Anchor & arm
Set your anchor point and swing radius, then arm in one gesture. Safe defaults everywhere, nothing to configure before you're protected.
The most complete anchor watch app.
Anchor watch · iOS & Android
Sleep soundly
at anchor.
If your boat drags on its anchor, the siren wakes you. And if the watch itself stops (GPS, the battery, a system crash), you know at once. Silence never means “all is well”.
Free drag simulation: test the whole alarm chain before you trust it with your boat.
The night · every crew knows it
At anchor, you never quite sleep
Every sailor who has spent a night on the hook knows this story by heart.
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22:40
Anchor set
The hook bit, the chain is out, the bay is calm. You go below. The bunk is warm, the lapping water rocks the hull.
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03:12
The gust
The wind veers, the rigging starts to whistle. You are already awake. A bearing on the shore lights, one eye outside, one eye on the position. All is well, and still you lie there, eyes open.
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06:50
Morning
The coffee tastes like a short night. It was nothing. This time.
What steals your sleep isn’t dragging. It’s doubt.
AnchorZen exists to clear it: not only to watch your anchor, but to show you, at every moment, that the watch is really running.
How it works
Three steps between you and a quiet night
Drop the hook, arm the watch, go to sleep. AnchorZen does the staring at the GPS for you.
The phone aboard keeps watch, 100% offline
Drag detection and the siren run entirely on the phone on board. No signal, no cloud, no problem: the alarm that matters never depends on the network.
Your crew is alerted, anywhere
Everyone else is notified through every channel: push first, then SMS and email as a safety net, until someone acknowledges the alarm.
What 383 reviews taught us
Built against the failures that break trust
Before writing a line of code, we read 383 public reviews of the anchor-alarm apps already out there. The same five failures come back, night after night. AnchorZen is built to answer every one of them.
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34 sailors
The app was killed in the background. The boat dragged. The alarm never went off.
AnchorZenA watchdog on the app itself: the watch phone checks in without a break, and the moment it goes quiet, that counts as a failure, not as good news.
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29 sailors
False alarms. The GPS wanders a few metres and the whole crew is woken at 2 a.m. for nothing.
AnchorZenPositions are filtered and the swing circle is estimated from your actual riding: the alarm fires when the anchor lets go, not when the GPS jumps.
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25 sailors
Remote watching that doesn’t watch: the notification never arrives, and nobody ashore knows.
AnchorZenEvery channel, in cascade: push first, then SMS and email as a safety net, until someone acknowledges the alarm.
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20 sailors
Surprise paywalls and subscriptions: safety held hostage by billing.
AnchorZenNo subscription. You pay for the trip you sail, and the alarm always sounds: safety is never blocked by billing.
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14 sailors
The alarm fired, silently, on a locked screen, while the whole crew slept through it.
AnchorZenThe siren runs on the phone aboard, at full volume, with no network and no cloud in the loop. An alarm that wakes nobody is not an alarm.
Counted across 383 written reviews of anchor-watch apps published on the App Store between 2017 and 2026, across five storefronts. We name no competitor: the point is not who failed, it is what must never fail.
Fail-safe by design
Silence never means “all is well”
AnchorZen is built like a safety instrument, local-first: detection and the siren live on the boat, the cloud only warns the others. And every link of the chain is watched.
If any link fails, you are told. You are never left guessing. Lost data at anchor? The local watch stays armed, and you see at once that remote alerts are down.
A dead-man switch, not wishful thinking
The watch phone reports its position and health without a break. The moment those reports stop, whether a crash, GPS switched off or a flat battery, an alert goes out. A quiet app is treated as a failure, never as good news.
Watchdogs on every link
GPS, data, cloud, battery: each is monitored and shown at a glance. Any degraded state reads from across the cabin: armed, armed local-only, or alarm.
Battery, watched like the anchor
The best setup is a plugged-in phone. If it isn't, AnchorZen tells you the moment you arm. Unplugged and below the threshold (default 20%)? You're warned while there's still time to react.
Night mode that respects your sleep
System-health blips (a GPS dropout, a data gap) wait a configurable buffer before waking anyone. A confirmed drag alarm is never buffered and never filtered. It sounds at once, for everyone.
Three roles, one crew
The boat watches. You decide. Everyone knows.
Roles can share one phone. At night aboard, the owner is usually the watch as well: a solo skipper's phone does both at once.
The phone aboard
One of the owner's own devices, their phone or an old tablet, left aboard. It watches GPS against the swing circle, sounds the local siren and reports position and health. The interface is deliberately bare: it's an instrument, not a dashboard.
Sets everything, from anywhere
The cruise has one owner. They adjust radius, night mode and thresholds from anywhere, the cockpit or the restaurant. Every command shows where it is: sent → pending → applied.
Alerted, nothing more
Family, crew, the marina: observers receive alarms only. Nothing to configure, nothing they can break: just the certainty of being woken if it matters.
Two moments of serenity
At the restaurant, the market, out on a hike: stay zen
AnchorZen covers both moments you're not staring at the anchor: the night you sleep aboard, and the day you leave the boat.
You sleep, the phone stares
The classic night watch: the phone aboard keeps its eyes on the swing circle so yours can close. If the boat drags, the siren wakes you at once, network or not.
You leave the boat, everyone stays in the loop
Leave the watch phone aboard and step off for groceries, a stroll, dinner ashore. If the boat drags, everyone is alerted on their own phone, owner and observers alike, wherever they are.
Adjust from the dinner table. Wind picked up between courses? The owner widens the swing radius from the table (sent → pending → applied), no need to row back.
Perfect with a sentinel. An old smartphone plugged in aboard makes the ideal boat-sitter: it keeps the watch so your own phone can come ashore with you.
Pricing
Pay when you sail, from €4.99 per trip
No subscription: you only pay for the trips you actually spend at anchor. Prices are indicative and charged in your own currency on the App Store and Google Play.
Never more than €39.99 per 12 months. Sail as often as you like: the annual cap protects frequent users, automatically.
The alarm always sounds. Safety is never blocked by billing. And the drag simulation is free, so you can test the whole alarm chain as often as you like.
Where we stand
Not published yet. On purpose.
An anchor alarm has one job, and it happens at three in the morning. AnchorZen is in sea trials: real boats, real anchorages, real nights. We will not publish it until it has earned the right to be trusted with a hull.
What AnchorZen must prove before it ships:
- Zero missed drags. One real drag that AnchorZen fails to see, and we stop everything.
- Fewer than one false alarm per twenty nights. An alarm you learn to ignore is worse than no alarm.
- The watch survives the night in at least 95% of cases, screen off, phone locked.
- At least 100 nights on watch across the test fleet before a single line of it is sold.
Sea trials: autumn 2026 · Release targeted before the 2027 season · iOS & Android