Waypoints

More detail

How to turn them on. Waypoints is a button on the bar along the bottom of the map, on the iPhone app and the website. Tap it and named dots appear over whatever layer you have up. Tap it again to hide them. The button is off again each time you open the app, but the app keeps your filter choices.

Not everything shows at first. There are 31 kinds of waypoint and eight are on to begin with: rigs, FADs, mounds, canyons, drillships, ridges, humps and valleys. Wrecks, artificial reefs and natural reefs start switched off. To see them, tap the small filter button with the sliders icon above the Waypoints button and switch them on. The filter sorts the kinds into four groups, Structure, Reefs & Wrecks, Bottom Features and Other, with All and None shortcuts.

Colors. On the website the dots are colored by group: amber for rigs and structure, green for reefs and wrecks, blue for bottom features and purple for everything else. On the iPhone app every dot is orange, so use the filter there to show one kind at a time.

Filter by depth. The same filter has a depth range, in feet. A waypoint with no depth on file always shows, whatever range you set.

Names. Names are hidden where they would overlap. Zoom in and they appear.

How to use them. Treat a waypoint as where to look, not exactly where to drop. On the East Coast and in Baja the depths are taken from a seafloor depth map. The same structure can appear twice under different names. Turn on the Depth button as well to see how a wreck or rig sits against the bottom contours.

Who makes it. RipIQ compiles the list itself. Drillship positions are refreshed once a week, on Wednesdays, from the government's offshore activity report, so a rig that has moved can show at its old spot for up to a week. Everything else changes only when we update the list.

Limits. The list keeps working when the live layers run late. The waypoints cover the Gulf of America, the East Coast and Baja, and they are densest in the Gulf.

The numbers

How often it updates	Whenever we update the list; drillships refresh weekly, on Wednesdays
How fresh it usually is	Up to about an hour for a newly added point; up to a week for drillships
How detailed it is	Individual named points, not a grid
Where it covers	Gulf of America, East Coast and Baja; densest in the Gulf
Observed or modeled	Neither. A list of cataloged structure that RipIQ compiles
What you see on screen	Named dots: 31 kinds in 4 groups, 8 on by default. Color-coded by group on the website, all orange on the iPhone app. Depth filter in feet, 0 to 10,000

Source: the RipIQ waypoint database.