Daily Trip Planner Tutorial

After downloading the sheet and opening in your preferred editor, you may need to enable editing to allow for full use of the sheet.

The purpose of this sheet is to help calculate the timing of arrival for bridge openings, lock operations, tides or weather before you get underway. The sheet is self explanatory, but we will cover what data to enter and the calculations made.

Start by entering the date of travel, your starting location and your destination. The date cell is formatted so entering 05/1/2025 will result in the day of the week along with the actual date and can be changed to your preference. The destination, in this example is a bridge to determine your arrival at a specific time. Bridges are the most common thing to plan for as they often open at specific times. Knowing when you will arrive will keep you from having to hover for an extended period.

Next enter the nautical miles from your starting location to the destination. Using mobile routing applications, chart plotters or even just an educated guess will work. Enter the speed you normally travel in knots. At this point the sheet will calculate that travel 40nm at 7kts is a total travel time of 5:42:51. The arrival time is 5:42:51 because the sheet sees a blank departure time as midnight, 12:00:00 AM. Once a departure time is entered, the correct arrival time is calculated.

The departure time can be entered as 08:00 AM or 08:00 PM. The sheet also recognized military time as 08:00 for AM and 20:00 for PM. If using standard time there must be a space between the time and the AM or PM.

Now that the sheet is filled out for your days travel, you will arrive at the bridge around 1:42 PM if you average 7 knots. From looking up online at sites like Waterway Guide, you will see the bridge normally opens on the hour for navigation. By slowing down as you get closer to the bridge, you can minimize your hover time.

But what if the bridge is under construction with limited openings, the bridge is only opening on the hours of 09:00 AM, Noon and 03:00 PM and work is completed after 07:00 PM. Now our travels become a little more complicated. Leaving earlier is not an option and we can not go any faster. By changing the departure time, to get the desired arrival time you can see that leaving at 09:15 AM, average 7 knots you should arrive within a few minutes of the bridge opening at 3:00 PM.

Adding the information for your second stop, you can see that because of the delay in departure to make the bridge opening it pushes back your arrival time at your final destination. If you have set hours or miles you want to travel, you can calculate if you can make the stops on a daily itinerary or will you have to alter your plans or adjust speed.

As an example, we can say our top speed is 7 knots, but we don't want to travel for more than 8 hours during the day and we want to be stopped or anchored 2 hours before sunset. We have completed the first hurdle of the bridge with limited openings but we were delayed because of the amount of boat traffic already waiting to pass. The average time to pass bridges or locks is 30 minutes, but this took 45.

While starting at 8:00 AM and traveling at 7 knots for 60nm, we would arrive to our final destination around 4:40 PM. With the limited bridge openings and delay at the bridge, we are now arriving less 30 minutes before sunset at 6:36:26 PM. This information helps by being able to determine where you are going to stop after the bridge to adjust your travel plans so that you are not left pushing yourself or your boat. making for less stress onboard.

Where we had planned to stop on 5/1/2025, 60 miles from our starting point, we are now having to break up that trip to an extra day and moving the arrival at the marina to the next day. If you plan this out and check the notice to mariners from the USCG for your section regularly, you will have less issues along the way and a more enjoyable journey.