You watch the horizon. It watches everything else.
Ask your boat what's wrong and get a real answer — from live instrument data and your own manuals. Sailboat or powerboat, at the dock or two hundred miles past cell coverage.
When something breaks eighty miles out.
There's no mechanic at sea. Vela pulls the live readings, checks them against your boat's history, and finds the procedure in your own manuals — for your exact engine, charger, and watermaker — citing the page it came from. No signal required.
- Your manuals, not generic advice. Answers come from the documents on board, with the exact page cited.
- Diagnosis backed by data. Live values and history confirm the theory before you start pulling panels.
- Fully offline. The worst problems happen far from help. This works there.
The log writes itself.
Say “departed at 0900, light westerly” — that's the whole job. The entry files itself with position, course, speed, and conditions pulled straight off the instruments. What you say, plus what the boat saw, in one record you can actually search.
- A sentence becomes an entry. Speak it or type it; the boring half fills in automatically.
- Stamped with the facts. GPS position, heading, speed, and engine hours attached as they were at that moment.
- Answers later. “When did we last service the impeller?” is a question, not an afternoon of flipping pages.
“Route to Provincetown tomorrow morning.”
Any chartplotter can draw the line. This plans the passage from the wind and current you'll actually meet — at each point, at the hour you'll be there — the canal timed to the tide, the bridge, the thin water, the night arrival. One sentence to ask, then drag through it on the chart.
- Planned on the boat. The routing engine runs aboard — ask for a route from a quiet anchorage with zero signal.
- Sail or power, planned honestly. Tack boards on the chart for a sailboat; fuel burn and range at your cruising RPM for a powerboat. When a sailing plan motors, it tells you why.
- A brief you can read. ETAs, wind on arrival, the skinny spot, the bridge, sunset — scrub it right on the chart.
It keeps watch when you can't.
Say what to watch, in plain words, and it stands the watch: the chart ahead, the wind overnight, the tanks, the batteries. When something crosses the line, the alert lands in chat with the evidence in it — the shoal on the chart, the shift that came through at three in the morning — and the buzzer wakes you.
- One sentence to set. “Warn me if we're heading for anything under 10 feet.” That is the whole setup.
- Evidence in the alert. The card carries the chart or the reading that tripped it, so you decide with the facts in front of you.
- Weeks later, still on watch. A watch you set in June is still standing in September, whether or not the phone is awake.
It pulls its weight.
The watch-standing, list-keeping, and paperwork that keep a boat honest — handled, so you can run the boat.
Another set of eyes on watch
“Tell me if we're heading for shallow water” or “if the wind gets over 25 tonight.” Plain-English watches on the instruments, the chart and the forecast — backing you up in ways no off-the-shelf alarm can.
Dashboards on demand
“Give me a passage screen with wind, depth, and the house bank.” Live gauges appear, arranged the way you asked, updating every second — and “put the wind rose on top” moves it.
Checklists that check themselves
Departure, anchoring, lay-up. Ask for one and it's built for your boat. Items tied to live data tick themselves off when the boat says they're done; the rest wait for your thumb.
Never forgets a fix
Every repair, oddity, and workaround becomes part of the boat's memory, tagged to the gear and stamped with where you were. “What did we do when this happened last time?” has an answer.
Sees the slow drifts
“Is the house bank holding charge like it did last month?” Months of instrument history, charted on request — so a slow drift shows up as a line on a chart, long before it's a failure.
Hands stay on the helm
Talk to it and it talks back — questions, answers, and alerts read aloud by your phone. Gloves on, spray flying, both hands full, you still get the answer.
Built for the middle of nowhere.
Everything that matters runs on a small computer that lives on your boat — not in a data center. Fifty miles past the last cell tower, you still get real answers from your instruments, your manuals, and your history. Back online, it adds reach — extra horsepower, weather, parts, fresh information — and lets go again when you leave.
- No connection required. Answers, watches, dashboards, and the log all run aboard.
- Stored aboard. Your instrument history, documents, log, and conversations live on the Console — not in our cloud.
- Cloud when you're connected. Online, it can bring in a bigger model, pull weather, look up parts, and fetch manuals you don't have.
On board in about an hour.
12 V power, one plug into the NMEA 2000 backbone, press the pair button. See how it works →
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