Rainbow’s End Monitor — Support

It lets crew watch a boat’s anchor watch and find their way back to her. The boat runs Rainbow’s End Anchoring (the paid app); when the owner arms the anchor watch and switches on Share with crew, the boat shows an eight-character crew code. Type that code into the Monitor and you see what the boat sees — the fence, the boat, her trail — with an alarm on your phone if she breaks out or falls silent, and an arrow that points at her. You need an iPhone or iPad and the code. No Apple ID, account, or sign-in is needed on your phone. Without a code, the app can show you only its demo. The boat’s battery, when she reports it, is a row on the Watch screen.

Yes. Tap Open the demo watch on the first screen, or type the code DEMO-DEMO. It is a boat called Rainbow lying to her anchor, built into the app with no network needed. “Find the boat” in the demo places her 600 ft northeast of wherever you are standing, so the arrow has somewhere real to point and the figures change as you walk.

No. That is the whole point of the code. The boat publishes one small record, encrypted with a key made from the code, to the public part of the app’s own iCloud storage; your phone computes the same key and opens it. Anyone with the code can read the watch; nobody without it can, and nobody but the boat can change or delete it.

Either the boat is not sharing right now — the watch was disarmed, or “Share with crew” is off — or a character is wrong. Codes are two groups of four, made of the digits 2 to 9 and the letters A to Z without I or O, so there is no O, I, 0 or 1 to mistake. Check the other characters, or ask the boat to read the code out again.

The boat’s last report is more than a day old. That usually means a phone aboard died with sharing on, or nobody took the watch down. The app treats a record older than a day as a watch that ended rather than as a boat sitting quietly in her fence. Ask the boat to arm again.

No. Boats this phone has joined are listed on the first screen; tap one to look for her again. The boat’s code stays the same until the owner chooses a new one, so a crew who joined at the dock on Monday still find her on Friday. “Forget this boat” removes an entry.

There are four, and a fifth notice. A breach: the boat reports she is outside her fence; your phone sounds within seconds with the watch on screen, or shows a notification within seconds with the app closed. A swing: she is inside her fence but has swung into the red sector her owner set; the alarm says it is a swing, not a drag. A quiet GPS: the boat’s own GPS has stopped giving fixes — she is not being watched, and her owner’s screen says so. Silence: the boat reports about every 20 seconds; with the app open, a minute and a half without one says the link is going stale and three minutes sounds the alarm. With the app closed, silence is judged at fifteen minutes by a notification this phone keeps ahead of itself. Ended: the owner disarmed or stopped sharing, which is a stand-down, not an alarm. Every age is measured by iCloud’s clock, never the boat’s.

Yes, as a notification with its own sound — within seconds for a breach, a swing, a quiet GPS or a stand-down; after fifteen minutes for silence. Two limits, stated plainly: the boat’s notifications obey the silent switch and Focus, so keep the phone off silent for a night ashore (allow Critical Alerts and the fifteen-minute silence notice sounds through the silent switch and Do Not Disturb); and they need this phone signed into iCloud, because the subscriptions that deliver them belong to a signed-in user. Watching with the app open needs neither.

Only for alerts with the app closed. Reading the boat’s watch never needed an account and still does not; the Join screen says so when the phone is signed out. Sign in and open the watch once, and the alerts follow.

No. Silence here quiets your phone only; the boat keeps its own watch and only the boat can disarm it. Crew can watch and find; they cannot change anything aboard. That is deliberate: a lost phone ashore must never become an unwatched boat.

The owner disarmed the watch or switched sharing off, and the record was deleted. Nothing is being reported now. If the boat arms again with the same code, look for her from the first screen. “Find the boat” still works from her last known position.

It uses your phone’s GPS and compass and the boat’s last position. Hold the phone flat, top edge forward, and turn until the arrow points up; the line beneath reads the bearing and the distance, in feet or meters close in and nautical miles farther out. While the boat’s reports are live the arrow follows her latest fix. If the boat reports an alarm it keeps following her latest fix, because a dragging boat is not at her anchor. If the reports have gone stale with no alarm, it points at the anchor — the one thing that does not move.

The compass is not yet trusted. Move the phone in a figure eight for a few seconds, away from steel and magnets — a winch, a stanchion, a phone case with a magnet. The bearing and distance figures still print while the arrow is gray, because they need no compass.

You are within about fifty feet. GPS error is larger than the distance by then, and a spinning arrow at the boarding ladder would be worse than none. Look up.

Yes. The phone keeps the boat’s last known position under each code. With no signal the arrow points at where she was and says how long ago; the first screen offers Find her from her last known position even after the app has been closed. A boat at anchor does not move, so this is the ordinary state on most dinghy docks, not an error.

It draws the same fence, boat, anchor and trail on Apple Maps, with you on it if location is allowed. It is off by default because the plot and the arrow need no signal and the map’s tiles do; with no signal you still see the dots on a blank grid. It is a picture, not a chart — no depths, no moorings.

The boat’s swing alarm. The owner has set how far she may swing round her anchor; the red is where she should not be, and if she spends three fixes there the boat sounds a swing alarm and so does your phone, with its own words. It is a different kind of trouble from dragging: she is inside her fence.

North up, like a chart, or heads up, with the boat’s bow at the top. At anchor she lies to her rode, so her bow points at the anchor and the picture reads the way the view from the cockpit does. Auto chooses north up with the map off and heads up with it on; you can choose either. The phone’s compass is not used, so carrying the phone about the deck does not swing the picture.

Location is asked for only when you open “Find the boat” or switch the map on, and only while the app is in use. It is used on your phone to point the arrow and draw your dot, and it goes nowhere: the boat never learns where you are, and we never see it. The app collects nothing and writes no records to iCloud; the only thing it saves there is the subscriptions that deliver notifications with the app closed. The app also asks to send notifications: the boat’s alarms with the app closed, and the fifteen-minute silence notice. Nothing about them is sent anywhere. See the privacy policy.

Free, no purchases, no accounts. The boat side — the anchor watch itself — is part of Rainbow’s End Anchoring, which the boat’s owner buys once.

Please tell me: what you saw, what you expected, and the code if it is a real watch. Every screen in this app got better because a sailor said “that doesn’t look right.”