User Manual

Your Profile is home. It carries your photo and bio, your recent activity, and four doors: Logbook, Training, Achievements and, under “Share your experience”, your Résumé and Reports. The navy On board band counts your vessels, crew, Groups and followers, and each one opens its own screen. The Bell, at the top of every screen, holds anything waiting for you.

Along the bottom are the five tabs: Profile, Feed, the big Quick Log button, Explore and Groups. You can choose which one Saltlog opens on, in Settings.

Quick Log is the big middle button. Start it as you leave, and your phone records the route, the distance and the time, filling in the weather and where you set off from. It carries on with the phone locked or with no signal. If your boat has its own navigation system connected (part of Saltlog Plus), Quick Log uses that alongside the phone.

The three buttons along the bottom each need a hold, not a tap, so a knock can’t end your log. Pause Tripmarks a stop: say whether you’re at anchor, alongside, berthed, on a mooring or drifting, and hold Resume when you’re off again. Finish Trip ends the log. Discard Trip throws it away.

Trip doneshows the map, the distance, the time and your average speed, then your stops and, under Passage, your time moving and top speed. Tap Stops to see each one and to correct the kind of stop. Add photos and a note, check the crew and the conditions, and press Save trip. With no signal, the trip is kept on your phone and sent when you’re back in range.

If the route looks as though it ran over land, Saltlog says so and leaves the trip out of your totals. If you were afloat, on a river, a canal or a lake, say so and it is saved with a Land overridemark. If a trip looks like one you’ve already logged, the Bell tells you, and you choose whether to keep both.

Share location, once you’re underway, has two parts, both off until you switch them on. On Saltlog’s map shows your avatar moving on Explore to the people who follow you, or to everyone. A link for someone ashore (part of Saltlog Plus) makes a web address to send to anyone you like: they watch the trip on a map, with no app and no account. It stops when you finish or discard the trip, and the page then says the trip has ended. It is not a safety service: it shows where your phone last reported, and nobody is watching it for you.

Manual Logis for a trip you didn’t track: type the dates, the boat, the distance and who was aboard.

Bulk uploadtakes a spreadsheet of old logs. Download the template, which already knows your boats, fill it in, and upload it. Anything Saltlog can’t place lands in Exceptions for you to fix in your own time. It’s under Settings → Your logbook data.

Voyages tie several trips into one passage: a week to the Scillies is one voyage with five legs. Your Logbook shows it as a single card holding its legs.

Every trip you’ve logged, newest first, grouped by month with that month’s trips, miles and hours. Each entry is one slim card: the photo or boat, the date, where you went, and chips for miles, hours, wind force, your role, and whether it was a night passage or over 60nm.

Hours are counted from a trip’s start and end times. A trip over more than one day with no times counts 24 hours a day.

Above the list are your totals and the charts: days on the water by year, months, wind, and hours by vessel. Every chart is marked “Tap to explore”: swipe the calendar or the monthly chart to move through time, and tap any bar or day to filter the trips below to exactly that.

Search and filters reach your whole history, not just what’s on screen. Tap an entry to open the trip, where you can edit, share or delete it.

Training holds three things: your goal (just for fun, beginner, intermediate, advanced, commercial or instructor), the organisations you train with, and your qualifications.

Add a qualification by organisation and type. Each one is Interested, Completed, or Proven once you’ve uploaded a certificate and it’s been checked. Saltlog deliberately says nothing about how much sea time a course needs: those rules differ between bodies and change, so we leave them to the people who set them.

Badges you earn from real logged trips: first trip, miles and hours passed, night passages, passages over 60nm, voyages, and more. The page shows what you’ve just earned, what’s next with the nearest first, and the full cabinet, with the ones you haven’t earned yet waiting in grey. Each ladder shows which level you’re on and how far you are to the next.

Reportsis your logbook, printed. Pick a date range and you get a passage log (a line per trip), a season summary, the vessels you’ve sailed with your time aboard each, and your experience totals by role, day and night, conditions and passages. Open one and press Send PDF to pass it on by email, message or Files; on the website, Save PDF.

Your Résuméis a sailing CV built from the same data: headline numbers, qualifications, time in command, where you’ve sailed, conditions, standout passages, boats and seasons. Tailorchooses who it’s for, which sections show, whether exact harbours appear, and whether it covers all time or the last five years.

Send shares your Résumé two ways: as a PDF, ready to drop into WhatsApp or email, or as a link to that exact copy. A PDF is theirs to keep once sent; a link you can withdraw later, and it stops working.

Add a vessel with her name, type, make and model, and a photo. One is your primary vessel. Yours are listed first; one you charter, share or borrow wears a label saying so, and vessels you’ve sailed on but never added show under “Also sailed on”.

A boat can have a Berth— drag the map, search for it, or use your current location. Once it’s set, Saltlog can nudge you to log a trip when you’re genuinely back, not just passing through. Log enough trips from the same spot without a Berth set and Saltlog will offer to set it for you. The first time you switch arrival reminders on, your phone asks whether Saltlog may send notifications. A vessel can also connect to her own GPS, by SignalK or NMEA, with Saltlog Plus. Removing a vessel archives her rather than deleting her, so old trips keep an honest record.

Each boat has a What she costs page for berthing, fuel, servicing, insurance and the rest. Because your logbook already knows her days, hours and miles, it works out what she really costs per day out and per nautical mile, and charts it year by year. Kit you buy for her is shown separately and kept out of the cost per mile.

Add a cost by typing it in, by uploading a spreadsheet of past invoices from the template, or by letting Deckhand read a photo or PDF of an invoice for you. Everything you bring in waits in Capturesuntil you’ve checked it: accept, edit or reject each line before it counts. Give a cost a reminder date and it shows under what’s coming up.

Everyone you sail with. Press + Addto add someone by name, or find them if they’re on Saltlog, and a trip you tag them on appears in their logbook too. Each person has one button: Message, Follow, or, for a guest with an email, Invite.

Crew you add stay yours: archiving one keeps your past trips accurate.

Following someone brings their trips into your Feed. Following and Followers shows who you follow, who follows you, and who’s waiting to be followed back. Your profile also has a QR code and a short link, so someone can add you as crew or follow you on the pontoon.

You can message any Saltlogger you can see. People you’ve sailed with and people you both follow arrive in your inbox; anyone else waits in Requests until you accept. You can send a trip into a conversation as a card. In Messages, + Newstarts a message to a person or to a Group you’ve joined.

Your conversations are private. Nobody at Saltlog can open them. If you report a conversation, a copy of its last twenty messages goes with the report so that someone can look at what was said. In a Group Room, tap a message and press Report; it goes with the few messages either side of it.

A Group is one of two things. A communityis run by its members: a crew, an owners’ group, a place to buy and sell. An organisation stands for a business, club, school or marina. You say which when you create one.

Anyone can create a Group for an organisation, their own or not. Until the organisation claims it, the Group is marked Unofficial and its page names the person who created it. An organisation claims its Group with a code sent to an email address at its own web domain. A community is never marked either way.

On a Group’s page, Join adds you to it. Call, Email and Message Usreach it; a message to an Unofficial Group says who will read it before you write. Once you’ve joined, Group Rooms are where members talk to each other.

Running a Group, you see it in Admin View: Post, Messages In (what people have written to the Group) and Group Rooms. Saltloggers View shows the page as everyone else sees it, and is where Transfer Ownership lives.

Starting an organisation’s Group is quick: paste its website and Deckhand reads it, then builds the page for you. You check every line before anything is saved.

A map of Groups, Saltloggers, trips and voyages. Search a tab to find a club, a person by name or town, or a passage. The list under the map holds what you can see on it, and changes as you move. Trips draws GPS-tracked passages as plain lines, and the heat map (part of Saltlog Plus) shows where boats go most. Deckhand, our demo sailor, is marked Demo user wherever he appears.

If a trip, comment, message or person breaks our community guidelines, report it from its menu and we’ll look at it. The same menu lets you block someone: they can’t message you, you stop seeing each other anywhere on Saltlog, and any follow between you is undone. Trips you really sailed together stay as they are. Unblock them any time from Settings → Blocked people.

The cog at the top of the screen opens Settings. It holds:

• About me — your name, contact details and emergency contact. Links and QR holds your short link and QR code, and you can see your profile as other people see it.
• Who can see you — Saltlog is open by default, which is how people find crew and clubs. Private hides your profile and trips from everyone. There are separate switches for the People map, the Routes map, crew adding trips to your logbook, and whether a shared trip includes your route.
• Quick Log nudges — off by default. Say yes and choose how Saltlog nudges you (banner, buzz or alarm) if you sit still for a while. A separate switch covers the nudge for coming ashore with the log still running. Your phone asks whether Saltlog may send notifications when you choose buzz or alarm.
• Units and formats — lengths in metres or feet, and how dates and times are written.
• Open Saltlog on — which of the five tabs you land on. And whether Deckhand, our demo sailor, appears.
• Blocked people, the community guidelines, and Your logbook data, where Bulk upload and your reports live.

Sign in with a password, with Face ID or Touch ID, or with a code sent to your email. You can change your email or password under Settings → Security. Logging is free, Quick Log included; Saltlog Plus adds Deckhand AI, dictating a trip note, your vessel’s own GPS, a live location link for someone ashore, more photos and clips, trip animations, what she costs, every chart and heat maps. See or change your plan under Settings → Your plan, and cancel it in your App Store or Google Play subscriptions.

You can delete your account yourself, from Settings → Delete account: press and hold to delete, then press and hold again to confirm. It permanently removes your trips, vessels, crew, photos and comments. Where another skipper logged you as crew on their own trip, that trip stays theirs and keeps an honest record of who was aboard.

Use Send feedback from Settings and tell us what happened. It goes straight to Steve, who reads every one. A screenshot helps.