Where the boats are, and what LakeOps does not keep

The office asks the same question four times a day: where are they, and how far through. Ringing the boat to find out costs the crew a pair of gloves and you a lift, so Fleet answers it on a screen instead. It sits next to Dispatch, because it is the other half of the same question — you sent four boats out this morning, and this is where they got to.

What a row tells you

One row per boat out today: the equipment aboard, who is on it, the lake and bays they are working, how many stops are done and how many are left, and where they are.

Every position carries its age

This is the part worth reading carefully, because it is the difference between knowing where a crew is and thinking you do. A dot on a map with no time attached is worse than no dot, because an office acts on it. So every position here says how old it is, in words:

• just now — a fix in the last minute or two. The crew has the app open.
• 12 minutes ago — they are working. A phone in a pocket does not report.
• 2 hours ago — greyed out. This is a hint about which lake, not a position.

When a phone has not reported at all, the screen falls back to where that crew last started a timer and says so on the row. That is often hours old and a bay away, and labelling it honestly is the whole point — an hour-old fix dressed up as live is how an office sends help to the wrong place.

Quiet stretches are normal

A phone only reports while the crew has LakeOps open on screen. Phones do not let an app report its location from the background — that is a limit of iPhones and Android, not something LakeOps can work around. So a hand working a lift with the phone in a pocket goes quiet for exactly as long as the job takes, and a phone in a dry bag in the rain goes quiet for the afternoon.

None of that means anything is broken, and the screen does not present it as though it were. Long gaps on a working day are the normal shape of this.

What LakeOps does not keep

There is no trail. LakeOps holds one position per person per day they are out, and every new one overwrites the last. There is no history, nothing to play back, nothing to export, and no report that shows where somebody has been.

That is worth telling your crews plainly, because it is a property of how the software is built rather than a promise about how you will use it. Reporting only happens for somebody who is out on a boat today, and it stops when the day does — a phone left on a dashboard after the boat comes in has nothing to report against.

If you need to know what happened when, you already have better records than a location trail would be: the timers say who was working and for how long, and the piece-by-piece completion record says what was actually done to which lift. Those are records of work rather than of a person’s whereabouts.

Who can see it

Anybody who can already open the dispatch board — office, admin and your boat operators. It uses the same permission, so a role you have already set up needs no change and there is no new switch to forget about.

Battery

LakeOps asks for a rough position every ninety seconds rather than 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 requirement; knowing it to the metre would cost the battery that has to last until the last lift is out of the water.