My Sea Router Turned a 50-Mile Canal Crossing Into a 10,337-Mile Detour

My Sea Router Turned a 50-Mile Canal Crossing Into a 10,337-Mile Detour

I asked my sea router for a route from the Atlantic side of Panama to the Pacific side. It returned 10,337 nautical miles, going all the way around South America. The Panama Canal is about 50 nautical miles long. The router is auto-sea-way, an open-source routing graph I generated for the whole ocean surface of the planet. I built it because I could not find one with enough detail for Rhumb, the marine navigation app I make. The first version wo…