Find a sheltered harbor to anchor or moor in

Everyone who has spent the night on a boat knows how important it is to find a safe harbor to anchor or moor in. HarbourMaps helps you find the harbors that are best protected from wind and waves for the upcoming night.

HarbourMaps uses advanced algorithms to analyze the topography around all harbors. This way, we know which wind directions each harbor provides protection against. Every hour, the system retrieves wind forecasts from yr.no and links them to the harbor's protection level. We can then estimate how well protected a harbor is from the forecasted wind for the upcoming night. The harbors receive a score between 0 and 100 points, where 100 points is the best. On the map, natural harbors are shown as small circles and marinas as diamonds (squares tilted on their point). Each harbor has a number indicating how good the harbor is expected to be the next night. The number 5 means a protection level between 50-59, the number 6 means 60-69, the number 7 means 70-79, and so on. The icons also change color with the numbers. Red is very bad, orange is in between, and green is good.

Here we see how the map looked around Koster in Sweden on a Tuesday in July 2024. The upcoming night was forecasted to have wind from the east, and we see that harbors exposed to east winds have a lower score than those protected from east winds.

When you zoom in on the map, you will also see wind arrows showing the wind for the coming night. Below is a screenshot from Fotö and Stora Axholmen outside Gothenburg. We see that the guest harbor at Fotö is marked green, while the natural harbor at Stora Axholmen is marked red. This is because the land at Fotö protects the guest harbor from the east wind, while the harbor at Stora Axholmen is exposed to the east wind. With up to 10 m/s wind, it will probably cause quite a bit of rocking in the boat. The waves will also hit the harbor. Even though they do not become large and dangerous when inland, it is quite likely that small choppy waves will hit the hull and make a lot of noise through the night. Depending on the size of the boat, it can also cause a fair amount of movement.

On each harbor page, you will find a detailed analysis of wind protection for the coming night. Below you see a recording of the wind analysis for Sandøbukta in Norway one afternoon in July 2024.

In the middle of the analysis, you see a circle marked with North, East, South, and West. A solid line in the circle shows which wind directions this harbor is protected from, and a dotted line means weak protection. The current harbor (Sandøybukta) is protected from the south wind and exposed to wind from the north, east, and west.

At the bottom is a timeline over the next 36 hours. Here we have from 3 PM on the current day. For each hour, we see the reported wind strength. There is also a green and orange block in the timeline. This is between 10 PM and 9 AM the coming night. At the beginning of the night, there is a weak south wind, so the block is green. Then the wind shifts to the north, but it is still weak in strength, and the block remains green. But around 4 AM, the wind has increased and is still coming from the northeast. Then the score drops and the block turns orange.

The score you see on the icons in the map is the worst hour of the coming night. This means that a port marked in green on the map will be green all night long. While a port marked in yellow may also have better (but not worse) periods during the coming night. As we saw in the illustration above.

Here is also a description of how to read the detailed wind reports. The port shown is Ulön - Dannemark (Sweden), and the wind was from a summer day in 2023.

We hope you find a good port for the coming night :)

Vi håper du finner en god havn for den kommende natten :)