Waterway Guide: trusted cruising data on your chart
The team behind Waterway Guide has spent years building up real, on-the-water boating expertise, and Aqua Map brings that knowledge directly onto your chart. It's a genuinely useful layer for plotting a course, picking out the best marinas and anchorages along the way, and finding the right fuel stop, complete with current fuel prices. You'll also get information on bridges, locks, and navigation alerts, everything you need to make an informed call about your route.
Waterway Guide settings
You'll find the Waterway Guide settings page from the main Settings menu.
- Data download turns Waterway Guide on and downloads its database for offline use. The first download can take a few minutes, but you're free to keep using the app while it finishes in the background.
- Update now triggers an immediate download of the latest available data.
- Automatic update controls how future updates happen. "Never" means you'll need to update manually. "WiFi" updates the database daily whenever the app is active on a WiFi network. "Always" updates daily over any connection, including cellular, worth knowing if your data plan has limits.
- Show on map turns the Waterway Guide overlay on, with six object types you can toggle individually: marinas, hazards, anchorages, bridges, free docks, and gates. One important detail: these same settings also control what Route Explorer can find, if an object type is hidden here, Route Explorer won't search for it either.
- Icon size on map adjusts how large Waterway Guide icons appear.
- Show names on map displays each object's name beneath its icon, though names only appear once you're zoomed in enough for a detailed scale.
The object info page
Tap any Waterway Guide icon on the map, then select the info button , to open its full details page.
You'll find six tabs covering different aspects of that object: General, Navigation, Dockage, Fuel, Service, and Reviews, with a red circle on the Reviews tab showing how many reviews are currently available. Want to leave your own review? Tap the star icon 
in the top-right corner, which takes you directly to the Waterway Guide website to submit it.
Want to see it in action?
For a full walkthrough of Waterway Guide, check out our video tutorial.
