(These setting are enabled through the application preferences.)

There is a short discussion on departure planning in the Introduction | Uncertainty? | Picking a departure area, as well as in the Getting Started | Routing Variants area.

Departure planning is the process of choosing the best time to leave for a passage. There may be many criteria used when planning your departures. You may want the shortest passage, or the most comfortable. Sailors who want to avoid using their engines may prefer a departure which minimizes the motoring time. If you are at sea, hove-to in a gale, you can use the departure planning feature to help plan when to start sailing again.

Generate departure time variations.

This group of settings can be enabled or disabled. Before leaving for a passage, enable the settings and set them as you feel is appropriate. After leaving on the passage, disable this group of settings.

Departure time increment.

This is the amount of time between the departures generated, in hours.

Number of departures to generate.

This is the number of possible departures which will be generated. This setting works in conjunction with the next one.

Daylight only.

If this setting is enabled, only daylight departure times will be used.

Consider the example where you set the time interval between departures to be 6 hours (four per day) and you ask the system to generate 16 departures, which is four days worth. If you enable this setting, all of the departures which have their starting time occurring after local sunset and before sunrise would be ignored. This could potentially reduce the number of departures from 16 to 8.

Note that if this setting is enabled, the start time must be in daylight. If the start time is at night, the system will issue a warning.

Change color.

If this setting is enabled, each departure will use a different path color. Note that there are only 8 colors available, so if there are more departures than this then some paths will use the same color.