Map — the basics
The Map is SHIPM8's live nautical chart. It shows vessels in real time as markers, and gives you tools to search for a ship, follow your own fleet, watch activity inside an area, and calculate routes.
Open it from the sidebar: Map (the map icon). You need the Map permission to see it.
The toolbar
The buttons across the top of the map open the tools, each covered on its own page:
- Marker options (gear icon) — Display options for how markers look.
- Activity in area (polygon icon) — Area activity(requires the area-activity permission).
- Route calculator (route icon) — Route calculator.
- My fleet (list icon) — My fleet (requires the fleet-list permission).
- Find vessels (search box) — Find a vessel.
- Area selector (top right) — Areas & regions to jump the map to a region or one of your saved areas.
Reading the map
Each vessel is a marker. Its colour and shape help you tell ship types apart at a glance, and you can change what the colours mean in Display options. Click a marker to open its pop-up, which shows the vessel's details and a row of quick actions (open the vessel record, calculate an ETA, add it to your fleet, and more).
What you can do
- Find a vessel — search by name or identifier.
- Vessel pop-ups & actions — what a marker shows and the actions on it.
- Display options — marker colours, labels, tracks, and the sea chart layer.
- Areas & regions — jump the map to a region or a saved area.
- Manage your saved areas — add, rename, and remove your areas.
- My fleet — follow your groups of vessels.
- Manage fleet groups — build and edit those groups.
- Area activity — watch the vessels inside an area.
- Route calculator — distance and ETA between two ports.
A few buttons in SHIPM8 — Save, New, Add, Edit, Search — currently show in English even when the app is set to Dutch. That's expected; this guide uses those English labels so they match what you see on screen.