Ending a deployment, and recalling a crew

The light goes, or the wind does, or the barge starts making a noise it did not make this morning. The crew is going in. Three questions follow, and the third is the one nobody asks out loud until the next morning.

The crew can end it themselves

On the boat, open the panel under the chart and tap Heading in? End the day, then tap why: weather, breakdown, ran out of daylight, work finished, or something else. That is the whole action — one control and one tap, because a form is not a thing you fill in standing on a wet deck.

It works with no signal. The tap is recorded on the device immediately and syncs whenever the boat next has a bar, so the day ends when the crew says it ended, not when the phone finds a tower.

Dispatch can recall them

From the office, open the deployment, pick a reason and press End the day. It is the same action the crew has, and it is recorded the same way — the only difference is who made the call, and LakeOps keeps that.

If the crew is out of signal when you do it, their device finds out the next time it talks to us — when it syncs the work it has been holding, when someone re-downloads the day, or on the next screen they open with a bar of signal. The screen then updates itself and says the day ended. Until one of those happens they will keep seeing stops, because there is no way to reach a phone with no service. No software can fix that, and it is worth saying plainly rather than implying a recall is instant. If it matters urgently, call them.

Ending the day does not finish any jobs

A deployment that ends having completed nothing at all is a normal Tuesday in April. It is not an error state and nothing needs cleaning up afterwards.

Any stop the crew forgot to leave is closed out for them, so tomorrow's map does not show a ghost boat still tied up at somebody's dock.

And then what happens tomorrow?

So form tomorrow's deployment the same way you formed today's. Point it at the same shoreline and the same pile is there, minus whatever got done. You are not rescheduling anything, because nothing was scheduled onto a boat in the first place.

There is one exception, and LakeOps tells you about it at the moment you end the day rather than leaving you to find out. Jobs dispatch added to a deployment by hand belong to that day. Those were specific requests — "swing by the Miller lift while you are over there" — that the zone pool would not have found on its own, so they end with the day and need adding again if the crew still needs to get to them. The confirmation names them and the closed deployment lists them.

Why the day ended is worth recording

The reason is not paperwork. "Closed" alone cannot tell a finished day from one the weather took, and how often the weather stops you — on which lake, in which month — is a real question about the business. Days that ended early are marked as such on the dispatch list.