The Map View — Visualising Your Routes

Modified on Tue, 28 Jul at 11:09 PM

The map shows every passage you have recorded as a track on a chart — your sailing history at a glance, and a way back into any individual log entry.

What you see

Open Map in the left sidebar. KnotWise draws a track line through the positions of your log entries, for completed and active passages alike, and marks the departure and arrival ports.

Tap or click any point on a track to open the log entry behind it — position, time, weather and the state of the vessel at that moment.

The track follows your entries, not a GPS trace. KnotWise draws a line from one logged position to the next, so a leg logged every four hours shows as a straight line between two fixes. Log more often and the track follows the actual course more closely.

Using the map without a connection

Map tiles come from the internet, so offshore the map is only as good as what you cached beforehand. Two settings decide this, both under Settings:

Protomaps API key — free to obtain, and needed for the higher-quality vector tiles and for the offline cache. Without a key the map still works online, in lower quality.
Offline Map → Download — saves the whole world at zoom levels 0–6 to the device. Progress is shown while it runs, and the setting then reads Cached.

Do it before you leave, and on every device. The cache lives on the device that downloaded it — it does not sync. Zoom 0–6 gives you the ocean overview, not harbour detail; KnotWise is a logbook, not a chart plotter, and it is no substitute for official charts.

You can remove the cache again under Settings → Offline Map. Your API key stays in place, so you can download the tiles whenever you want.

Getting a route out

Passages export as GPX tracks for chart plotters and navigation software: Export → Data Export. GPX is available on every plan. See Exporting your logbook.

Last updated: 28 July 2026