Troubleshooting
Who this is for: anyone where the guide is doing something that looks wrong. Last updated: 2026-08-30
Each entry is a symptom, the likely cause, and what to do. Several of these are the guide working correctly in a way that looks like a fault — those are marked Working as intended, with the reason.
Contents
Distances and home base
Everything says "no walk estimate"
Cause: no home base is set, or the place has no position on the island.
Fix: set your home base from the control at the top of most pages, or on Your trip. If it is already set, the place itself is off the island — West OC, Berlin, Assateague — and there is no walking distance to give.
The walk times look too short
Working as intended. The estimate is a straight line at 3 mph, not a route. It is a floor: the real walk is longer, because streets are not straight lines and crossings exist. Every estimate carries a "~" for exactly this reason.
It gives me miles instead of minutes
Working as intended. Past about 45 minutes the guide stops quoting minutes. A "68 min walk" implies somebody checked that route; nobody did.
My street isn't in the list
Cause: the list carries the named crossings, not every address.
Fix: pick the nearest one. One block of error will not change any answer the guide gives you.
Missing information
A place has no opening hours
Working as intended. The guide has not verified them, and shows nothing rather than guessing. A wrong opening time is how somebody drives across the island to a locked door.
If you know them: use the "tell us what changed" control on that page.
A place has no phone number or address
Same reason. The guide publishes what it has checked.
The Today page is nearly empty
Cause: you are here off-season, or late in the day.
Working as intended. Rather than padding the page, the guide shows what is genuinely open. In February that is a short page.
There is no forecast in the header
Cause: the National Weather Service is unreachable, or returned nothing usable.
Working as intended. The guide shows no forecast rather than a stale one. Everything else on the page is unaffected — the forecast fails on its own without taking the page with it.
Fix: none needed; it will return.
Tides or water temperature are missing
Cause: NOAA's tide and water-temperature feeds are separate from the forecast and can fail independently.
Working as intended, same reasoning. Each of the three fails alone.
Offline
The guide says I'm offline but I have signal
Cause: the guide checks real reachability rather than the browser's own "online" flag, which is frequently wrong — captive wifi portals, hotel networks and saturated cells all report "online" while nothing loads.
Fix: if pages are genuinely loading, the notice will clear itself. If they are not, the guide is right and your connection is not working.
Nothing was saved for offline
Cause: you did not open Offline pack while you had signal, or your browser cleared its storage.
Fix: open Yours → Offline pack next time you have a connection. Note that private or incognito windows discard everything when closed.
My trip is there offline but the hours look different
Working as intended. Offline you get season hours — "Daily 11am–1am, summer" — rather than an "open now" badge. The badge answers "can I walk in this minute", which is exactly the wrong question with no connection: a cached answer from Tuesday is wrong on Thursday.
Trips and sharing
My trip vanished
Cause, most likely: browser data was cleared, or you are in a different browser or a private window. The trip lives in your browser, not on a server.
Fix: sign in if you want it to survive across devices. There is no way to recover a trip from a browser that has been cleared — nothing was stored on our side to recover.
A shared trip link doesn't open the right plan
Cause: the link was truncated. The entire itinerary is encoded in the link, so a link that got cut in a message loses part of the plan.
Fix: send it again, making sure the whole URL is carried — some messaging apps break long links across lines.
I opened someone's trip and it replaced mine
Cause: opening a shared link gives you your own editable copy.
Fix: if you have not made changes since, your browser's back button will return you. Otherwise the original is gone — a shared link is a starting point, not a merge.
Game and account
My Sand Dollars reset
Cause: signed-out progress lives in that browser only. A different browser, a private window, or cleared data all start from zero.
Fix: sign in to carry progress between devices.
A trivia question seems wrong
Every question is drawn from the guide's own corpus and can point at the record behind it. If the record is wrong, the question inherits it — use "tell us what changed" and the correction will fix both.
The Gull-dex says a bird "isn't actually a gull"
Working as intended. Several birds people call seagulls are terns or pelicans. Those entries are deliberate — the dex is a field guide first and a collection second.
Display
The page flashes light before going dark
This should not happen. All three display settings apply before the page paints. If you are seeing a flash, that is a real fault worth reporting, with your browser and version.
Text size changes didn't stick
Cause: settings are stored in your browser. A private window discards them on close.
Fix: use a normal window, or set it again.
The map is unreadable / I can't use the map
Every map carries a text equivalent containing the same information in words — the districts, their places and their connections — not a caption saying a map exists. It is available to screen readers and is real page content. If you cannot use the map, that equivalent is the intended route, not a fallback.