CoastFinder

Point your phone at the water and CoastFinder names what you are looking at. Stand on a beach, a dock, a pier, a boat or a headland. CoastFinder draws a labeled panorama over the live camera view: every island, lighthouse, shipwreck, shoal and reef in front of you, each with its name, its distance and its depth. Nothing is recognized in the picture: the app knows where you are, which way you point, and where every charted feature sits. Bought once. No account, no subscription, no advertising. WHAT GETS LABELED • Islands, islets and keys • Lighthouses, with tower height and light characteristic • Shipwrecks, from wartime losses to ships and aircraft sunk as dive reefs • Sand bars and shoals • Reefs • Ocean fishing piers BELOW THE WATERLINE A wreck's label sits on the water directly above the site, styled so you know at a glance it is submerged. Its card gives the water over the top at the next low and high tide, with times, and the depth of the seabed, plus a note when it is awash or exposed at low water. When NOAA charts only the seabed beside a wreck, or a chart's "showing" is decades old, the card says so. BELOW THE HORIZON From a beach, the curve of the earth hides almost everything worth naming: at Cape Hatteras, of more than 50 notable features within 60 km, only the lighthouse behind you is in sight. Hidden features stay marked on the horizon at their true bearing; point at one, or tap its mark, for its name and distance, so you know what is out there. Raise your eye height in the app and watch them rise into view. THE SEAFLOOR Depth contours darken the water with distance. Pull up the cross-section to see the bottom fall away ahead of you, with every wreck, reef and shoal sitting on it at its depth. WHEN THE LABELS ARE OFF A phone compass wanders. Tap Align, then drag sideways until a lighthouse sits under its label, and up or down until the dashed line sits on the real horizon. Every label moves together. Poor GPS under a pier roof? Pick your spot on the map. WHEN THE CHART IS WRONG Every detail card ends with Know this spot? Help improve it: wrong place, not there, wrong name, depth or height. For a misplaced feature, take a sighting by aiming the center of the screen at the real thing. Send it in one tap: it goes to our review queue with your position and nothing that identifies you. Something missing? Search for it and tap Tell us about it. ALSO INSIDE • A dark chart with all six categories, filtered with a tap • Search by name, reef number or anything on a card, then turn onto its bearing • Detail cards with distance, bearing, height or depth, and the story behind it • Send any feature to your chartplotter, handheld or dive computer as a GPX waypoint, or copy its coordinates • Manual location, so you can stand somewhere else and look OFFLINE BY DESIGN Signal is worst exactly where this app is most useful. A region is a compact pack of coastline, features, tide predictions and a depth grid, and the overlay, map, search and detail cards work with the radio off. The whole North Carolina coast is included, from the Virginia line to the Grand Strand, in two regions: the Outer Banks and Crystal Coast, with nearly 900 features, and Cape Fear and the Grand Strand, with more than 400. WHERE THE DATA COMES FROM NOAA charts, wreck records, tide predictions and bathymetry, the US Coast Guard Light List, the North and South Carolina artificial reef programs, and OpenStreetMap. Positions and depths are not invented, and every card names its source. YOUR POSITION Your position is used on the device to work out what is in front of you and is not sent anywhere, unless you put it in a report yourself. TRY IT FIRST See the labeled view from points along the coast, free in your browser: coastfinder.app NOT FOR NAVIGATION CoastFinder is for looking at the water, not for navigating on it. It is not a substitute for official charts, a chartplotter, or a proper lookout. Depths are estimates and conditions change.