Zooming out -- literally -- and working on yacht pathing. I have a basic implementation of A* following the pseudocode on wikipedia with heuristics to avoid landmasses and prefer deeper water. What's interesting is I am able to use the underlying noise field directly to make navigation decisions. It picks a random spawn point (chosen because spawn points are always in deep water, where the noise field is lowest, farthest away from landmasses) and plots a path towards it. The whole thing is synchronous and not terribly optimized so you might see a pause when a particularly long path is being computed.
Yacht steering is a mess, still. It is using the same mechanism as orca steering with different parameters but that might need to change. I really love how the orcas feel and I don't want to significantly change their locomotion at this point, but I think the yachts will need more than parameter tweaking to behave right.
You can play the full thing here.