Sailing Logbook

A logbook for cruising sailors

The logbook you’ll actually keep.

Sailing Logbook does the clerical work of the log — the track drawn over real charts, the weather on arrival, photographs pinned where they were taken — and leaves you the part worth doing: the writing. Private by default. Shared when you choose.

Join the beta See the app
Sailing Logbook home: 1,325 nautical miles and 81 legs of lifetime stats, the current voyage, and a live chart

Why it exists

Paper logbooks are beautiful. Most of them are blank.

Every sailor means to keep the log. Then the wind builds, the anchor needs re-setting, dinner wants cooking — and three harbours later the last entry is still the one from June. The book on the chart table stays beautiful. The record stays thin.

Sailing Logbook closes that gap by keeping the log with you. From the moment you start tracking, the voyage is already being written down — where you went, how fast, what the weather did, where every photograph was taken. Add a sentence at anchor, or don’t. Either way, it’s in the book.

Rail down in the Strait of Juan de Fuca — water rushing along the wooden deck through the rigging
The Strait of Juan de Fuca. Nobody is writing anything down.

01 — Record

Tap start as you drop lines.

That’s the whole job. The app records in the background — in a pocket, through signal gaps, with the screen asleep — and names the trip for you when the anchor goes down. Engine hours are prompted at the start, so the count never drifts.

Every passage is drawn over real nautical charts — buoys, depth contours, harbour marks. Play it back later and watch the boat sail the whole thing again.

28.1 nm · 5h 54m · Dixie Cove → Nuchatlitz · 4,527 track points

A real passage, To Nuchatlitz: gold track on a nautical chart with a photo pinned at its capture point, distance, duration, speeds and engine hours

02 — Write

All that’s left is the writing.

Wind, sea state, sail changes, who was aboard — the clerical fields fill themselves or take a few taps. What remains is the part no instrument can record: what it was like. Entries carry their position and time, pulled straight from the track, and photographs pin themselves to the exact point where you took them.

Legs gather into voyages, and a voyage reads like a storybook — the map on one side, the pages on the other. A circumnavigation of Vancouver Island holds together as one book, eighty-two legs long.

Narrative · 10:05 · 49.9751°N 127.2559°W

Voyage legs with photographs: Nuchatlitz, Dixie Cove from a kayak, Fair Harbour docks, Rugged Point beach
A real log entry written at sea, with its coordinates and a Public indicator

03 — Keep the boat

The boat’s memory, too.

Oil changes, zincs, rigging inspections — each with its interval, its history, and a countdown to the next service, tied to real engine hours. Provisioning lists remember what you bought for every anchorage you return to, and the home screen quietly counts the days since you last topped up diesel, water, and groceries.

Maintenance records are owner-only by design. The state of your boat is nobody else’s business, so the app won’t let it be published at all.

Westerbeke L25 · 1,931.0 hrs · zinc inspection overdue

Service and maintenance ledger: engine hours, overdue zinc inspection and oil change, upcoming rigging inspection

The point of it

A beautiful place to look back.

The whole thing is set like a book — warm paper, type meant for reading, nothing shouting. The pleasures of the cloth-bound log, kept by something that never forgets to write in it. Easy to wander through at anchor, easy to hand across the cockpit.

Wooden side deck underway, grey sea beyond
Underway, west coast
Dusk through the shrouds at anchor, harbour lights along the shore
Dusk, Desolation Sound
Jura at anchor beneath the mountains, a hammock slung on the foredeck
At anchor, Kwatsi Bay

A private journal that happens to have a GPS and a beautiful map.

Sharing

Jura at anchor in the glowing turquoise water of Whitepine Cove

“I picked up the binoculars and realized it looked like a Lyle Hess cutter. I paddled over and met Bob aboard Mabel, a 24-foot gaff-rigged cutter he built himself on Pender Island. He’s on his fifteenth circumnavigation of Vancouver Island.”

— a logbook entry from Mary Basin, Nootka Sound

Sailing Logbook is being written aboard Jura, a wooden sloop, on the west coast of Vancouver Island. The moments worth keeping arrive without warning; the log is where they land.

Also aboard

The manifest.

  1. Works offlineTracks queue on the device and sync when signal returns; the whole logbook browses without a connection.
  2. GPX importBring your history in from Navionics, PredictWind, or Garmin — track, speed, and heading intact.
  3. Everything exportsGPX and full logbook export, any time. The core is open source (AGPL) — you can read exactly how privacy is enforced.
  4. Crew aboardInvite crew to a trip; they add their own entries and photographs to the shared record.
  5. Sea-service recordsCertification fields for RYA, Yachtmaster, and ASA sea time — kept as you go, ready when you need them.
  6. HavensAnchorages you love, remembered — notes, photographs, past stays, and what you provisioned there last time.
  7. A quiet APIScoped, revocable tokens let a trusted AI agent add entries underway — and answer questions about what’s in your log.
  8. Weather, logged for youConditions recorded automatically on arrival; wind, pressure, and sea state fields on any entry.
  9. Units your wayNautical, metric, or imperial, switchable anywhere. Knots by default, naturally.
  10. Native on iPhoneNative GPS, camera, and notifications, with recording that survives a pocket, a restart, and a dead screen.

Coming soon.

Sailing Logbook is in private beta on iPhone, delivered through Apple TestFlight. Leave your email and an invite will follow as spots open — nothing else, and never anyone’s address but yours.