Route terms of use
Draft for review. These terms have not yet been checked by a lawyer.
Route is a planning aid, not for navigation. Do not use it as your primary means of navigation or to make decisions on which the safety of the boat or crew depends. Check official charts, notices to mariners, the sailing instructions and the latest official forecasts, and keep a proper lookout at all times. The skipper alone is responsible for the safety of the boat and crew and for the decision to start or continue a race or passage.
1. Who provides Route
Route (FirstShift Route) is provided free of charge by Stuart Greenfield, publisher of FirstShift: Yacht Racing Intelligence, based in Cowes, Isle of Wight. Contact: through firstshiftsailing.com.
By using Route you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, do not use Route.
2. What Route does and does not do
Route takes published computer forecasts of wind, waves and tidal streams, a performance model of your boat and the course you choose, and calculates routes and finish times. Every input is an estimate.
- Forecast models can be wrong, out of date or missing, and can disagree strongly with each other and with what you meet at sea.
- Tidal stream, depth and coastline data are approximate. Route does not add the height of tide to depths and does not know every hazard.
- Traffic separation schemes, keep-out areas and marks shown in Route may be incomplete or out of date. The sailing instructions and official charts always take precedence.
- Boat performance comes from polars, which may not match your boat, sails, crew or conditions.
- AIS targets, positions shared with family and friends, and fleet comparisons depend on third-party feeds and your device. They can be delayed, wrong or missing and must not be used for collision avoidance.
- Route needs a working device, battery and, for fresh forecasts, a data connection. It may stop working at any time.
3. Your responsibility
You are responsible for how you use Route and for checking everything it shows against official sources. Any route, finish time, sail choice or tactical suggestion is information for you to weigh, not an instruction.
4. No warranty
Route is provided free, "as is" and "as available". To the extent the law allows, no promise is made that it is accurate, complete, available, fit for a particular purpose or free of errors.
5. Limits on liability
To the extent the law allows, FirstShift and Stuart Greenfield are not liable for any loss or damage arising from the use of, or reliance on, Route, including loss of a race, damage to a boat or equipment, or any indirect or consequential loss.
Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot be excluded or limited under the law of England and Wales.
6. Personal use only
Route is for personal use by individual sailors planning their own racing and passages, and by the crew of their boat. You may share routes and briefings with your own crew.
Use by or for a club, class association, sailing school, coach, coaching business or any other organisation, and any commercial use, needs written permission first. Ask through firstshiftsailing.com.
Please do not copy Route's forecasts or code in bulk, resell them, or overload the service with automated requests.
7. Your data
Your boat, races and settings are kept on your own device. If you use a boat code, the boat and routes linked to it are stored on FirstShift's server so that your crew's devices can share them. If you turn on following for family and friends, your boat's position is shared with anyone who has the link. Live AIS comes through a third-party service. No account, password or payment details are asked for.
8. Changes
These terms may change as Route develops. The version and date at the top show which terms apply.
9. Law
These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales.
10. Data sources and acknowledgements
Route is built on open data published by the organisations below. They provide their data without warranty and are not responsible for Route or how it uses their data.
- Met Office (UK): UKV 2 km and Global 10 km models
- British Crown copyright, the Met Office, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence (CC BY-SA 4.0). Accessed from the Registry of Open Data on AWS. Forecast files that Route derives from this data are available under the same licence.
- ECMWF: IFS, AIFS, ensemble and wave forecasts
- European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts open data, licensed under CC BY 4.0 and the ECMWF Terms of Use.
- NOAA: GFS
- US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Global Forecast System.
- Deutscher Wetterdienst: ICON-EU
- DWD open data.
- Meteo-France: AROME and ARPEGE
- Meteo-France open data, Licence Ouverte.
- Open-Meteo
- Used when your device fetches fresh wind directly. Weather data by Open-Meteo.com, licensed under CC BY 4.0.
- Copernicus Marine Service: North-West Shelf and Iberia-Biscay-Ireland tidal streams and waves
- Generated using E.U. Copernicus Marine Service Information.
- Ifremer: MARS2D tidal streams, western Channel
- Ifremer, Licence Ouverte.
- EMODnet Bathymetry
- European Marine Observation and Data Network, depths used to keep routes out of shallow water.
- OpenStreetMap
- Traffic separation schemes, lights and coastline features: © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence.
- Natural Earth
- The light coastline shown outside the detailed charts: Natural Earth 1:50m land, public domain, via the world-atlas package.
- Shom
- Service hydrographique et océanographique de la Marine, French traffic separation and maritime data.
- Rijkswaterstaat
- Dutch traffic separation schemes, Verkeersscheidingsstelsel Noordzee, published through PDOK under CC0.