Terms of Use & Navigation Disclaimer

Mervare is a software platform for marinas and recreational boat owners. It surfaces berth availability, on-board telemetry shared by boat owners, public OpenStreetMap data, third-party weather forecasts and harbour information from the sources listed below, which differ by country. Marinas use it to manage bookings and dock layouts.

The maps you see are composed from third-party tile providers. Each provider's own terms apply on top of these terms:

• OpenStreetMap base map — community-edited, no guarantee of nautical accuracy. © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL.
• OpenSeaMap seamark overlay — the OpenSeaMap project explicitly states that its data is not safety-critical and must not be used for navigation. Imprint.
• EMODnet Bathymetry depth raster — derived from public soundings of mixed provenance and resolution (~115 m grid). Provided by the European Marine Observation and Data Network for general information; not a navigational product. Conditions of use.
• Windy embedded forecast — model output, not observation; conditions on the water can differ significantly.
• AIS vessel positions — sourced from public AIS feeds with arbitrary delay; vessels without an AIS transponder, or with the transponder switched off or malfunctioning, will not appear at all.
• Harbour information (depths, dimensions, services, contacts) comes from different sources in each country, and may be out of date; always confirm with the harbour master before approaching:
  • Estonian Port Register (Sadamaregister) — Estonian harbours only — depths, dimensions and contacts as the register publishes them.
  • Latvian Maritime Administration open data — Latvian harbours only.
  • Ports of Ireland (data.gov.ie) and the Marine Institute marina layer — Irish harbours only, CC BY 4.0.
  • Visit Sweden open data — Swedish harbours only.
  • East Baltic Coast (eastbaltic.eu) — Latvian harbour facts and photographs, used with written permission from Riga Planning Region.
  • OpenStreetMap — Harbour locations and names in every country, including Portugal. © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL.
  • Harbours' own websites — Facts a harbour publishes about itself, each linked to the page it came from.
  • Reviewed community suggestions — Corrections from sailors, published only after moderation, never for depths.
• Boat telemetry shown on a boat page is published voluntarily by the owner. Position is reported by the on-board GPS / N2K bus and may be stale, missing, or incorrect; treat it as a courtesy share, not a tracking service.

Nothing on this site relieves the skipper of the duties imposed by SOLAS Chapter V (Regulation 34, voyage planning), the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (COLREGs), the flag-state regulations of the vessel and the local rules of the waters being navigated — for example, in Estonia, the Maritime Safety Act (Meresõiduohutuse seadus) and the regulations issued under it by the Transport Administration.

You agree that you will not rely on this site as the primary means of navigation and will carry, and use, official paper or electronic charts published by an authorised hydrographic office for the waters of your voyage (for example Transpordiamet in Estonia, the Instituto Hidrográfico in Portugal or Sjöfartsverket in Sweden).

When you book a guest berth, the contract is between you and the operating marina. Mervare provides the booking interface and processes payment via Stripe Connect on the marina's behalf. The marina sets its own house rules, cancellation policy and on-site terms; these are presented at the time of booking and you confirm acceptance before payment.

Boat owners control what is published on their boat page (photos, documents, guestbook, relay-scenario names, hero framing, etc.). You retain ownership of content you upload and grant Mervare a non-exclusive licence to host and display it for the purpose of operating the site. You are responsible for ensuring you have the rights to anything you publish and that it does not violate the rights of third parties or applicable law.

Boats on the telemetry package contribute their depth soundings to Mervare by default, as part of the service under these terms. While contribution is on, Mervare stores the depth and position the boat's sounder reports while it is moving (above 1 knot), thinned to about one sounding every 10 seconds and 20 metres, with time rounded to 10 minutes and position to about 1 metre, and also archives the boat's earlier underway soundings still in its telemetry history. Stored soundings carry no boat name, MMSI, owner or other identifier — only a pseudonymous key Mervare can link back to the boat with a secret held on its server.

Mervare publishes the soundings, aggregated into map cells, on the public community depth layer on mervare.io: only soundings at least 7 days old, never as tracks or individual soundings, and never naming the boat. A cell can come from a single boat and soundings in a boat's home harbour are shown too, so someone who knows where a boat sails may recognise its routes as a corridor of cells. Mervare does not send the soundings to any third party (including the IHO Data Centre for Digital Bathymetry) or release them under an open licence; that would need the owner's separate, explicit consent.

The boat's owner can turn contribution off at any time in the boat's Settings → Depth sounder (or My Mervare → My depth contributions). From then on no new soundings are stored, and Mervare does not turn it back on; the owner can turn it on again themselves. Turning it off changes nothing else about the service. The owner can also have their past contributions removed ("Remove my past contributions"), which deletes every archived sounding stored under their key for that boat and takes them off the public layer within about an hour.

Retention: the anonymised depth archive is never pruned; soundings leave it only through that removal.

Not navigational data. Soundings are raw readings below the transducer, uncorrected for water level or installation. Nothing built from them, the public layer included, is an official chart or fit for navigation; section 3 applies in full.

Mervare is provided on an as-is, best-effort basis. We do not warrant uninterrupted availability, and we do not warrant that telemetry, AIS, weather or harbour-register data is current, complete or accurate. To the maximum extent permitted by law, we exclude liability for any loss arising from reliance on the site.

Questions, takedown requests or safety concerns: kepsic@gmail.com.