Lakes and zones: cutting big water into dispatchable pieces

Everything in LakeOps is organized by water first. A property belongs to a lake, a lake can be cut into zones, and a crew is deployed to a lake and some of its zones. That chain is the whole dispatch model.

Lakes

Add the water you actually work under Settings → Lakes & zones. Every property needs one; it is the only geography field that is required. A lake carries a default map center and zoom, which is what makes the map open somewhere useful instead of over the ocean.

Zones, and when you need them

A zone is a named stretch of one lake — a bay, an arm, a side. The test for whether you need them is simple: can one boat work this whole lake in a day? If yes, do not bother. If the lake takes three days and half of it is unworkable in a north wind, cut it up.

Name them the way your crews already talk: “North arm”, “The narrows”, “Big bay”. If you have to explain the name on the radio, it is the wrong name.

Zone membership is a decision, not a guess

That is deliberate, and it is the difference between dispatch you can trust and dispatch that surprises you. A boundary drawn on a map is approximate; the pin might be three meters the wrong side of a line you sketched in February. Worse, a spatial test means moving a boundary silently re-assigns dozens of properties to a different crew’s pool overnight.

So the zone lives on the property, set by a person, and it stays put until a person changes it. Drawing a boundary polygon on the zone is still worth doing — it colors the zone on the map and helps suggest a sensible default — but it decides nothing on its own.

Setting a property’s zone

On the property, next to the lake. The list is grouped by lake, and the field is optional — “unzoned” is a legitimate answer on small water. Unzoned properties are still picked up by a deployment that works the whole lake with no zones selected.

How dispatch uses them

A deployment names a lake and any number of its zones. The crew’s pool is the open work in those zones. Change the zones — repoint — and the pool changes immediately, with nothing to reschedule.

Getting it wrong is cheap

Zone boundaries are not load-bearing. If you cut a lake in half and it turns out the natural split is thirds, redraw them and move the affected properties. Nothing about history, billing or completed work depends on which zone a property was in last year.

The reports do break down by zone, which after a season is the honest way to find out whether your zones match how the work actually goes.