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.

Put them in the order you would work them. Under Settings → Lakes & zones, drag a zone by the handle on its left (or focus the handle and use the arrow keys). That is the order a deployment lists them in, and the order a crew’s stops fall in when the device has no position fix to rank them by.

Zone membership is a decision, not a guess

That 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.