Seeing where your crews are today

A customer rings at half past ten wanting to know whether anyone is coming today. You sent four boats out this morning. Open Fleet, next to Dispatch, and you can answer in about six seconds — which boat is on their lake, roughly where it is, and how many stops it has left before theirs.

What each row shows

One row per crew out today.

Column	What you get from it
Boat and gear	What went out this morning. If the job needs a crane, you can see at a glance whether the boat nearest it has one aboard.
Crew	Who is on it, so you know who to text if you do need to interrupt them.
Lake and zones	The water they are working today, and which stretches of it.
Stops	Done and left. Two of eleven at ten in the morning is a different phone call than nine of eleven.
Position	Where the boat was when the crew’s phone last reported — and how long ago that was.

The time under the dot is the important part

Every position on this screen says how old it is, in plain words, so you never have to guess whether you are looking at a boat or at a memory of one.

What it says	What that means
Just now	Live. Somebody has the app open — they are underway or between stops.
12 minutes ago	They are working. A phone in a pocket does not report. Trust the dot, allow for a bay — unless the row also says Rough fix, in which case even a fresh dot only tells you which lake, not which dock.
45 minutes ago, amber	Not live, but recent — good enough to say which lake, not which dock. Fleet holds a fix like this for up to two hours; past that it stops showing it at all and falls back to the row below.
Last timer start	The phone hasn’t reported a fix in the last two hours, so the screen falls back to where that crew last started a timer today, and labels the row so you know. It is often hours old and a bay away. If nobody has started a timer today either, the row says so instead and shows no position at all.

Why a boat goes quiet

A phone reports only while LakeOps is open on screen. iPhones and Android both stop an app from reporting location once it is in a pocket, and there is no setting that changes it. So a hand spending forty minutes on a lift goes quiet for forty minutes, and a phone in a dry bag in the rain goes quiet for the afternoon.

That is a normal working day, not a fault, and nothing on the screen will tell you otherwise. Long gaps on your busiest weeks are exactly what this looks like.

There is no trail, and you can say so out loud

Worth telling the crew on the first morning you turn it on, because it is how the software is built rather than a promise about how you will use it. Reporting only happens for somebody out on a boat today, and it ends when the day does — a phone left on a dashboard after the boat comes in has nothing to report against.

And if what you actually need is what happened when, you already have better records than a trail: timers say who worked and for how long, and per-item completion says what was done to which lift. Those describe the work, which is what you would be looking for anyway.

Who can see Fleet

Anyone who can already open the dispatch board — office, admin, and your boat operators. It uses the same permission you have already set up, so there is nothing new to switch on and nothing new to forget.

What it costs the battery

Very little. LakeOps asks for a rough position every ninety seconds instead of holding the GPS radio awake, and only while the app is on screen. Knowing a boat is at the north end of the lake is the whole job; knowing it to the metre would spend the battery that has to last until the last lift is out of the water.