# Saillogger user guide The complete Saillogger user guide, one page per section. Canonical HTML: https://saillogger.com/docs/ Saillogger is an automated marine logbook and boat monitoring service: a device aboard uploads position and sensor data, and Saillogger detects and logs every trip, records moorages and stays, builds statistics and timelapses, monitors the boat remotely and shares it with whoever the owner chooses. This document is long. Each page below starts with a level-one heading and can also be fetched on its own at the address listed, which is the reliable way to read one topic. ## Contents - What Saillogger is (Start here): https://saillogger.com/docs/what-is-saillogger.md - Create your account (Start here): https://saillogger.com/docs/create-your-account.md - Connect your boat (Start here): https://saillogger.com/docs/connect-your-boat.md - Check that it is working (Start here): https://saillogger.com/docs/check-your-connection.md - How trips are logged (Using Saillogger): https://saillogger.com/docs/automatic-trip-logging.md - Your logbook (Using Saillogger): https://saillogger.com/docs/your-logbook.md - Watch your boat live (Using Saillogger): https://saillogger.com/docs/live-monitoring.md - Notes, photos and your journal (Using Saillogger): https://saillogger.com/docs/journal-and-notes.md - Timelapse (Using Saillogger): https://saillogger.com/docs/timelapse.md - Alerts and notifications (Using Saillogger): https://saillogger.com/docs/alerts-and-notifications.md - Make Saillogger yours (Using Saillogger): https://saillogger.com/docs/customise-saillogger.md - Statistics and badges (Using Saillogger): https://saillogger.com/docs/statistics-and-badges.md - Share your boat (Sharing and community): https://saillogger.com/docs/share-your-boat.md - Friends, fleets and messages (Sharing and community): https://saillogger.com/docs/friends-and-fleets.md - For family and friends without Saillogger (Sharing and community): https://saillogger.com/docs/follow-without-saillogger.md - Subscription and seasonal pause (Account and billing): https://saillogger.com/docs/subscription-and-seasonal-pause.md - Your account, data and privacy (Account and billing): https://saillogger.com/docs/account-and-privacy.md - Troubleshooting (Help): https://saillogger.com/docs/troubleshooting.md - Frequently asked questions (Help): https://saillogger.com/docs/faq.md --- # What Saillogger is Source: https://saillogger.com/docs/what-is-saillogger/ An automated logbook for your boat: a device aboard sends position and sensor data, and Saillogger detects and writes up every trip on its own. Saillogger is an automated marine logbook and boat-monitoring service. A device aboard your boat uploads position and sensor data. From that data Saillogger works out when you left, where you went and when you arrived, and writes the log entry itself. You never start or stop a trip. There is no button to press when you slip the lines and none to press when you tie up. If the device aboard is running, the trip gets logged. ## What Saillogger records For every trip it detects, Saillogger keeps: - the track you covered, drawn on a map - distance, duration, average and maximum speed - wind conditions along the way - the moorage you left from and the moorage you arrived at, named for you - your stay in between trips, so the gaps in your season are recorded too A moorage is a place you stop: somewhere you anchored, picked up a mooring buoy or tied to a dock. Saillogger names the start and end of each trip from where you actually were, so your logbook reads as a list of places rather than a list of coordinates. The time between two trips becomes a stay at that moorage. On top of the individual logs it builds: - **Statistics** across your whole logging history: how far you went this month, this season, and since you started. - **Timelapse** video of any stretch you choose, built from your own track. - **Live monitoring** while you are away from the boat: gauges for what your instruments report, and a map showing where she is. - **Sharing**, so family, friends or the whole world can follow along, if and only if you decide they should. ## Everything is private by default Nothing you record is public. Your logs, your positions, your moorages and your monitoring data are visible only to you until you turn on Sharing yourself. Turning it on is a deliberate act in your settings, and you can restrict what you share to people who have a password. > [!NOTE] > A new account shares nothing. If you never open the sharing settings, nothing you record is ever visible to anyone else. ## Three ways to feed data to Saillogger Saillogger does not collect anything by itself. Something aboard has to send it data. There are three supported ways to do that. | Path | What you need | What you get | | --- | --- | --- | | PredictWind tracking link | A PredictWind tracker you already have | Position only: trips, tracks, moorages, stays, statistics | | Victron GX device | A Victron GX device (Cerbo GX and similar) wired to NMEA 2000 | Position plus instrument monitoring | | Signal K plugin | The Saillogger plugin on any Signal K server, for example a Raspberry Pi with a PiCAN-M board | Position plus instrument monitoring | The Victron GX route is the one most boaters take, and it is what the setup pages recommend. The hardware for it costs roughly USD 300 in the United States. If you already run Signal K on a Raspberry Pi, you do not need to buy anything: the plugin is free. Choosing between them, and the step-by-step for each, is on [Connect your boat](https://saillogger.com/docs/connect-your-boat.md). > [!IMPORTANT] > Use only one of the three at a time. Two sources sending at once produce duplicate entries. ## What Saillogger needs from your boat Two things, and they are not the same thing. **A GPS position.** This is required for both trip logging and live monitoring. Without a position, your boat counts as offline no matter how healthy the rest of the setup looks. The GPS usually comes from your chartplotter or AIS transceiver over the boat network, which means it goes dark when you switch your instruments off. **An Internet connection, but how much depends on what you want.** - **Trip logging** needs only an occasional connection. The device aboard caches your data locally and uploads it when it next gets online. Weeks offline in the islands is fine: the logs arrive complete once you reconnect. - **Live monitoring** needs the boat online right now. If the boat has no Internet, you cannot watch your batteries from ashore, and the monitoring page shows the last data it received. ## What it costs Saillogger is free for 45 days, then USD 7.99 per month. The 45 days start when your boat first sends data, not when you sign up. If you create an account in February and connect your device in June, your trial starts in June. You do not need a credit card to start the trial. Billing, cancelling and pausing for the off-season are covered in [Subscription and seasonal pause](https://saillogger.com/docs/subscription-and-seasonal-pause.md). ## On your phone There are Saillogger apps for iOS and Android. They are wrappers around the same site, so anything you can do on the web you can do in the app, and your account is the same one. - iOS: [apps.apple.com/us/app/saillogger-app/id6479176158](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/saillogger-app/id6479176158) - Android: [play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.saillogger.app](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.saillogger.app) ## Two web experiences: Classic and Modern Saillogger has two versions of its web interface: - **Classic** is the default and is what you get unless you change it. It is the interface most of the screens in this guide describe. - **Modern** is a newer interface at [saillogger.com/app](https://saillogger.com/app). You opt into it in your settings. This guide covers both. Where a screen differs between the two, the page tells you which one it is describing. If a page does not say, the screen is the same in both. ## Questions boaters ask before they start **Do I have to remember to do anything when I set off?** No. Trips are detected from the data, so there is nothing to press and nothing to forget. This is the whole point of the service. **Do I need Internet at sea?** Not for logging. The device aboard caches everything and uploads later. You do need Internet for anyone ashore to watch the boat live. **What if my instruments are off?** Then there is no GPS position, and nothing is logged. Saillogger needs a position for both logging and monitoring. **Does it work for a motorboat?** Yes. Boat type is one of the things you set up, and **Motorboat** is one of the choices. **Can I see it working before I pay?** Yes, twice over: the demo account below, and 30 free days on your own boat with no card. ## Look before you sign up There is a read-only demo account at [saillogger.com/demo/](https://saillogger.com/demo/). The credentials are filled in for you on that page, so you can sign in and click around a real account with real logs, statistics and monitoring. You cannot change anything in the demo, which makes it a safe place to see what your own account will look like. ## What to read next The guide is written to be read in order if you are new. The first four pages get you from nothing to a working logbook: 1. [Create your account](https://saillogger.com/docs/create-your-account.md): signing up, what the fields mean, referral codes, and when your trial actually starts. 2. [Connect your boat](https://saillogger.com/docs/connect-your-boat.md): the most important page. Pick one of the three paths and follow it to the end. 3. [Check that it is working](https://saillogger.com/docs/check-your-connection.md): where to look to confirm data is arriving, and what to expect in your first days. 4. [How trips are logged](https://saillogger.com/docs/automatic-trip-logging.md): how Saillogger decides a trip started and ended, and why your first log takes about an hour to appear. If something is not behaving, [Troubleshooting](https://saillogger.com/docs/troubleshooting.md) collects the problems boaters actually hit and what fixed them. For anything this guide does not answer, the [community forum](https://community.saillogger.com) is where boaters and the Saillogger team work through problems together, and info@saillogger.com reaches a person. > [!NEXT] > Start with [Create your account](https://saillogger.com/docs/create-your-account.md), which takes about two minutes. --- # Create your account Source: https://saillogger.com/docs/create-your-account/ Sign up, understand what each field does, and know when your free trial actually begins. Signing up takes about two minutes and no credit card. It creates your account and, at the same time, creates your boat, ready for a device to link to it. Two of the fields are decided for good at signup: the e-mail address, which becomes your username, and any referral code, which cannot be added later. Read those two sections before you fill the form in. ## Before you fill in the form Have these to hand: - **The e-mail address you intend to keep.** It becomes your username and cannot be changed later without asking support. - **A referral or promo code, if someone gave you one.** It has to go in now. You do not need your boat, your device, or anything from the boat's network yet. None of that is asked for at signup, and you can sign up at home in the winter with the boat ashore. ## Sign up 1. Go to [saillogger.com/accounts/create/](https://saillogger.com/accounts/create/). 2. Enter your **Email address**. This becomes your username, so use an address you will keep. 3. Enter a **Password**. It must be at least 8 characters. 4. Enter your **First name** and **Last name**. Each must be at least 3 characters. 5. If you were given a code, click **Have a promo or referral code?** and type it into the field marked **Promo or referral code (optional)**. See below: this is your only chance to enter it. 6. Tick **I agree to Terms of Service**. 7. Click **Submit**. There is an invisible reCAPTCHA on **Submit**, so nothing extra is asked of you in normal use. If the button appears to do nothing, wait a few seconds and click it again. After you submit, you land on the Getting Started page, which is where you choose how to connect your boat. That is the next page of this guide. > [!TIP] > If a browser password manager offers to save the password, let it. The e-mail address you signed up with is the username it should store. ## Your e-mail address is your username The address you sign up with is your login. It cannot be changed later from anywhere in the Saillogger interface. If you need to change it, for example because you have left an old provider behind, write to info@saillogger.com from the address currently on the account and ask for it to be changed. Everything else about you (your name, your boat's details, your preferences) you can change yourself at any time in **Settings**. ## Promo and referral codes A referral code has to go in at signup. It cannot be added afterwards, not by you and not by support. If a friend gave you one, click **Have a promo or referral code?** before you submit the form and enter it. What a referral code does: - You get 25% off your first paid month. - The boater who referred you earns one free month, once you make your first payment. If your friend sends you a share link rather than a bare code, it looks like this: ``` https://saillogger.com/accounts/create/?referral=CODE ``` Opening that link takes you to the same signup form with the code already filled in, which is the least error-prone way to use one. > [!IMPORTANT] > A referral code can only be entered while you are creating the account, and cannot be added afterwards. If you have been given one, do put it in now: signing up without it means missing both your discount and your friend's free month. ## One account, one boat Signing up creates one boat for you automatically. You do not create it yourself, and you do not name it here: for most setups the boat's name comes from your Signal K server, which is covered in [Connect your boat](https://saillogger.com/docs/connect-your-boat.md). One account holds one boat. Boaters who own more than one boat, or who keep an old boat's logs while running a new one, use a separate account for each. Saillogger staff can link those accounts together so that a **switch boat** entry appears in the menu and you can move between them without signing out. Ask for it at info@saillogger.com or on the [community forum](https://community.saillogger.com), naming the accounts you want linked. > [!TIP] > The iOS and Android apps show the same signup form as the web site, so it does not matter which you use. The account is the same account either way. ## After you sign up Until your boat sends its first data, Saillogger keeps steering you back to Getting Started. Every time you sign in, an account whose boat has never sent data lands on that page instead of the usual home screen. This is deliberate: there is nothing to show you yet, and the thing you need to do is on that page. Getting Started offers three ways to connect a boat, and you pick one. That is what the next page of this guide walks you through, so if you are following along in order, you do not need to decide anything on that screen yet. Once data arrives, the redirect stops and you get your normal home screen. ## When your free trial starts Your 30 free days start when your boat first sends data, not when you sign up. Signing up in the winter and connecting your device at launch in the spring costs you nothing in trial days. Until the first data arrives, **Settings** > **Subscription** shows: > Your trial period hasn't started yet. > > It will start automatically when your monitoring device is linked. When that message is gone and the tab shows your plan and its dates instead, your trial has begun, which also tells you data has arrived. Full details of what happens at the end of the 45 days, and how to pause over the winter, are in [Subscription and seasonal pause](https://saillogger.com/docs/subscription-and-seasonal-pause.md). ## If you never link a boat An account that never links a boat is closed after 60 days. You get a warning e-mail 7 days before that happens, at the address you signed up with. If your device is still on order, or the boat is out of the water, there is nothing to worry about while you are within the 60 days. If the account has already been closed and you want it back, write to info@saillogger.com; do not create a second account on a different address, as that leaves you with two. ## Passwords **If you cannot sign in**, use **Forgot your password?** on the sign-in form, or go straight to [saillogger.com/accounts/password_reset/](https://saillogger.com/accounts/password_reset/). You get an e-mail with a reset link. **If it does not work:** - Check the address you typed is the one you signed up with. The reset only goes to a known address. - Look in your spam folder for the message. - If your account was cancelled or closed, the reset can fail without telling you why. Write to info@saillogger.com from the registered address and ask for the account to be re-enabled. **To change a password you already know**, sign in and open **Settings** > **General**, find the **Password** row and click **Change Password**. ## What you should have now - An account you can sign in to. - A boat that exists but has never sent data, so your trial has not started. - Getting Started waiting for you every time you sign in. The next page turns that into a boat that is actually logging. > [!NEXT] > Go to [Connect your boat](https://saillogger.com/docs/connect-your-boat.md) and pick one of the three ways to send data. --- # Connect your boat Source: https://saillogger.com/docs/connect-your-boat/ The three ways to send data to Saillogger, step by step: a PredictWind tracking link, a Victron GX device, or the Saillogger plugin on Signal K. This is the page that turns an empty account into a working logbook. Everything else in Saillogger depends on data arriving from the boat, and this is where you arrange that. There are three supported paths. Pick one, then follow only that section. Setup lives at [saillogger.com/getting_started/](https://saillogger.com/getting_started/), which offers exactly these three: **Use PredictWind Tracker**, **Use a Victron GX Device (Recommended)** and **Use Raspberry Pi (Advanced)**. ## Which path is yours | Path | Choose it if | You get | Cost | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | PredictWind | You already have a PredictWind tracker and a tracking link | Position only: trips, tracks, moorages, stays, statistics | Nothing extra | | Victron GX | You want instrument monitoring and are buying hardware | Position plus instrument monitoring | Roughly USD 300 in the United States | | Signal K | You already run Signal K, or you build your own boat computer | Position plus instrument monitoring | Free if you have the hardware | > [!WARNING] > Use only one data source at a time. Running a PredictWind tracker and a Victron GX together sends the same voyage twice and produces duplicate entries in your logbook. If you are moving from one to the other, stop the old one first. ## Your Collector ID Whichever path you take, the credential that ties a device to your account is your **Collector ID**. Find it in **Settings** > **Boat**, in the **Collector ID** row: [saillogger.com/settings/?tab=boat](https://saillogger.com/settings/?tab=boat). Treat it like a password. Anyone who has it can send data into your logbook. Do not post it in a public forum thread, and do not put it in a screenshot. The PredictWind path is the exception: those boats show **PredictWind** in the **Collector ID** row rather than an identifier, because the link is made with the tracking URL instead. --- ## Path 1: PredictWind tracking link Three screens, and no hardware to buy. Note the limitation before you start: a PredictWind tracker sends position only. You get trips, tracks, distances, moorages, stays and statistics, but no instrument monitoring, because there are no instrument readings in the feed. Have your tracking link ready. Saillogger accepts either of these two forms, where `` is your own boat's part of the address: ``` https://forecast.predictwind.com/tracking/display// https://www.predictwind.com/tracking// ``` 1. Go to [saillogger.com/getting_started/](https://saillogger.com/getting_started/) and click **Use PredictWind Tracker**. 2. Paste your PredictWind tracking link and click **Continue**. 3. Choose your boat type, **Motorboat** or **Sailboat**, and click **Continue**. PredictWind does not send this, so Saillogger has to ask. 4. Wait. The setup page tells you: "It may take up-to 5 minutes for changes to be recognized." The page refreshes itself when the link goes live, so leave it open. **If it does not work:** - A link Saillogger cannot read is refused on the spot with **Invalid tracking link**. Copy the address out of your browser's address bar on the PredictWind tracking page rather than typing it, and keep the trailing slash. - Check the tracking page actually loads for you in another tab. If PredictWind is not publishing positions, there is nothing for Saillogger to read. - Give it the full 5 minutes before deciding it has failed. --- ## Path 2: Victron GX device This is the recommended path and the one most boaters use. It takes eight steps and you have to be aboard for most of them. Allow an hour, and more if the plugin install runs slowly on your device. ### Step 1: hardware You need a Victron GX device (a Cerbo GX or similar) and the Victron VE.Can to NMEA 2000 micro-C cable, which connects the GX to your NMEA 2000 backbone. > [!IMPORTANT] > You must be aboard and on the same network as the GX device to complete this setup. The configuration screens are on the device itself, not on saillogger.com, so they are not reachable from home. ### Step 2: enable the large firmware image On the GX device, go to **Settings** > **Firmware** > **Online Updates** > **Image Type** and choose Large. The standard image does not include what the next step needs. ### Step 3: turn on Signal K Go to **Settings** > **Venus OS Large features** > **Signal K** and switch it on. Wait a couple of minutes for it to start. ### Step 4: enter your boat's details Open [http://venus.local:3000/admin/#/serverConfiguration/settings](http://venus.local:3000/admin/#/serverConfiguration/settings) while on the boat network, and under **Vessel Base Data** fill in: - **Name** - **MMSI** - **Ship Type** All three matter. A missing MMSI in particular has left boaters with no monitoring data at all, weeks later, in a way that is hard to trace back to this screen. If you do not have an MMSI, enter 123456789. It does not affect anything else. ### Step 5: install the Saillogger plugin 1. Open [http://venus.local:3000/admin/#/appstore/apps](http://venus.local:3000/admin/#/appstore/apps). 2. Type Saillogger into the search box at the top right. 3. Click **Install**. 4. Wait. > [!WARNING] > The setup page warns "Installation may take more than 30 minutes." With plugin 5.0.0 it is usually under a minute, but do not interrupt it and do not reboot in the middle either way. An interrupted install can leave Signal K in a state that needs a full reinstall to fix. ### Step 6: reboot the GX On the device, **Settings** > **General** > **Reboot**. ### Step 7: paste in your Collector ID 1. Open [http://venus.local:3000/admin/#/serverConfiguration/plugins/signalk-saillogger](http://venus.local:3000/admin/#/serverConfiguration/plugins/signalk-saillogger). 2. Enter your **Collector ID** in the field of that name. 3. Click **Submit**. If that address does not load, the GX may still be rebooting from step 6. Wait a few minutes and try again. ### Step 8: wait for the connection The setup page sits and waits for your boat, and moves on by itself as soon as data arrives. Leave it open. **If nothing happens after a few minutes**, check each of these: 1. The Victron GX is powered on and connected to the Internet. 2. The Victron GX is connected to your NMEA 2000. 3. The NMEA 2000 network is powered on. 4. There is a GPS source on the NMEA 2000 network and it is powered on. 5. Your Collector ID is entered correctly, with no leading or trailing space. 6. The Victron GX and your chartplotter are set to the same timezone. The GPS point catches most boaters out. Your position usually comes from the chartplotter or AIS transceiver, so if the instruments are off, the GX has Internet but no position, and Saillogger has nothing to log. If you have worked through all six and the page is still waiting, [Troubleshooting](https://saillogger.com/docs/troubleshooting.md) covers install failures and Signal K problems in detail. --- ## Path 3: Signal K on your own hardware The plugin is `signalk-saillogger`, and it runs on any Signal K server, not only a Raspberry Pi. If you already have Signal K running, this takes minutes. 1. Open your Signal K server's admin page and go to the app store. 2. Search for `signalk-saillogger` and install it. 3. Open the plugin's configuration and paste in your **Collector ID**. 4. Restart the Signal K server. Your boat then appears as connected on [saillogger.com/getting_started/](https://saillogger.com/getting_started/), which refreshes itself once the device links. **Recommended hardware if you are building from scratch:** a Raspberry Pi 4 with a PiCAN-M HAT. The PiCAN-M gives the Pi its NMEA 2000 connection and can also power the Pi from the NMEA 2000 network, which saves you a separate supply. The plugin's source code is at [github.com/itemir/signalk-saillogger](https://github.com/itemir/signalk-saillogger). --- ## The plugin's settings Whether the plugin is running on a Victron GX or on your own Signal K server, it shows you the same two fields. | Field | What to put in it | | --- | --- | | **Collector ID** | Required. From **Settings** > **Boat** on saillogger.com. | | **GPS source** | Leave it EMPTY unless you are fixing a bad GPS. | **GPS source.** This exists for boats with several GPS receivers producing conflicting positions and zigzag tracks. It is an advanced option and it fails badly if you get it wrong: a typo here makes Saillogger ignore every position, so nothing at all is logged. If you do not have a GPS conflict, leave it empty. **Everything else is on saillogger.com.** Which sensor feeds depth, wind, pressure, temperature, humidity, battery voltage and battery charge is chosen under **Settings** > **Monitoring & Tracking**, from dropdowns of the Signal K paths your boat actually publishes. Older plugin versions carried those fields, including a battery one that took only the instance part of a path, and older instructions still describe them. They no longer exist in the plugin. See [Make Saillogger yours](https://saillogger.com/docs/customise-saillogger.md). ## Your boat's name comes from Signal K Boat name, MMSI and ship type are not Saillogger settings. They arrive from Signal K, and Saillogger displays them read-only in **Settings** > **Boat**. To change any of them, open your Signal K server and go to **Server** > **Settings** > **Vessel Base Data**. On a Victron GX, when you are on the boat network, that is [http://venus.local:3000/admin/#/serverConfiguration/settings](http://venus.local:3000/admin/#/serverConfiguration/settings). Changes take a little while to show up on saillogger.com, so do not keep editing if the old name is still displayed a minute later. ## Keep the plugin up to date Update the Saillogger plugin from the Signal K app store when an update is offered. Version matters for what you can configure: - **3.0.0 or later** is needed for sensor-source settings and custom monitoring sections. Below that, monitoring sources are still configured in the plugin rather than on saillogger.com, and several of this guide's instructions will not match what you see. - **5.x** adds native engine logging, which records engine hours per trip without any hand-built configuration. You can see which version Saillogger is receiving in the **Plugin Version** row of **Settings** > **Boat**. ## Starlink If your boat has Starlink, you need nothing special for tracking. Saillogger sees Starlink as an Internet connection like any other, and an Internet connection is all tracking needs. Starlink used to be usable as a backup GPS source through an optional Signal K plugin. Starlink no longer shares its position with the local network, so that no longer works. If your usual GPS disappears when the instruments are switched off, fit a USB GPS receiver to the monitoring device instead. > [!NEXT] > Once your device is linked, go to [Check that it is working](https://saillogger.com/docs/check-your-connection.md) to confirm data is really arriving. --- # Check that it is working Source: https://saillogger.com/docs/check-your-connection/ Where to look to confirm your boat's data is arriving, what each status means, and what to expect over your first days. You have linked a device. Now confirm it is really sending, and learn what the first days are supposed to look like so you do not chase a problem that is not there. Almost everything on this page is read from one screen, and knowing that screen well is the difference between a five-minute check and an afternoon of guessing. ## The health panel: Settings, Boat Open **Settings** > **Boat**: [saillogger.com/settings/?tab=boat](https://saillogger.com/settings/?tab=boat). This is the health panel for your connection. (The older `/boats/` address now redirects here, so an old bookmark still works.) It shows these rows: | Row | What it tells you | | --- | --- | | **Name** | Your boat's name, as sent by Signal K. | | **Status** | The headline verdict, with a colour and a sentence. See below. | | **Photo** | Your boat's photo, used across the site and in e-mails. | | **Type** | Sailboat, motorboat and so on. | | **MMSI** | Your MMSI, as sent by Signal K. | | **Make & Model** | Your boat's make and model. | | **Integration Type** | Which of the three paths this boat uses. | | **Collector ID** | The credential your device sends with. | | **Plugin Version** | The Saillogger plugin version your device is running. | | **Monitoring Device** | The hardware Saillogger sees, for example a Victron GX. | | **Last Contact** | How long ago data last arrived. | **Last Contact** and **Status** are the two you will come back to. **Plugin Version** matters when a feature described in this guide is missing from your account: an old plugin is a common reason. ## What each status means **Status** is one of six things. The exact wording of each is below, because the difference between two of them is easy to miss. | Status | Colour | What it means | | --- | --- | --- | | **Not Linked** | Red | "Your boat is not configured for Saillogger yet". No device has ever sent data with your Collector ID. | | **Offline** | Yellow | "Your boat has been offline since ... but it is configured for Saillogger, things should be fine when she comes back online". | | **No GPS positions** | Red | The device is reaching the Internet, but it is sending no position at all. | | **Online** | Green | "Your boat is online". Everything is working. | | **Online** | Yellow | "Your boat is online but we have not received enough information for trip logging yet. This should auto-resolve in a few hours." | | **Paused** | Red | Collection has stopped because the subscription is not active. | Three of these are worth dwelling on: **Offline is usually fine.** It means Saillogger has not heard from the device recently, which is what happens every time you switch the boat off. Your cached data is still aboard and uploads when the boat next gets online. Offline is only a problem if you expected the boat to be connected right now. **Online in yellow is not an error.** It means data is arriving but not yet enough of the right kind for trip logging. It sorts itself out within a few hours, so there is nothing for you to do but let it. **No GPS positions in red is the one to act on.** The device found the Internet, so your Collector ID and your network are fine, but nothing is giving it a position. That is nearly always the boat's instruments being switched off, since the GPS usually comes from the chartplotter or the AIS transceiver. ## What "Online" actually measures **Online** means data arrived recently, not that the boat is connected this very second. A device with Internet reports continuously, so a healthy boat clears that bar with room to spare. The consequence worth knowing is that the status lags reality by a few minutes: a boat that has just lost its connection still reads **Online** for a short while. That is why **Last Contact** is worth reading alongside the status rather than instead of it. The status tells you the state, **Last Contact** tells you how current that state is. ## A GPS position is required This is the single requirement boaters most often miss: a GPS position is required for both monitoring and trip logging. Not merely helpful, required. A device with a perfect Internet connection and no position logs nothing at all, and the boat is treated as offline. If your GPS comes from the chartplotter, then switching the instruments off at the end of the day switches your logging off too. That is normal, and it is why this page asks you twice to leave things running after you arrive. ## Checking from the Signal K side If you have a Signal K server (that includes a Victron GX), its dashboard shows a status line for the Saillogger plugin that looks like this: ``` 3 entries in the local cache, last connection to the server was 2 minutes ago. ``` Read the two halves together, in this order: - **The last connection** is the one that matters. On a boat with Internet it should be recent, minutes rather than hours. If it keeps growing, the uploads are not getting through. - **The local cache** is data held aboard waiting to upload. It drains as soon as an upload succeeds, so on a connected boat a low number is exactly right, and zero is not a fault: it means everything collected has already been sent. The cache is only worth worrying about when it does not move while the boat is offline. A cache that grows while you have no Internet is a good sign, since data is being collected and will arrive when you reconnect. A cache stuck at the same number means nothing is being collected, usually because there is no GPS or no NMEA readings. ## What to expect in your first days The order things appear in surprises people, so here it is: 1. **Data starts arriving.** Within minutes of linking, **Last Contact** starts updating and **Status** goes to **Online**. 2. **Monitoring populates.** The monitoring page begins showing what your instruments report. If you have a Victron GX or Signal K, expect gauges. With PredictWind, expect position only. 3. **Your first trip appears about an hour after you arrive.** Not while you are underway, and not the moment you tie up. Saillogger waits to be sure the trip has ended before writing it up. 4. **The logbook and journal start filling.** Each subsequent passage adds a log, and the moorages and stays between them build up as you cruise. > [!IMPORTANT] > Your first trip appears about an hour after you arrive, and only while the device stays powered and online. If you shut everything down the moment the anchor is set, the trip cannot be finalised. Leave the monitoring device and instruments running after you arrive. If the device was switched off at arrival and the trip never appeared, it is not lost. Power the device on again where you are, leave it for a while, and the trip completes on the next position report. ## Before you leave the boat A short habit that prevents most of the problems boaters write in about: - Leave the monitoring device powered and the instruments on for a while after you arrive, so the trip can finalise. - Check **Status** reads **Online** in green before you go. - If you want to watch the boat while you are away, leave her Internet connection up. Without it, monitoring shows only the last data received. If you shut everything down as you leave, that is a legitimate way to use Saillogger: your trips are logged, they just take longer to appear, and there is no live monitoring while you are gone. ## If nothing arrives after an hour Work through these in order: 1. **Is the device powered and online?** Confirm at the device itself, not from ashore. 2. **Is the Collector ID correct?** Compare it character by character with the **Collector ID** row in **Settings** > **Boat**. A trailing space counts as wrong. 3. **Is a GPS source set in the plugin?** It should be empty unless you deliberately set one. A wrong value here makes Saillogger ignore every position, and the symptom is exactly this: nothing logged. 4. **Are the boat electronics and the GPS switched on?** The monitoring device sees a position only if something on the network is producing one. 5. **Restart the Signal K server.** A restart clears a surprising number of problems, and it is the last cheap thing to try before you start digging. If you get through all five and **Status** is still not green, [Troubleshooting](https://saillogger.com/docs/troubleshooting.md) goes deeper, and the [community forum](https://community.saillogger.com) has boaters who have met most setups. ## If monitoring works but no trips are logged If the monitoring page is showing live values and yet no trips ever appear, that is a different problem from the one above, and the checklist you just worked through will not fix it. Your device is clearly online and sending. Something about the positions themselves is the issue. Go to [Troubleshooting](https://saillogger.com/docs/troubleshooting.md), which covers this case specifically. > [!NEXT] > Read [How trips are logged](https://saillogger.com/docs/automatic-trip-logging.md) to understand how Saillogger decides a trip started and ended. --- # How trips are logged Source: https://saillogger.com/docs/automatic-trip-logging/ Saillogger decides on its own when a trip started and ended. This is exactly how it decides, what a finished trip records, and why your last trip is sometimes missing. There is no start button. You never tell Saillogger you are leaving, and you never tell it you have arrived. It watches the positions your boat sends and works out the rest. That is the whole design, and once you know the rules it follows, almost every surprise about the logbook stops being a surprise. ## Nothing happens the instant you move Saillogger reads the positions your boat has uploaded and works out, a little after the fact, whether a trip started, whether an open trip has ended, and whether a moorage or a stay needs creating. So do not expect your logbook to change the moment you slip your lines. It catches up shortly afterwards, on its own. ## When Saillogger decides a trip has started Saillogger opens a trip when your boat is genuinely under way: moving steadily for a sustained stretch, and with real distance covered to show for it. It takes all of that together, which is what keeps your logbook clean. A boat swinging on her hook reports a knot of speed all night, and a boat ranging on a dock line does much the same. A brief burst of speed, or speed that never adds up to any distance, is not a departure, so it never becomes a trip. ## When Saillogger decides a trip has ended A trip ends when your boat has stayed put for about an hour. The arrival recorded is the moment you actually stopped, not the hour later when Saillogger became sure of it, and time spent sitting still at the end is not added to your passage. A trip also closes on its own if your device stops sending and the boat has not moved since. Shutting everything down on arrival does not leave a trip open indefinitely. > [!NOTE] > A boat that goes dark **while moving** is deliberately left open. That is an offshore passage out of coverage, buffering its track to upload when you get a connection again, and closing the trip would split your passage in two. ## When your trip appears A finished trip normally appears about **an hour after you arrive**, and only if the monitoring device stays powered and online after you arrive. That second half is the part that catches people. Saillogger needs positions arriving during that hour to confirm the boat has not moved. If the device goes off the moment the anchor is set, there are no positions, so nothing confirms anything, and the trip stays open. > [!IMPORTANT] > Powering the monitoring device off the moment you tie up is the single most common reason a last trip is missing. Nothing is lost. The trip completes on the next position report from the same place, so it appears when the device is back online. The habit worth building: leave the monitoring device and the instruments running for 10 to 15 minutes after you arrive, ideally an hour. On most boats the GPS comes from the chartplotter or the AIS transceiver, so switching the instruments off switches your logging off with them. If a trip is genuinely stuck, [Check that it is working](https://saillogger.com/docs/check-your-connection.md) shows you where to read your boat's status, and [Troubleshooting](https://saillogger.com/docs/troubleshooting.md) covers the case where trips never appear at all. ## A stop of about an hour ends a trip Because of the rule above, a long lunch stop gives you two trips rather than one. That is Saillogger working as intended: it logs what your boat did, and your boat did stop. The same principle answers three things boaters often ask us for: - **Merging trips.** An out-and-back stays two trips. We would rather keep each leg as it happened than stitch them into a passage you did not sail in one go. - **Splitting a trip.** A trip is kept whole, exactly as your boat sailed it. - **Adding a trip by hand.** Logs are built from your boat's own tracking data, so a passage made with the system switched off has nothing to build from. Anything you could type in would be a guess, and your logbook is more valuable when everything in it is real. The one-hour rule runs through everything downstream, so your stays, moorages, statistics and summaries all rest on it. That is why it is not a setting. If you have a track from elsewhere you would like added, see the import note in [Your logbook](https://saillogger.com/docs/your-logbook.md). It is an e-mail to a human rather than a button, and it works in narrow circumstances, but do ask. ## What a finished trip records Every saved trip carries: | What | Notes | | --- | --- | | The track | Every position, sampled more densely at speed and through turns | | Start and end moorage | Created automatically, see below | | A name | Automatically `From to `, and you can change it | | Start and end time | Local time, trimmed to when you actually moved and stopped | | Distance | In your preferred distance unit | | Average and maximum speed | | | Wind | Average and maximum, when your boat reports wind | | Engine hours | Start, usage and finish, when the engine reports them over NMEA 2000 | | A map image | Used in e-mails and previews | | A notification | In your feed, and by e-mail if you have that switched on | Reading and editing all of this is covered in [Your logbook](https://saillogger.com/docs/your-logbook.md). ## Moorages: how a place gets into your logbook A **moorage** is a place your trips start and end. You never create one. The first time a trip starts or ends somewhere new, Saillogger adds that moorage for you and names it from its own place lookup. Arrive anywhere near it again and the visit joins the moorage you already have. That is worth knowing before it surprises you: **two stops close to each other are the same moorage**. A harbour with an anchorage on one side, a mooring field in the middle and two marinas along the wall is very likely one moorage in your logbook, at roughly the scale a boater would name a place. What you can do is label each visit differently. Every stay carries its own type, so the week on the anchor and the weekend on the marina wall read correctly even though they share a moorage. That is set on the stays page, and covered in [Your logbook](https://saillogger.com/docs/your-logbook.md). You can also rename a moorage, set a default stay type for it, and mark it as your home port. Same page. ## Stays: the time between two trips A **stay** is the visit between an arriving trip and the next departing trip at the same moorage. Like everything else here, stays are created for you. A stay's duration is counted in whole days, rounded to the nearest one. So two days and fourteen hours reads as a three day stay, and two days and six hours reads as a two day stay. Stays are named automatically, in these shapes: - `3 days stay at in ` - `1 day stay at in ` - `Short stay at in ` for a visit under a day You can rename any of them, and clearing the name brings the automatic one back. ## Sailing and motoring For sailboats, a trip also shows how long you sailed and how long you motored, in hours and as a percentage. Saillogger works this out from when the engine was actually running, so there is nothing to switch on and off as you go. It is computed only when both of these hold: - Your boat's **Type** in **Settings** > **Boat** is **Monohull sailboat** or **Sailing catamaran**. (If you have left **Type** unset, an AIS sailing vessel type also counts.) - Your engine reports data over NMEA 2000, so Saillogger can tell when it was running. If the breakdown is missing from your trips, the boat type is the first thing to check: [saillogger.com/settings/?tab=boat](https://saillogger.com/settings/?tab=boat). ## Trips that should not exist If you find trips of zero miles and a minute or two while the boat sits at the dock, or the same passage logged twice, the cause is almost always an extra, unreliable GPS source. When two sources report slightly different positions for the same boat, the difference between them looks exactly like movement. The good news is that this is fixable, and the fix is at the boat rather than in the logbook. You have two ways to go about it: point Saillogger at your one reliable GPS source in the plugin, or set your source priorities in Signal K so that the good source always wins. [Troubleshooting](https://saillogger.com/docs/troubleshooting.md) walks you through both, including how to find the exact source name safely, since a wrong one stops logging altogether. Once that is settled, you can tidy up what was already logged. On the trip page, the red trash button at the bottom of the panel removes a junk trip entirely, and if it is only one wild position spoiling an otherwise good track, you can delete that single point from the map instead. Both are covered in [Your logbook](https://saillogger.com/docs/your-logbook.md). > [!WARNING] > Deleting a trip also deletes any stay bounded by it. That is usually what you want when you are clearing out fake dock trips, but it is permanent. ## If a trip is missing Work through these in order: 1. **Wait an hour**, with the monitoring device powered and online. Most "missing" trips are not finished yet. 2. **If the device was switched off when you arrived**, power it on again where you are and leave it for 5 to 15 minutes. The trip completes on the next position report. 3. **Check positions are really arriving**, not just that the device has Internet. Being online and reporting positions are two different things. **Settings** > **Boat** shows both, and [Check that it is working](https://saillogger.com/docs/check-your-connection.md) explains what you are reading. 4. **Check the clocks agree** between your chartplotter and your monitoring device, including daylight saving. A mismatch produces out-of-order or future-dated positions, and those break trip detection. 5. **If the departure was never detected at all**, so there is no trip and never was, write to [info@saillogger.com](mailto:info@saillogger.com) with the date and your boat name. Missing starts have been repaired from the server side before. > [!NEXT] > Now read [Your logbook](https://saillogger.com/docs/your-logbook.md) to browse your trips, tidy up the ones that need it, and export the lot. --- # Your logbook Source: https://saillogger.com/docs/your-logbook/ Browse and read your trips, rename them, delete a bad position or a whole trip, curate your moorages and stays, and export everything as CSV or GPX. Saillogger writes your logbook for you. This page is about everything you do afterwards: reading a trip properly, giving it a name people recognise, throwing out the fake trips your GPS invented, tidying your moorages once so they stay tidy, and getting the whole lot out as a file. If you have not read [How trips are logged](https://saillogger.com/docs/automatic-trip-logging.md) yet, start there. It explains why a trip exists, and this page assumes you know. ## Browsing your logbook Your logbook is at [saillogger.com/logs/](https://saillogger.com/logs/), headed **Logbook for ``**. ![The logbook list, with one row per trip](https://assets.saillogger.com/static/docs/logbook-list.png "Every trip Saillogger has logged, newest first.") One row per trip, newest first, 25 rows to a page. Every column heading is a link that sorts by that column: | Column | What it holds | | --- | --- | | **Name** | The trip name, automatic or yours | | **From** | The moorage you left | | **To** | The moorage you arrived at | | **Started** | Departure, in local time | | **Ended** | Arrival, in local time | | **Distance** | In your preferred distance unit | | **Duration** | Time under way | There is an **Export** action at the top of the page. That is covered further down. The classic logbook has no search box. If you want to search, use the modern app: [saillogger.com/app/logbook](https://saillogger.com/app/logbook) has a **Search trips** box that matches the trip name and both moorage names, so typing a place name finds every trip that touched it. ## Reading a trip Click any row, or go straight to `https://saillogger.com/log/`. ![A trip page with the track on the map and the detail panel open](https://assets.saillogger.com/static/docs/log-detail.png "A trip page. The panel on the left holds everything Saillogger recorded.") A trip page is a full-screen map with your track on it. Two controls sit on top of it: - the **hamburger** at the top left, which slides the detail panel in and out - the **share** button on the right, covered in [Share your boat](https://saillogger.com/docs/share-your-boat.md) The panel is where everything lives. Not every row appears on every trip: a row is there when Saillogger has something to put in it. | Panel row | What it shows | | --- | --- | | **TRIP** | The trip name. This one is editable, see below | | **DEPARTED** | The moorage you left, and the local time | | **ARRIVED** | The moorage you arrived at, and the local time | | **DISTANCE / DURATION** | How far and how long, followed by a **Play timelapse** link | | **SAILING / MOTORING** | Hours and percentage of each. Sailboats with engine data only | | **SPEED AVG / MAX** | Average and maximum boat speed | | **WIND AVG / MAX** | Average and maximum wind speed | | **ENGINE** | Engine hours as **START**, **USAGE** and **FINISH** | | **PORT ENGINE** / **STARBOARD ENGINE** | The same three figures per engine on twin-engine boats, in place of **ENGINE** | | **ADDITIONAL DATA (MIN / MAX)** | The lowest and highest reading of every custom value you monitor, for this trip. Yours only, and collapsed until you click it | | **NOTES** | Your notes on the trip, in a rich text editor | **ADDITIONAL DATA** is the quietly useful one. If you have built monitoring sections for your tanks, batteries or engine, each trip carries their range. See [Make Saillogger yours](https://saillogger.com/docs/customise-saillogger.md) for how to add them. ## Renaming a trip Automatic names are honest but not always recognisable: `From Barhau to Bantam` may be two places you have never called that. Rename the trip before you share it. 1. Open the trip and slide the panel out. 2. Click into the **TRIP** field and type the name you want. 3. Click away from the field. The page reloads with the new name. To go back, clear the field and click away. An empty name brings the automatic `From X to Y` name back. ## Writing notes on a trip The **NOTES** box at the bottom of the panel is a rich text editor: bold, italic, lists and links. Write what happened, then click the blue save button next to it. Nothing saves on its own. Notes attached to individual positions are a different thing, and often the better one. They are covered below and in [Notes, photos and your journal](https://saillogger.com/docs/journal-and-notes.md). ## Deleting one bad position A single wild GPS fix can add miles to a trip and wreck its maximum speed. You can delete it without touching the rest of the trip. 1. On the trip page, click the boat marker at the bad position. A popup opens with the time, boat speed, wind speed and position. 2. Click the red trash button in the popup. 3. Confirm. The point is gone. Saillogger then recalculates that trip: distance, average and maximum speed, maximum wind, and the start and end times all come back correct. Use this for a handful of spikes. If the whole track is a mess of zigzags, deleting points one at a time is not the answer: delete the trip. > [!NOTE] > A thoroughly garbled track cannot be repaired, by you or by anyone else. If a GPS failure turned a 210 mile passage into 1,800 miles of back and forth, the usable data is not in there any more. Delete it and fix the source, as described in [Troubleshooting](https://saillogger.com/docs/troubleshooting.md). ## Adding a note to a position The same popup has a **Notes** box. Click a marker anywhere along the track, write your note, save it. This is how you add the note you meant to write at the time. Notes on positions show up in the timelapse and in your journal, at the point on the track where you put them. ## Deleting a whole trip The red trash button at the bottom of the trip panel deletes the trip. It warns you first: *"This will permanently delete the Log Entry and any associated Stays."* > [!WARNING] > Read that second half. Any stay bounded by that trip goes with it. If you delete the passage that brought you into a harbour, the record of the fortnight you then spent there goes too. There is no undo. Deleting is the right move for the zero-mile trips a flaky GPS invents at the dock. It is the wrong move for a real trip with a few bad points in it. ## Classic and modern Every editing control on this page is on the classic trip page. In the modern app a trip page is read-only: it shows the same figures, and offers a **Classic view** link that takes you to the page where you can edit, delete or share. ## Moorages A **moorage** is a place your trips start and end. Saillogger creates them, one per place, and reuses them forever. Curating a moorage is a one-off job that pays back on every future visit. - Map of all of them: [saillogger.com/moorages/map/](https://saillogger.com/moorages/map/) - List of all of them: [saillogger.com/moorages/](https://saillogger.com/moorages/) The list is headed **Moorages of ``** and has a column for the **Default Stay** type, the **Total Stay** you have spent there and the number of **Arrivals & Departures**. Open one, and its page gives you: | Control | What it does | | --- | --- | | **Preferred Name** | What you call this place. Used wherever the moorage is shown, and on every future visit | | **Default Stay Type** | The type new stays here get, so you classify a place once rather than per visit | | **Home** | Marks this as a home port. This is the only place a home port is set, which is why people cannot find it in **Settings** | | **Total Duration of Stay** | Read-only, in days | | **Number of Arrivals & Departures** | Read-only | | **Notes** | Anything you want to remember about the place | Renaming keeps the original name internally, so nothing is lost. Titles of trips that already exist keep the old name, because those were written when the trip was logged. Rename the trips you care about, as above. > [!WARNING] > **Delete Moorage** at the bottom of the page is the most destructive button in your logbook. It removes the moorage **and every log and stay attached to it**, including trips that merely ended there. Use it only for a moorage created in the wrong place by a bad position, and expect to lose those trips. Remember from [How trips are logged](https://saillogger.com/docs/automatic-trip-logging.md) that nearby stops share a moorage, so one harbour cannot be split into an anchorage and a marina. What you can do instead is label each visit, which is exactly what stays are for. ## Stays A **stay** is your visit between arriving and leaving again. Your stays are at [saillogger.com/stays/](https://saillogger.com/stays/), headed **Moorage History of ``**. Columns: **Name**, **Moorage**, **Arrived**, **Departed**, **Stayed at**, **Duration**. **Stayed at** is a dropdown you can change right there in the list, without opening anything. It holds the four built-in types under **Built-in**: - **Unknown** - **Anchor** - **Mooring Buoy** - **Dock** If you have made your own stay types (Yacht Club, Guest Dock, Raft-Up, Haulout, whatever you need) they appear below those under **Your types**. Creating them is covered in [Make Saillogger yours](https://saillogger.com/docs/customise-saillogger.md). This dropdown is the answer to the one-moorage-per-harbour limit. Three visits to the same place can read anchor, mooring buoy and dock. Open a stay and you also get **Max Wind**, if wind was recorded while you were there, and a **Notes** box. There is no delete button on a stay, by design. A stay is the gap between two trips, so it exists as long as they do. It disappears when one of its trips is deleted, or when its moorage is. ## Exporting Four exports, in four places. All of them cover your own boat and there is nothing extra to buy. Your running totals across all of these trips are in [Statistics and badges](https://saillogger.com/docs/statistics-and-badges.md). | Where | Button | You get | | --- | --- | --- | | [Logbook](https://saillogger.com/logs/) | **Export** | A CSV of every trip | | [Stays](https://saillogger.com/stays/) | **Export** | A CSV of every stay | | [Moorages](https://saillogger.com/moorages/) | **Export** | A GPX of every moorage, as waypoints | | [saillogger.com/timelapse/export/](https://saillogger.com/timelapse/export/) | **Export** | A GPX of your tracks | The two CSV exports are one click and a download, and you can bookmark them directly at `https://saillogger.com/logs/export/` and `https://saillogger.com/stays/export/`. Use the **Export** link on the moorages page rather than its address, because opening `https://saillogger.com/moorages/export/` yourself shows the GPX in the browser instead of saving it. The track export is the one with choices on it. The page is headed **Export Tracks** and offers: - **Choose Trips**, a switch. Leave it off for everything; turn it on to pick a **Start Trip** and an **End Trip** and export that range. - **Granularity**, which sets how far apart exported positions have to be. Coarser means a much smaller file. | Granularity | Minimum spacing | | --- | --- | | **Extremely Granular** | Every position, nothing dropped | | **Very Granular** | 0.3 nautical miles | | **Granular** | 0.6 nautical miles | | **Normal** | 1 nautical mile | | **Coarse** | 3 nautical miles | | **Very Coarse** | 6 nautical miles | | **Extremely Coarse** | 15 nautical miles | **Normal** is preselected. The page shows only the words, not the distances, so keep this table if you are matching a file size. > [!TIP] > Pick **Extremely Granular** if you are feeding the file to another chart program and want your real track. Pick something coarse if you want a tidy overview line for a blog or a map print. ## Importing There is no self-service import, but that does not always mean the answer is no. GPX tracks or PredictWind history can sometimes be brought in by hand at our end, but only in narrow circumstances: it works if **nothing newer has been logged since** the gap you are filling. Saillogger keeps a running state of your boat, and inserting old data underneath newer data corrupts it. So if you have a passage you would like recovered, do write to [info@saillogger.com](mailto:info@saillogger.com) with the file attached and the dates it covers, and we will tell you whether it can be done. It is worth asking early, while the gap is still the newest thing in your logbook, because that is when the answer is most likely to be yes. Trips made with the system switched off are a different matter: logs are built from tracking data, so there is nothing to reconstruct a passage from, and no way to type one in afterwards. > [!NEXT] > Read [Watch your boat live](https://saillogger.com/docs/live-monitoring.md) for the other half of the picture: what your boat is doing right now. --- # Watch your boat live Source: https://saillogger.com/docs/live-monitoring/ Read your live monitoring page: what each gauge means, what the buttons do, the anchor circle, geofences, map layers, and the setting that draws your track. Your live page is the boat as it is right now: where it sits, what it is doing, and every reading it sends. This page explains what you are looking at, why a value is sometimes blank, and what each button does. ## Open your live page Open the **monitoring** menu in the top navigation and choose **realtime tracker**. The page lives under `https://saillogger.com/monitor/`. Once **Live Tracking & Monitoring** is on in your Sharing settings, Saillogger sends you on to your boat's public address, which is the same page at the address you can give to other people. The page keeps itself current: your readings, the AIS traffic your own receiver hears, and the **AIS Fleet**, **Friends** and fleet layers all refresh on their own every minute or so. Leave it open and you never need to reload it. ![The live monitoring page with the boat on the chart and the gauges panel open](https://assets.saillogger.com/static/docs/monitoring.webp "The live page. Sections appear only for readings your boat actually sends.") ## The gauges The panel down the side is built from what your boat actually reports. A section your boat does not send is hidden, not shown empty. That is why two boats can have quite different panels, and why a section can appear the day you add a sensor. - **Wind & Depth** shows wind speed with a direction arrow, and depth. When Saillogger has a figure for the last hour it adds a `1h Max` caption underneath. - **Temperature** shows outside, inside and water temperature. Each one appears only if you have a source for it. - **Humidity** shows inside and outside humidity. - **Battery** is an arc for state of charge with the voltage printed in the middle. This is your main or house battery. - **Barometer** shows the current pressure. Its trend line is different: it needs a few hours of readings behind it before it can draw anything, so a newly connected boat sees the number before it sees the line. - Any **custom sections** you have built yourself appear below these. Each section heading is a link into the history charts for that reading. ### The wind arrow points where the wind is going The arrow shows the direction the wind is blowing **toward**, not where it comes from. An arrow pointing south means a northerly. This trips people up, because weather charts and wind barbs use the opposite convention. It is worth reading the arrow twice the first few times. ### Where wind direction comes from The wind arrow uses the Signal K path `environment.wind.directionTrue`. Most NMEA 2000 networks do not carry it: instruments broadcast apparent wind, and true direction has to be calculated. The Signal K **derived-data** plugin ([github.com/SignalK/signalk-derived-data](https://github.com/SignalK/signalk-derived-data)) does that calculation. Installing it is not enough, you have to enable **True Wind Angle, Direction and Speed** in its configuration, and it needs heading and speed through water to work from. > [!TIP] > If your wind gauge shows a speed but no arrow, true wind direction is the missing piece, not Saillogger. ### Why a value is blank rather than wrong Saillogger discards readings that arrive stale. A sensor that reports too rarely, or one whose source has quietly stopped, produces a blank rather than a number left over from an hour ago. A blank is Saillogger telling you it does not currently know, which is more useful at sea than a stale figure. ## The buttons down the right side These are icon-only, and only you see them. Some appear and disappear with the state of the boat, which is deliberate: a button that cannot do anything useful right now is not shown. - **Pencil**: add a note at the boat's current position. Only while underway, and only while no geofence is set. The note lands on the track where you wrote it and stays there in the finished trip. - **Anchor**: draw a geofence while you are stopped, or clear one. Once a geofence exists the icon stays available while underway, so you can always clear it. - **Book**: open the notes panel, which lists every note and photo of this cruise. It appears once **Initial Tracking Position** is set (see below). - **Camera**: upload a photo of where you are now. Only while underway. - **Flag**: set or clear a destination. Only while underway. - **Share**: send someone the link to this page. ## The anchor circle and the yellow line If a circle appears around your boat when you are anchored, it is **your boat's own anchor alarm**, not a Saillogger feature. Saillogger reads the anchor position and radius your boat publishes on Signal K as `navigation.anchor` and draws them. Change the radius on the boat and the circle changes here. Saillogger draws one thing of its own while you are stopped: a thin yellow line through the positions recorded since you stopped, so you can see how the boat has swung. It covers the last day, so a boat sitting in a marina for a week shows you recent swinging rather than a scribble of the whole stay. ## Geofencing A geofence is an area you draw on the map. If the boat leaves it, Saillogger sends you an alert. > [!WARNING] > Saillogger's own warning, which you have to accept before drawing one, is worth repeating in full: geofencing is not a substitute for a dedicated anchor alarm and must not be used as such. While Saillogger can notify you if your boat goes outside of set boundaries, it may be error-prone and should not be relied on for critical functionality. Use at your own risk. To set one: 1. Make sure the boat is stopped. A geofence cannot be set while you are underway. 2. Click the **anchor** icon on the right of the map. 3. Read the warning and accept it. 4. The map shows: **Click at least three points on the map to create an area to geofence**. Click your points. 5. After the third point the tip changes to **Click on the first point to close the geofence**. Click your first point again to close the shape. The area appears as a red outline. The area must contain your boat's current position, so draw it around the boat rather than beside it. To clear it, click the same icon again and confirm. If the boat leaves the area, the alert reads `ALERT: has left the designated geofence!` and is delivered through whatever you have turned on under **Monitoring Alerts** in your notification settings. If you have turned phone notifications off, Saillogger warns you about that when you set the fence. Geofencing is on the classic monitoring page only. ### If it does not work - The anchor icon is missing: you are underway and no geofence is set. A new geofence can only be drawn when the boat is stopped. - Nothing happens when you click: the shape only closes when you click within a short distance of your **first** point, and only after at least three points. - No alert arrived: check **Monitoring Alerts** in your notification settings, and check that phone notifications are on if you expected a push. ## Set a destination While underway, click the **flag** icon and then click the map. Saillogger names the point and marks it with a checkered flag. Your boat's popup then carries a **Destination** row with the name and the distance still to run, which updates as you go. Click the flag again to clear it. ## Map layers Open the layer control on the map. You get three base maps and a set of overlays. The overlays are yours alone: visitors to your public page never see which layers you have on, or the fleets and friends they name. Base maps: - **Satellite Overlay**, the default, satellite imagery with place names and roads drawn over it - **Satellite**, imagery on its own - **Street Map** Overlays: | Layer | Colour | On by default | What it holds | | --- | --- | --- | --- | | **Local AIS traffic** | magenta | yes | Only what your own AIS receiver can hear | | **AIS Fleet** | rose | no | Worldwide AIS, limited to the part of the map you are looking at and capped at 500 vessels | | **Friends** | green | yes | Boats you follow | | One row per fleet | one colour each | yes | The members of that fleet | Each row carries a live count of what is on the map. A layer with nothing in it is dimmed rather than hidden, so "why can I not see my friends" has a visible answer: **Friends 0**. When the **AIS Fleet** layer comes back full it reads **500+** rather than pretending 500 is the whole picture. **Local AIS traffic** and **AIS Fleet** overlap: a vessel your receiver hears is usually in the worldwide database too. Where they disagree it is because your receiver hears something the database has not seen recently, or the other way round. ## Wikipedia points of interest Saillogger shows a handful of Wikipedia places near the boat, each with a short extract from the article. It is on by default. To turn it off, open **Settings**, go to **Monitoring & Tracking**, and switch off **Wikipedia Points of Interest**. ## Your track, and the one setting that draws it This is the setting people spend the most time confused by, so it gets its own section. Your live page can draw the whole cruise behind you, not just the current trip. It does that from one setting: **Settings** > **Monitoring & Tracking** > **Initial Tracking Position**. You pick a trip, and Saillogger draws everything from that trip onward. With nothing chosen: - there is no historical track on the live page, only the trip you are on - there is no **Cruise Dist.** row in the boat popup - the notes panel and the journal are **empty**, even though your notes and photos are safely stored That last one is the part that alarms people. A blank journal almost never means lost data. It means Saillogger has not been told where your cruise starts, so it has no range of trips to collect notes from. Saillogger normally sets this for you after your first trip, so a blank one usually means a new account, or one where the setting was cleared. To set it: 1. Open [saillogger.com/settings/?tab=monitoring](https://saillogger.com/settings/?tab=monitoring). 2. Find **Initial Tracking Position** at the top of **Monitoring & Tracking**. 3. Choose the trip your cruise starts with. Choose the oldest trip in the list to draw your entire history. 4. Reopen your live page. Your track, your cruise distance and your notes panel are all there. To clear it again, choose the blank entry at the very top of the same dropdown. That blank entry is easy to miss: it is part of the list, above the first trip. > [!NOTE] > This setting scopes what is drawn and collected. It never deletes anything. Change it as often as you like, for instance at the start of each season. ## What the boat popup tells you Click your boat to open it. The rows you see depend on what the boat is doing: - **Updated**, how long ago the position came in - **Make & Model**, if you have set them on your Boat settings page - **Position** - **Status**, the navigation status Then, while underway: - **Departed**, how long ago you left - **Trip Dist.**, distance run on this trip - **Wind Speed** - **Boat Speed** - **Destination**, with distance to go, if you have set one And when stopped: - **Arrived**, how long ago you got in A **Cruise Dist.** row appears whenever **Initial Tracking Position** is set, and counts the whole cruise rather than the current trip. ## History charts The gauges show now. For the last day or the last week, choose **history** from the **monitoring** menu, click any gauge section heading, or go straight to [saillogger.com/monitor/history/](https://saillogger.com/monitor/history/). You can look at **24 hours**, **48 hours** or **7 days**, and every reading Saillogger records for you is charted, including your own custom sections. If your boat is on the modern app, the same charts are at `/app/history`. > [!NOTE] > A gap in a history chart means readings were missing over that period, usually because the boat or a sensor was off. The chart corrects itself once the readings come back. > [!NEXT] > Notes and photos turn the live page into a record you can keep and share: see [Notes, photos and your journal](https://saillogger.com/docs/journal-and-notes.md). --- # Notes, photos and your journal Source: https://saillogger.com/docs/journal-and-notes/ Write notes and add photos as you go, then read, print and share them as a journal, and fix the blank journal that catches almost everyone. Saillogger records where you went on its own. The notes and photos are the part only you can add, and they are what turns a set of tracks into something worth reading later. Everything you write is pinned to the position you wrote it at, so it comes back on the map, in the trip, in the journal and in a timelapse. ## Three ways to write a note - **The pencil on the live page**, while underway. This is the one to reach for at sea: the note lands on the boat's current position, so it is anchored to the place and the moment. - **The notes panel**, from the book icon on the live page. Open an entry and edit it. Use this to tidy up something you typed one-handed, or to add to a stay. - **A position marker in a finished trip**. Open the trip, click one of the little boat icons along the track, and type into the **Notes** box in the popup. This is how you add a note after the event, at the right place. There is no wrong order. Many boaters write a line or two underway and fill in the details at anchor that evening. ### Where a note ends up You write it once and it appears in four places: - on your live page, as a marker on the track, which anyone following you can open - in the finished trip, on the position it belongs to - in the notes panel and the journal - as a caption in a timelapse, as the boat reaches that point Nothing is copied, so editing it later changes it everywhere. ### A note about a place belongs to that visit Notes and photos you attach to a stop belong to **that stay**, not to the place itself. Come back to the same anchorage next year and you start with a clean entry: last year's note stays with last year's visit, where it makes sense, instead of resurfacing on top of the new one. ## Adding photos Three ways again: - **The camera on the live page**, while underway, for a photo of where you are right now. - **The camera on any entry** in the notes panel, to add a photo to a note you have already written. - **Add photo** in the journal header, which attaches to where the boat is now. Accepted files: `.jpg`, `.jpeg`, `.png`, `.gif`, `.heic` and `.heif`, up to 20 MB each. HEIC and HEIF are what an iPhone produces by default, so you do not have to convert anything. If a photo is too big, Saillogger says: **Photos must be 20 MB or smaller.** Resize it, or send a smaller version from your phone's share sheet. > [!TIP] > Photos upload over whatever connection you have. On a weak link, start the upload and leave the page open rather than tapping again: a second tap while the first is still going is ignored on purpose. ### If a photo will not upload - **"Photos must be 20 MB or smaller."** The file is too big. Most phones offer a smaller size when you share a photo; use that. - **The file is refused before it starts.** Only `.jpg`, `.jpeg`, `.png`, `.gif`, `.heic` and `.heif` are accepted. A video or a PDF is not a photo. - **The upload never finishes.** Saillogger asks you to reload the page, sign in if prompted, and try again. This is usually the connection rather than the photo. ## The notes panel The book icon on the live page opens the notes panel beside the map. It lists this cruise's entries, newest first. Each entry carries an anchor icon if it is a stay and a boat icon if it is a passage, the place, how long ago it was, the text and any photos. Click an entry and the map flies to where it was written and opens its marker. That is the quickest way to answer "where were we when we saw that". Every entry you own carries two small icons: a pencil to edit the text and a camera to add a photo to that entry. Each photo has a bin icon over it to remove it. Editing the text opens a box with **Save**, **Cancel** and **Delete**, so an entry you no longer want can go entirely. The panel is the writing surface next to the boat. For reading, printing and sharing there is a full page, and the two show exactly the same entries: they are built from one place, so they cannot drift apart. ## Your journal The journal is the same collection of entries as a page of its own. Choose **journal** from the **more** menu in the top navigation (it opens in a new tab), or go straight to [saillogger.com/monitor/journal/](https://saillogger.com/monitor/journal/). The older address, `/monitor/logbook/`, still works and sends you here, so old bookmarks and links are safe. ![The journal, one entry per stop and passage](https://assets.saillogger.com/static/docs/journal.webp "The journal collects your notes and photos, newest first.") Across the top: - **New entry**, which writes a note at wherever the boat is now - **Add photo** - **Map**, back to the live page - **Share** - **Print** Each entry shows an anchor icon for a stay or a boat icon for a passage, the place, the time (a finished stay shows a date range rather than a single moment), your text and your photos. Entries are grouped by month, so a long cruise reads in order without you counting dates. As the owner you also get, on each entry, **Edit this entry**, **Add a photo to this entry** and, on each photo, **Delete this photo**. Everyone reading the journal, including visitors, gets **Copy a link to this entry**, so you can point someone straight at one anchorage rather than the whole cruise. **New entry** in the header writes a note at wherever the boat is now, which is the journal's version of the pencil on the map. You do not have to be underway to use it. ### Sharing the journal **Share** always shares the public address of your journal, `https://saillogger.com//journal`, never the private one you are looking at. Whoever you send it to sees the journal without being asked to sign in. The journal has no sharing switch of its own. It is published by the same switch as your live page: **Live Tracking & Monitoring** in the Sharing settings. If that is off, there is nothing public to share and the **Share** action does not appear. ### Printing the journal **Print** opens your browser's print dialog against a print layout, with the navigation and the on-screen controls stripped out. Print from a desktop browser in landscape for the best result: phone browsers are not built for this. Printing to PDF works the same way and is the usual way people keep a season. This page used to be called the printable logbook. Same page, better name. ## A blank journal If your journal shows its heading and nothing else, this is almost always the cause: **Initial Tracking Position** is not set. Your notes and photos are not lost. The journal is built from your trips at or after a chosen starting log, and without that starting log there is no range of trips to collect from. The notes panel and the track behind your boat go empty for the same reason. Setting it takes a minute: [Watch your boat live](https://saillogger.com/docs/live-monitoring.md) has the steps. Saillogger normally sets this for you after your first trip, so a blank journal usually means a new account, or one where the setting was cleared. ### If it still looks empty - You set the starting log to a recent trip: choose an older one. Only trips at or after it are collected. - You have logged no trips yet: notes need a track to attach to. - You are looking at someone else's public journal: it shows only what its owner has written. ## Notes show up in your timelapse A note attached to a position becomes a caption in a timelapse, appearing as the boat reaches that point. This is the main reason to write them while underway rather than afterwards: the note is already at the right place on the track, so the timelapse tells the story on its own. Saillogger thins a timelapse track down for smooth playback, but it never drops a position that carries a note. Whatever you wrote survives, however long the passage. See [Timelapse](https://saillogger.com/docs/timelapse.md). > [!TIP] > A short note at each departure and arrival ("left at first light, fog until 09:00") is worth more later than a long one written weeks afterwards. It also reads well as a caption. > [!NEXT] > Turn a season of tracks and notes into something you can watch: see [Timelapse](https://saillogger.com/docs/timelapse.md). --- # Timelapse Source: https://saillogger.com/docs/timelapse/ Replay a passage or a whole season as an animated track, set it up the way you want, share it as a link, and export it as a video. A timelapse replays your logged tracks as a moving boat on a chart, with moorage names and your own notes appearing as captions along the way. It can be one passage or every mile you have ever logged. You can watch it, share it as a link, or export it as a video file. ![The timelapse player replaying a passage](https://assets.saillogger.com/static/docs/timelapse.webp "A timelapse of one passage. Every option lives in the address, so you can share exactly this view.") ## The four pages Everything lives in the **timelapse** menu in the top navigation. | Menu item | Address | What it is for | | --- | --- | --- | | **timelapse** | under `https://saillogger.com/timelapse/` | Watching | | **customize** | [saillogger.com/timelapse/customize/](https://saillogger.com/timelapse/customize/) | Choosing trips, speed, colour and map | | **videos** | [saillogger.com/timelapse/recordings/](https://saillogger.com/timelapse/recordings/) | Your exported videos | | **export** | [saillogger.com/timelapse/export/](https://saillogger.com/timelapse/export/) | Downloading tracks as GPX | Choose **timelapse** to watch straight away. Everything else starts from the customiser. ## Set one up Open [saillogger.com/timelapse/customize/](https://saillogger.com/timelapse/customize/) and work down the form. - **Choose Trips**: a switch. Leave it off and the timelapse covers your whole logbook. Turn it on and two more fields appear, **Start Trip** and **End Trip**, each a dropdown of your logged trips by date and name. Set both to replay one passage, or a range for a season. - **Base Map**: `Satellite Overlay` (imagery with place names over it), `Satellite` (imagery alone) or `Street Map`. - **Animation Speed**: `Snail Speed`, `Very Slow`, `Slow`, `Normal` (the default), `Fast`, `Very Fast` or `Light Speed`. A single day sail is worth slowing down. An ocean crossing is not. - **Track Color**: Dodger Blue by default, plus Green, Yellow, Red, Orange, Black, Gray and White. Pick something that stands out against the base map you chose: a dark track disappears over deep water. - **Remove Moorage Overlays**: a switch. See captions below. - **Zoom Level**: 5, 6, then 8 to 13, default 10 (7 is not offered). Low numbers show a whole sea area, high numbers stay close to the boat. If your track runs off the edge, come down a number. - **Initial Delay**: `None`, `5 seconds` or `10 seconds`, a pause before the boat starts moving. Useful when you are screen-recording it and need a moment to start. Then press **Play**. > [!TIP] > Every choice you make ends up in the address of the player. That means a timelapse set up exactly the way you like it can be shared, or bookmarked, as a plain link. Copy the address from your browser once it is playing. ### Choosing settings that suit what you are showing | What you are showing | Sensible starting point | | --- | --- | | One day sail | The trip in **Start Trip** and **End Trip**, `Slow`, zoom 12 or 13 | | A week's cruise | The range of trips, `Normal`, zoom 10 or 11 | | A whole season | **Choose Trips** off or a wide range, `Fast`, zoom 8 or 9 | | An ocean passage | The single trip, `Very Fast`, zoom 5 or 6 | If the boat crawls, speed it up. If it disappears off the edge of the map, come down a zoom level. Neither costs anything to try: change it in the customiser and press **Play** again. ### If it does not look right - **The track runs off the map.** Lower the **Zoom Level**. - **Nothing plays.** The chosen range holds no logged trips. Widen it, or switch **Choose Trips** off to use everything. - **The track is hard to see.** Change **Track Color**, or switch the **Base Map** to `Street Map`. - **You want no place names on screen.** Turn on **Remove Moorage Overlays**. ## Captions Two things write captions across a timelapse as the boat passes them: - **Moorage names**, added automatically at the start and end of each trip. Switch **Remove Moorage Overlays** on in the customiser if you would rather have a clean chart. - **Your own notes**, wherever you attached one to a position. These are the ones worth having: they are why a timelapse of a passage reads as a story rather than a line moving across a chart. See [Notes, photos and your journal](https://saillogger.com/docs/journal-and-notes.md). For smooth playback Saillogger thins the track out, keeping a point every so often rather than every fix you sent. Any position carrying a note is always kept, however closely spaced, so no caption is ever lost to the thinning. ## Watching The player has: - **play and pause**, bottom left - a **distance legend** that counts up as the boat runs, in your own distance units - a **share** button - a red **record** button, which only you see ## Export it as a video The red record button turns what you are watching into an MP4 file you can post or keep. 1. Set the timelapse up in the customiser first. Changes you make on the map after playback starts, such as zoom or base map, are not captured in the recording. 2. Press the red button and confirm. Saillogger warns you that the conversion can take a while. 3. Saillogger takes it from there. You do not have to keep the page open. 4. Open **videos** in the **timelapse** menu, or [saillogger.com/timelapse/recordings/](https://saillogger.com/timelapse/recordings/). The page refreshes itself, and the status moves from **Queued** to **Processing** to **Ready for download**. 5. Click **Ready for download** to save the file. > [!WARNING] > Videos are deleted 72 hours after they are made. Download yours as soon as it is ready. Making it again is easy, but nobody wants to discover this the week after a passage. Very long tracks are refused rather than turned into an unusably large file. You get: **This track is too long to export in a reasonably sized video. Please choose a shorter track and try again.** Go back to the customiser and narrow **Start Trip** and **End Trip**. A season usually needs to be exported a leg or two at a time. > [!NOTE] > On an iPhone or iPad, a downloaded MP4 lands in **Files**, not in Photos. Move it across before posting it to social media. ## Share a timelapse The share button hands over the address you are watching, options and all, so the other person sees exactly your version. Sharing needs **Timelapse** switched on in your Sharing settings. If it is off, the button tells you the page is not public and offers **Go to Sharing settings** so you can turn it on. Turning it on publishes your timelapse at your boat's public address; it does not publish anything else. ## Export your tracks as GPX [saillogger.com/timelapse/export/](https://saillogger.com/timelapse/export/) gives you a GPX file for a chosen range of trips. GPX opens in chart plotters and most navigation software, so this is the way to take your tracks somewhere else, or to keep a copy of your own. It works like the customiser: - **Choose Trips**, with **Start Trip** and **End Trip** when it is on. Off means everything you have logged. - **Granularity**: how many points the file holds. `Extremely Granular`, `Very Granular`, `Granular`, `Normal` (the default), `Coarse`, `Very Coarse` or `Extremely Coarse`. Coarser means fewer points and a smaller file. - **Export** to download it. Start at `Normal`. Go finer if you want every wiggle of a harbour approach, and coarser if the file is too big for the device you are loading it onto: some older chart plotters refuse a track with too many points. ## The timelapse in the modern app If your boat is on the modern app, `/app/timelapse` is a smoother player: it scrubs, it has a satellite toggle, and it can follow the boat as it goes rather than holding one fixed view. Recording, the customiser and GPX export stay on the classic pages described above, so use both: set up and export on the classic pages, watch wherever you prefer. > [!NEXT] > Tell Saillogger when to call you about the boat: see [Alerts and notifications](https://saillogger.com/docs/alerts-and-notifications.md). To decide who can see your timelapse in the first place, see [Share your boat](https://saillogger.com/docs/share-your-boat.md). --- # Alerts and notifications Source: https://saillogger.com/docs/alerts-and-notifications/ Set the thresholds that raise an alert for your boat, and choose how each kind of news reaches you. Saillogger keeps this in two separate settings tabs, and readers mix them up constantly. **Alerting** decides *what* raises an alert. **Notifications** decides *how* anything reaches you. If a low battery never reaches you, one of the two is the reason, and the first table below tells you which one to open. ## Which tab do you want | What you want | The tab | | --- | --- | | Be told when the wind gets up or the battery runs low | **Alerting** | | Change the wind speed or battery level that counts as too much | **Alerting** | | Stop an alert firing at all | **Alerting** | | Stop the e-mails about your trips, or get them on your phone as well | **Notifications** | | Turn everything off for a while, then turn it back on | **Notifications** | An alert has to pass both: the threshold on **Alerting** decides that something is worth telling you about, and the row on **Notifications** decides whether that news is sent to your e-mail, your phone, both or neither. --- ## Alerting: what raises an alert Open [https://saillogger.com/settings/?tab=alerting](https://saillogger.com/settings/?tab=alerting), or **Settings**, then the **Alerting** tab. At the top is one master switch, **Alerting**. It is **off** when you start, and while it is off the tab shows nothing else: every threshold is hidden. 1. Turn on **Alerting**. 2. The page reloads and the threshold rows appear, in four groups: **General**, **Weather**, **Temperature** and **Depth & Battery**. 3. Type a number into the rows you care about, and clear the rows you do not. ### The thresholds Every threshold except the first can be switched off by clearing the field. An empty field shows the word `Off`. | Row | It alerts when | Starting value | | --- | --- | --- | | **Min Notification Interval (h)** | Quiet time before the same alert can repeat | 6 | | **Wind Speed** | Wind rises above this | 30 knots | | **Pressure** | Pressure falls below this | 990 hPa | | **Pressure Drop in 12 hours** | Pressure falls this much within 12 hours | 12 hPa | | **Outdoor Temperature** | It falls below this | 3 C | | **Indoor Temperature** | It falls below this | 7 C | | **Water Temperature** | It falls below this | 10 C | | **Water Depth** | Depth falls below this | 1 m | | **Battery Charge** | Charge falls below this | 50% | | **Battery Voltage** | Voltage falls below this | 12.5 V | **Min Notification Interval (h)** is the one row you cannot turn off. It is a whole number of hours, and the lowest it will accept is 1. Leave it at 6 and the same alert will not repeat more than once every six hours, however long the gale lasts. Thresholds are read and written in **your own display units**, whatever you have chosen under **Settings**, then **Units**. If you have set wind in knots and depth in feet, that is what these boxes mean. See [Make Saillogger yours](https://saillogger.com/docs/customise-saillogger.md) for the unit settings. > [!IMPORTANT] > **Leave a threshold empty to turn that alert off.** An empty **Water Depth** does not mean zero and does not mean "warn me at any depth": it means the depth alarm is not armed at all. ### There is no Save button Each field saves on its own the moment you leave it (tap or click somewhere else, or press the done key on a phone). The box flashes green for a moment when the value is stored. If you type something that is not a number, the field is **cleared** and that alert is switched **off**. This is the one thing worth checking every time: after you edit a threshold, look at the field again. If it has gone blank, the alarm you thought you had just set is now off, and typing the value again is the fix. That applies to the nine optional thresholds. **Min Notification Interval (h)** refuses a non-number instead: you get a message and the page reloads with the old value. > [!TIP] > Editing a threshold is tap and type. Tapping the field selects what is in it, so typing "35" over "30" replaces it rather than making "3035". ### If an alert never fires - The **Alerting** master switch is off. Nothing on this tab does anything while it is off. - The threshold is empty. Empty means off, not zero. - Your boat does not report that reading at all. An alert can only fire on a value the boat actually sends. Check on your [live monitoring page](https://saillogger.com/docs/live-monitoring.md) that the reading appears there first. - It already fired inside the quiet period set by **Min Notification Interval (h)**. - The alert fired, but the **Monitoring Alerts** row on the **Notifications** tab has e-mail and phone both switched off, so it had nowhere to go. --- ## Notifications: how anything reaches you Open [https://saillogger.com/settings/?tab=notifications](https://saillogger.com/settings/?tab=notifications), or **Settings**, then the **Notifications** tab. This tab is a grid: six kinds of news down the side, and up to two channels across the top, **E-mail** and **Phone**. Each column has a master switch in its heading, above the individual switches. ### The six kinds of news **About Your Boat** | Row | What it covers | | --- | --- | | **Critical** | When your boat comes online or goes offline | | **Navigation** | New logbook entries, stays, and daily & weekly summaries | | **Monitoring Alerts** | Threshold alerts from the Alerting tab, and geofence alarms | **From Other Boaters** | Row | What it covers | | --- | --- | | **Friends** | New followers, and arrivals or departures of boats you follow | | **Direct Messages** | Direct messages from other Saillogger members | | **Fleet Messages** | Group chat messages from fleets you belong to | Everything you set on the **Alerting** tab arrives through one row: **Monitoring Alerts**. So does a geofence alarm, the circle or shape you can draw around the boat on the monitoring page ([Live monitoring](https://saillogger.com/docs/live-monitoring.md) covers drawing one). ### E-mail The **E-mail** master switch is **on** when you start, and so are the individual rows. Turn off a single row to stop that kind of e-mail and keep the rest. Turn off the master to stop all of them at once. > [!NOTE] > Account and billing e-mails are always sent, even when notifications are off. Turning the **E-mail** master off does not stop a receipt, a payment failure or a password reset. ### Phone The **Phone** column is not there until you link a Pushover account, and the **Phone** master switch is off until then. Pushover is a separate app made by another company, and it is a paid app: Saillogger sends your push notifications through it. 1. On the **Notifications** tab, find the note under the grid: "Phone notifications are delivered through Pushover. Link your Pushover account to turn them on". 2. Follow that link, or go straight to [https://saillogger.com/settings/pushover/link/](https://saillogger.com/settings/pushover/link/). 3. You are taken to Pushover to subscribe, with your Pushover account. 4. When you come back, the **Phone** column has appeared beside **E-mail**, and its master switch is on. 5. Turn off any rows you do not want on your phone. Most people leave **Critical** and **Monitoring Alerts** on and turn the rest off. A push is only ever sent when both the **Phone** master and that row's phone switch are on. Nothing bypasses the master. ### Turning a master off When you turn a master switch off, its column dims and stops sending, but **your individual choices are kept**. Turn the master back on months later and the same rows are still on and off exactly as you left them. That makes the master the right switch for a winter ashore, and the individual rows the right switch for "I never want this one again". --- ## The notifications page inside Saillogger Not everything has to arrive as an e-mail. The same news is listed at [https://saillogger.com/notifications/](https://saillogger.com/notifications/), grouped by day, newest first. A small badge in the navigation bar counts your unread notifications and your unread messages together: on your name on a wide screen, on the menu button on a phone, and on the bell in the mobile app. Two things to know about the badge: - **Opening the page does not clear it.** This is deliberate. A page full of news you have not read yet still counts as unread. - A notification is marked read when you **open that row**, or when you use **mark all as read** at the top of the page. So if you skim the list on a phone at anchor and put the phone down, the badge is still there when you have a proper connection, which is the point. --- ## The weekly summary e-mail Once a week Saillogger sends a summary of where you have been. It rides the **Navigation** row along with new logbook entries, stays, the daily passage update and your badge e-mails, so there is no separate switch: turning **Navigation** off stops all of them. What is in it is on [Statistics and badges](https://saillogger.com/docs/statistics-and-badges.md). ## If notifications stop arriving altogether - Check the **E-mail** master switch first. One tap turns off everything on this tab. - Check the individual row. **Friends** and **Monitoring Alerts** are the two people turn off and forget. - Check the address on your account is one you still read, under **Settings**. - Look at [https://saillogger.com/notifications/](https://saillogger.com/notifications/). If the news is there but never reached your inbox, the problem is the e-mail channel, not Saillogger noticing. - If the news is not there either, nothing was raised. For an alert, that sends you back to the **Alerting** tab and the checks above. Still stuck: the [community forum](https://community.saillogger.com) or [info@saillogger.com](mailto:info@saillogger.com). > [!NEXT] > Units, your home port, the map you prefer and the rest of the settings: [Make Saillogger yours](https://saillogger.com/docs/customise-saillogger.md). --- # Make Saillogger yours Source: https://saillogger.com/docs/customise-saillogger/ Set the units you think in, name your own stay types, build monitoring sections for your own tanks and sensors, and choose how Saillogger looks. Saillogger works without any setup, but almost everything it shows you can be adjusted to the way you already think about your boat. Feet or meters. Your own name for the pontoon you always end up on. A gauge for your fuel tank next to one for your water tank. All of it lives in **Settings** at [saillogger.com/settings/](https://saillogger.com/settings/), one tab per subject. Changes save as soon as you make them: there is no **Save** button on most of these tabs. ## Units Open **Settings** and go to the **Units** tab ([saillogger.com/settings/?tab=units](https://saillogger.com/settings/?tab=units)). The tab starts with **Unit System**, a three-part switch: - **Metric** sets every measurement below to its metric default. - **Imperial** sets every measurement below to its imperial default. - **Custom** is not a button. It lights up on its own the moment you change any single measurement, which is why it is greyed out and cannot be clicked. So the usual way to work is: pick **Metric** or **Imperial** first, then change the one or two measurements you disagree with. The switch moves itself to **Custom** and stays there. > [!IMPORTANT] > Choosing **Metric** or **Imperial** resets every measurement to that system's defaults. If you have customised anything, Saillogger asks you to confirm first, so an accidental tap cannot quietly throw your choices away. ### The eight measurements Each row has its own list, and you can mix them freely. | Measurement | Your choices | | --- | --- | | **Boat Speed** | Knots (kn), Kilometers per hour (km/h), Miles per hour (mph), Meters per second (m/s) | | **Wind Speed** | Knots (kn), Kilometers per hour (km/h), Miles per hour (mph), Meters per second (m/s) | | **Distance** | Nautical miles (nm), Kilometers (km), Statute miles (mi) | | **Depth** | Meters (m), Feet (ft), Fathoms (ftm) | | **Temperature** | Celsius (°C), Fahrenheit (°F) | | **Barometric Pressure** | Hectopascals / millibars (hPa), Inches of mercury (inHg), Millimeters of mercury (mmHg) | | **Volume** | Liters (L), US gallons (gal), Imperial gallons (imp gal) | | **Engine Pressure** | Kilopascals (kPa), Bar (bar), Pounds per square inch (psi) | ### What the two systems actually change | Measurement | Metric | Imperial | | --- | --- | --- | | **Boat Speed** | Knots | Knots | | **Wind Speed** | Knots | Knots | | **Distance** | Nautical miles | Nautical miles | | **Depth** | Meters | Feet | | **Temperature** | Celsius | Fahrenheit | | **Barometric Pressure** | Hectopascals | Inches of mercury | | **Volume** | Liters | US gallons | | **Engine Pressure** | Kilopascals | Pounds per square inch | > [!NOTE] > Speed and distance are nautical in both systems: knots and nautical miles, whichever you pick. The two systems really differ on depth, temperature, volume and pressure. If you are a metric boater who wants feet on the depth gauge, change **Depth** on its own and leave the rest. Your choices apply everywhere Saillogger shows your data: maps, gauges, logs, statistics, e-mails and alerts. There is no separate setting for e-mail. ## Your own stay types Every stay and every moorage carries a type, so you can see how much of your season was spent at anchor rather than in a marina. Open **Settings** and go to the **Stay Types** tab. Four types are built in and cannot be changed or deleted: - **Anchor** - **Mooring Buoy**, meaning a buoy or ball you tie up to, not a berth in a marina - **Dock** - **Unknown** Under **Your types**, add your own: 1. Click **Add type**. 2. Type a name, up to 30 characters. The field suggests `e.g. Marina`. 3. Click **Save**. You can have up to 20 of your own types. Each one gets **Rename** and **Delete** buttons on its row. Your types then appear in the type picker on every moorage and every stay, and in your statistics, next to the built-in four. > [!NOTE] > Deleting a type does not delete anything else. Every moorage and stay that was using it reverts to **Unknown**, and Saillogger tells you how many that is before you confirm. ## Monitoring sections of your own The monitoring page shows depth, wind, temperatures, batteries and so on. Anything else your boat network carries, you add yourself as a **monitoring section**: a titled group of readings, for example a **Tanks** section holding Freshwater, Wastewater and Fuel. Open **Settings**, go to **Monitoring & Tracking**, and scroll to **Additional Monitoring**. 1. Click **Add Monitoring Section**. 2. Give it a title. The field suggests `Title (e.g. Tanks)`. 3. Choose a **Monitoring Type**. This matters more than it looks: read the note below before you pick. 4. Under **Data Fields**, click the **+** button once per reading. Each field takes a name of up to 15 characters (the field suggests `Field Name (e.g. Freshwater or Fuel)`) and a data source, chosen from the list of everything your boat has reported. 5. Set **Public** on if visitors to your public page should see this section, off if it is for you alone. To remove one, use the **Delete Section** button at the bottom of that section. > [!IMPORTANT] > **Monitoring Type** decides how the number is displayed, not just its label. Choose **RPM** for engine revolutions and **Duration** for engine hours. If you leave the type wrong, Saillogger shows the raw value, which means revolutions in Hz and hours in seconds. The full list of types is: Other, Length, Distance, Speed, Percentage, Volume, Temperature, Atmospheric Pressure, Battery, Direction, Industrial Pressure, RPM, Duration, Rate for Volume. > [!NOTE] > This needs version 3.0.0 or later of the Saillogger plugin. On an older version the tab replaces these controls with a message telling you to upgrade. Your plugin version is shown in **Settings** > **Boat**, under **Plugin Version**. Changes have to travel out to the boat, which takes about 90 seconds. The page shows a countdown while it happens, and the boat has to be online for it to arrive. You can close the tab: the process carries on in the background. Refresh the monitoring page after the countdown ends. ## Which sensor Saillogger reads A well-equipped boat often reports the same measurement from more than one place: two depth sounders, a masthead unit and a handheld anemometer, three temperature sensors. The same **Monitoring & Tracking** tab lets you say which one Saillogger should use. There is one row per reading, each ending in **Source**: - **Depth Source** - **Wind Speed Source** - **Wind Direction Source** - **Inside Temperature Source**, **Outside Temperature Source**, **Water Temperature Source** - **Inside Humidity Source**, **Outside Humidity Source** - **Barometer Source** - **Battery Charge Source**, **Battery Voltage Source** Each list is built from what your boat has actually reported, so it only ever offers real sources. Pick the blank option at the top to clear a choice. **If the list is empty or the reading you want is missing:** - Your boat network does not carry that reading, or has not sent it yet. Saillogger cannot offer a source it has never seen. - Your plugin is older than 3.0.0. Upgrade it, then come back to this tab. - The boat is offline, so a change you make cannot reach it. Wait until it is back online. ## Where the monitoring track starts The first row of **Monitoring & Tracking** is **Initial Tracking Position**. It picks the log your live tracking map draws the track from, so you can show the whole passage from your home port rather than only the last few hours. Choose the empty option at the very top of the list to clear it. The monitoring page itself is covered in [Live monitoring](https://saillogger.com/docs/live-monitoring.md). ## Your boat's details Open **Settings** and go to the **Boat** tab. **Type** decides two things: the icon that represents your boat on charts, and whether Saillogger calculates the sailing versus motoring split of your trips. The choices are: - Not specified (use AIS vessel type) - Monohull sailboat - Sailing catamaran - Motorboat with inboard engine - Powerboat with outboard engine - Motoryacht - Superyacht **Make & Model** is free text, shown alongside your boat. **Photo** is a picture of your boat. Click **Upload**, pick the file, and wait: the page shows a spinner while it goes up, with a **Cancel** button if the transfer stalls. The photo appears on your pages and to friends who follow you. The trash icon in the corner of the photo removes it. > [!NOTE] > Your boat's **Name** and **MMSI** are not editable here. They are sent from Signal K, so to change them you open your Signal K server and go to **Server** > **Settings**. The same tab also shows read-only facts that are useful when something is wrong: **Status**, **Integration Type**, **Collector ID**, **Plugin Version**, **Monitoring Device** and **Last Contact**. ## Classic or Modern Saillogger has two web interfaces, and you choose between them in **Settings** > **General**, on the **Experience** row. - **Classic** is the default. It is what you get unless you change this setting, and it is the interface most of this guide describes. - **Modern** is the rebuilt Saillogger at [saillogger.com/app](https://saillogger.com/app). It is an early preview, so expect the occasional rough edge, and some screens still hand you back to the classic pages. Your boat, your logs and your data are exactly the same in both. What changes is how Saillogger looks to you, and what visitors see on your public pages. Every link you have already shared keeps working. Choosing **Modern** opens a short dialog explaining all of this; nothing is saved until you confirm it. You can come back to this row and pick **Classic** again at any time, and picking Classic saves straight away with no dialog. The modern app has one setting the classic site does not: a **Light** or **Dark** theme, under **Units & appearance** in its own settings. The theme is remembered on that device, so your phone can be dark and your laptop light. ## On your phone There are Saillogger apps for both platforms: - iOS: [apps.apple.com/us/app/saillogger-app/id6479176158](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/saillogger-app/id6479176158) - Android: [play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.saillogger.app](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.saillogger.app) Same account, same boat, same data. Sign in with the e-mail address and password you already use. > [!NOTE] > Subscription management is not in the apps. For anything to do with billing, your payment method or the seasonal pause, use the website. See [Subscription and seasonal pause](https://saillogger.com/docs/subscription-and-seasonal-pause.md). > [!NEXT] > See what a season of this adds up to in [Statistics and badges](https://saillogger.com/docs/statistics-and-badges.md). --- # Statistics and badges Source: https://saillogger.com/docs/statistics-and-badges/ The running totals Saillogger keeps for your boat, the badges it awards for them, and the weekly summary e-mail that reports on both. Every trip and every stay adds to a set of totals for your boat: how far you have gone, how long you were under way, how many nights on the hook, how many countries. Saillogger keeps them all, and you can look at any stretch of time you like. Badges sit on top of the same data. They are the milestones worth remembering, awarded on their own as you reach them. ## Open your statistics Click **stats** in the navigation bar. On a phone, open the menu and look under **Records** for the **Stats** tile. The page is headed **Statistics for ``**. If you have published your boat, its public address is `https://saillogger.com//stats`, and going to the private one sends you there. ## What the page shows Two columns of figures. The left column is about your passages: | Row | What it counts | | --- | --- | | **Boat** | Your boat, or boats | | **Number of Log Entries** | Trips in the period | | **Total Distance** | In your preferred distance unit | | **Total Time Underway** | In hours | | **Longest Nonstop Sail** | Your record trip, by distance and by time. These can be two different trips, and each figure links to its own | | **Max Speed** | Your fastest recorded speed | | **Max Wind Speed** | The strongest wind recorded on a trip | | **Countries Visited** | Flags, not names. Click one for the country name and the regions you visited within it | The right column is about where you stopped: | Row | What it counts | | --- | --- | | **Home Ports / Unique Moorages** | Two numbers: how many places you have marked **Home**, and how many moorages you have in total | | **Time Spent at Home Port(s)** | Nights at home, in days | | **Time Spent Away** | Nights away, in days | | **Dock** | Of those nights away, how many alongside | | **Anchor** | How many on the hook | | **Mooring Buoys** | How many on a buoy | | **Unclassified** | Nights whose stay type you never set | | **Badges** | Your earned badges, as medallions. Click one for its name and what it was for | Your own stay types appear as extra rows between **Mooring Buoys** and **Unclassified**. Making them is covered in [Make Saillogger yours](https://saillogger.com/docs/customise-saillogger.md). On your own page every figure is a link into the data behind it, so clicking **Total Distance** opens the trips that made it up, and clicking **Anchor** opens those stays. Visitors to a shared page see the same numbers as plain text. > [!NOTE] > The **Unclassified** row always covers your whole history, whatever dates you have set. Every other row respects the period. The modern app labels this row **Unclassified (all time)** to make it obvious. If the page is empty it says so, under the heading **Your Logbook is Empty**, and tells you whether Saillogger has heard from your boat at all. That second part is the useful bit: it separates "no trips yet" from "nothing is arriving". [Check that it is working](https://saillogger.com/docs/check-your-connection.md) takes it from there. ## Choosing a period At the top of the left column are **Start Date** and **End Date**. Click either one and pick a date from the calendar. Two things to know: - **There is no apply button.** The page reloads as soon as you change a date. - **The two boxes start filled in** with your first and last logged trip, so the page you land on covers everything. They are a starting point, not a filter you have to clear. There are no presets on the classic page: no "this year", no "this season". Set the dates you want. The modern app works the other way round. [saillogger.com/app/stats](https://saillogger.com/app/stats) has a row of chips instead: **All time**, then one chip per year you have logged anything. No free date entry, but a year is one tap. It shows the same numbers, grouped as tiles, plus a **Nights** section and a **Countries visited** section. ## Sharing your statistics Your statistics are private until you publish them. Turn on **Sharing** and then **Stats** on the sharing tab, and your stats page becomes visible at the public address above. See [Share your boat](https://saillogger.com/docs/share-your-boat.md), including how to put a password on it so only the people you choose can read it. Your earned badges appear on that public page too. Locked badges never do, and neither does your progress towards them. ## Badges Your badges are at [saillogger.com/badges/](https://saillogger.com/badges/), headed **``'s Badges**. There is a **badges** link in the navigation bar, and a **Badges** tile in the phone menu. At the top right is a count that reads how many you have earned out of the total, for example **7 of 28 earned**, with a bar underneath showing the same thing. Below that, when you are genuinely close to something, an **Almost there** rail shows the two or three badges you are nearest to, each with its own progress bar. It is hidden entirely when nothing is close, so an empty page is not a page with a fault. Then the badges themselves, in categories: - **Milestones** - **Seamanship** - **World & Regions** - **Latitude & Extremes** Each category header carries its own count, like **3 / 6**. Three chips above them filter the lot: **All**, **Earned**, **Locked**. ### Reading a badge An earned badge shows its medallion in colour, its name, what you did to get it, and often a line reading **Held by 4% of boaters**. That last one is why some badges feel worth having. A locked badge is a grey medallion with a padlock. If it is the counting kind, it also shows a progress bar and how far along you are, for example **3 / 5**. Badges you have made no start on show no bar at all, since a row of bars sitting at zero would tell you nothing worth reading. Click or tap any badge for its full details. An earned one tells you when: **Earned** followed by the month and year. A locked one shows **How to earn** with the exact requirement. A few real examples, so you know the shape of them: | Badge | What earns it | | --- | --- | | **Helmsman** | Your very first logged trip | | **Proud Owner** | Adding a photo of your boat | | **Explorer** | 10 nights away from your home port. You need a home port set first | | **Anchormaster** | 25 nights at anchor away from home | | **Wake Maker** | A top speed over 15 knots on any trip | | **Traveler** | Moorages in 2 different countries | | **Stormtrooper** | A trip through winds over 30 knots | | **Night Owl** | One trip of 16 hours and 50 miles that runs right through the night | There are others for particular waters, from **Club Alaska** to **Viking** to **Round Britain**. ### How badges are awarded Three rules, and they cover almost every question about them: - **They arrive the day after you earn them**, rather than the moment you qualify. The badge for today's passage turns up tomorrow. - **They are never taken away.** Once a badge is yours it stays yours, even if you later delete the trip or the stay that earned it. - **They are worked out from your whole history.** A new badge is awarded for things you did years ago, not only for what you do next. There is nothing to opt into and nothing to claim. ### The badge e-mail When you earn something, Saillogger e-mails you. The subject is **You earned the `` badge**, or **You earned `` new badges** when several land together. The e-mail shows each medallion, what it was for, how many badges you now hold, and which one you are closest to next. It rides the **Navigation** notification group, so it arrives only if **Notifications** are on for e-mail and **Navigation** is switched on within them. Turning **Navigation** off stops the badge e-mail along with your new trip and weekly summary e-mails. See [Alerts and notifications](https://saillogger.com/docs/alerts-and-notifications.md). You also get a row in your in-app notifications feed reading **You unlocked a new badge: ``**, which opens your badges page. ## The daily passage e-mail While you are on a long passage, Saillogger sends a daily update instead of making you wait for the week. The subject is **Daily Passage Update: ``**. It goes out only while you are genuinely on passage: more than a day under way, with real distance behind you. An afternoon sail or a weekend hop never triggers it. It rides the same **Navigation** group as the weekly summary and the badge e-mail, so one switch governs all three. ## The weekly summary e-mail Once a week, Saillogger sends a summary of your boat's week. The subject is **Boating Summary for the Week of ``**, the date being the start of the seven days it covers. It contains, when there is something to put in each: - **Number of Trips** and **Total Distance Covered** - **Places Visited**, one line per stay, in the form `3 days at ` - **Max Wind Speed** - **Minimum and Maximum Outside Temperatures** - **Minimum Battery Voltage and Charge**, the low points of your week - a **Pro Tip**, one of a rotating set Then, for each fleet you belong to: - its **New Members** for the week, or a line saying there were none - **Number of Trips by Fleet Members** and **Distance Covered by Fleet Members** - **Top movers**, the three most active boats in the fleet with their distance and trip count If you are in no fleet, that section invites you to join or start one. [Friends and fleets](https://saillogger.com/docs/friends-and-fleets.md) explains how. The summary is not sent at all in a week with nothing to report: no trips, no fleet, no wind, no temperature and no battery readings means no e-mail. A quiet winter does not fill your inbox. It arrives on the same **Navigation** group as the badge e-mail, so the same switch governs both. The summary also appears in your in-app notifications feed, as **Weekly summary for ``: `` trips, ``**. That row opens your statistics page with the dates already set to that week, which is the quickest way to look at one week on its own. > [!TIP] > If your figures look wrong, the fault is almost always upstream in the logbook rather than in the arithmetic here. A zero-mile trip the GPS invented at the dock counts as a trip, and a stay you never classified sits in **Unclassified**. [Your logbook](https://saillogger.com/docs/your-logbook.md) covers cleaning both up, and the numbers follow. > [!NEXT] > Read [Share your boat](https://saillogger.com/docs/share-your-boat.md) to decide who gets to see your statistics, your badges and everything else. --- # Share your boat Source: https://saillogger.com/docs/share-your-boat/ Turn on public sharing, choose which pages are visible, and put an access password on them if you want only a chosen few. Nothing about your boat is public until you turn it on. Your position, your logbook, your statistics and your timelapse are visible to you and to nobody else, and they stay that way until you go to one settings tab and switch sharing on. This page covers that tab: what each switch exposes, what your public address looks like, and how to share with your family without putting your live position in front of the whole internet. ## Turn on sharing 1. Open **Settings**, then the **Sharing** tab: [https://saillogger.com/settings/?tab=sharing](https://saillogger.com/settings/?tab=sharing). 2. Turn on the top row, **Sharing**. This is the master switch: "Master switch for public sharing links. If password protection is off, anyone with a link to an enabled page can view it without logging in." 3. The tab reloads and fills out: your boat **Name**, a switch for each page you can share, and the access password rows underneath. 4. Every page switch is now **on**, and each one shows the public address it has just published. Turning the master **off** again turns every page switch off with it. There is no half-way state to worry about: one switch takes everything public, and the same switch takes everything private. ## What each switch exposes Under **Pages You Can Share**, each row is a separate public page, with its own switch and its own address. | Switch | What a visitor sees | | --- | --- | | **Live Tracking & Monitoring** | Where the boat is now, and the instrument readings you monitor | | **Timelapse** | The animated replay of your season | | **Stats** | Distances, days out, ports and the rest of your numbers | | **Logbook List** | The list of your trips | | **Individual Log Pages** | A single trip page, for anyone who has a link to it | Your **journal** has no switch of its own. It is published with **Live Tracking & Monitoring**: turn that on and your journal is public too, turn it off and both are private. That is worth knowing before you write anything personal in a note. > [!WARNING] > With **Live Tracking & Monitoring** on and no password set, Saillogger says so in red on the tab: "Anyone with this link can see your live location. Turn on Require Access Password below to restrict who can open it." A public live position is a real decision, not a formality. If you are not sure, use the password recipe further down this page. ## Your public address The **Name** row builds your address out of two parts: - a prefix: **SV**, **MV**, **SY**, **MY** or **RV** - your boat name, at least 3 characters Together they make addresses like these: | Page | Address | | --- | --- | | Live tracking and monitoring | `https://saillogger.com/svrenaissance` | | Journal | `https://saillogger.com/svrenaissance/journal` | | Stats | `https://saillogger.com/svrenaissance/stats` | | Logbook list | `https://saillogger.com/svrenaissance/logs` | | Timelapse | `https://saillogger.com/svrenaissance/timelapse` | Each row on the tab shows its own address once the switch is on, so you can copy the exact link rather than typing it. > [!IMPORTANT] > Changing the prefix or the boat name changes every one of these addresses. Links you have already sent, printed on a card, or pasted into a blog post stop working. Pick the name you want before you hand the link around, and change it as rarely as you can. A name shorter than 3 characters is refused, and the classic site does not tell you so: you type it, nothing happens, and the old name is still there when you reload. If a rename appears to do nothing, that is almost always why. ## Share with a chosen few: the access password Two rows under **Access** turn your public pages into pages only your people can open. 1. Turn on **Require Access Password**. 2. An **Access Password** field appears. Type a password of at least 3 characters (30 at most) and leave the field. It saves on its own. What to know about it: - It is **not your account password**. It is a separate word you hand out, and anyone who has it can view the public pages you enabled. Do not reuse the password you sign in with. - A visitor is asked for it once. After that they stay unlocked in that browser for the rest of their session, so a family member is not typing it every time they check on you. - Changing it locks out **everyone** who had the old one, including people already following you, until you send them the new one. - Turning **Require Access Password** on without typing a password protects nothing. Set the password, then check the field kept it. ### Private sharing, step by step This is the setup most cruising families want: the boat visible to grandparents and friends, invisible to everyone else. 1. Open [https://saillogger.com/settings/?tab=sharing](https://saillogger.com/settings/?tab=sharing). 2. Turn on **Sharing**. 3. Turn off the pages you do not want to publish. Most people keep **Live Tracking & Monitoring** and turn off **Stats**, **Logbook List** and **Individual Log Pages**. 4. Set the **Name** row now, before you send anything: pick the prefix and the boat name you intend to keep. 5. Turn on **Require Access Password**. 6. Type an **Access Password** and tap or click somewhere else so it saves. Reload the tab and check it is still there. 7. Copy the address shown on the **Live Tracking & Monitoring** row. 8. Send the address and the password to your people, in the same message or in two, as you prefer. The red warning under the live tracking address disappears once the password requirement is on. That is how you know the page is no longer open to anyone with the link. > [!TIP] > Test it yourself before you send it: open the address in a private or incognito window. You should be asked for the password, and see your page after entering it. That takes a minute and saves the "it says access denied" message later. ## The Share buttons You do not have to copy addresses by hand. There is a **Share** button on your monitoring page, your journal, your timelapse, an individual trip page, and on a fleet map. It hands the link to whatever your phone or computer shares with: messages, mail, or the clipboard. If the page you are trying to share is not switched on under **Sharing**, the button does not send a dead link. It tells you "Sharing is turned off" and offers **Go to Sharing settings** instead. ## Put your boat on your own website If you keep a blog or a website, you can embed your live page in it. Paste this where you want the map, with your own address in place of the example: ```html ``` The frame shows the same public page as the link, so it only works while that page is switched on. If you require an access password, an embed on a public blog is not much use: your readers are stopped by the password just as they would be if you sent them the link. ## Publish your weather to Windy The **Windy Station** row, under **Weather Sharing**, publishes your boat's observations as a weather station on [windy.com](https://www.windy.com). It is useful in places where there is no other station for miles. The switch stays disabled until three things are true: - Saillogger has received at least one monitoring reading from your boat - your **Wind Direction Source** is exactly `environment.wind.directionTrue` - that latest reading includes an outdoor temperature Publishing true wind direction needs plugin 2.3.0 or newer, so update the plugin first if the wind direction source will not take that value. When all three are true the switch becomes usable, and once it is on the row shows your station's address on Windy. If you are not a subscriber you can still contribute to Windy: there is a free Signal K plugin at [https://github.com/saillogger/signalk-windy-plugin](https://github.com/saillogger/signalk-windy-plugin). ## Changing your mind - **Turn one page private.** Switch that row off. Its address stops working straight away. - **Turn everything private.** Switch the master **Sharing** row off. Every page switch goes off with it. - **Keep sharing but change who can see it.** Change the **Access Password**. Everyone with the old one is locked out until you send the new one. - **Stop one particular person following you.** There is no per-person switch, though changing your access password gets you most of the way there. [Friends, fleets and messages](https://saillogger.com/docs/friends-and-fleets.md) explains how boaters handle this in practice. Turning sharing off does not delete anything. Your logbook, journal, statistics and timelapse are all still there for you, they are just no longer public. > [!NEXT] > Follow other boats, run a fleet, and see who is following you: [Friends, fleets and messages](https://saillogger.com/docs/friends-and-fleets.md). --- # Friends, fleets and messages Source: https://saillogger.com/docs/friends-and-fleets/ Follow other boats by MMSI, see who is following you, run a fleet map for a group, and message the boaters you know. Saillogger has three social features, and they stack: **Friends** puts other boats on your map, a **fleet** puts a group of boats on one shared map, and **messages** let you write to the boaters you already have a connection with. Friends and fleets both work by MMSI, the number a boat's AIS transponder broadcasts, so you can follow a boat whether or not its owner uses Saillogger. Messages then work off those connections. | You want to | Use | | --- | --- | | See a friend's boat on your own map | **Friends** | | Be told when a particular boat leaves and arrives | **Friends** | | Put a rally, a club or a family of boats on one map | A **fleet** | | Write to a boater you already follow or sail with | **Messages** | | Let people ashore follow you | Neither: see [For family and friends without Saillogger](https://saillogger.com/docs/follow-without-saillogger.md) | ## Follow another boat You have two views of the same list of boats: - the map, [https://saillogger.com/friends/](https://saillogger.com/friends/) - the list, [https://saillogger.com/friends/list/](https://saillogger.com/friends/list/), with each boat's status, last update and distance from you To add one: 1. Open either page and press the **+** button. 2. The **Follow a boat** window opens, with one field, **MMSI** (it shows an example, `e.g. 366123456`). 3. Type the boat's MMSI and press **Follow**. 4. The boat appears in your list and on your map. On the map version you can paste several MMSIs at once, separated by commas, which is the quick way to set up after a rally briefing. If the boat belongs to a Saillogger user who has set an access password, you are asked for it as part of following: a **Profile password** field appears, and the follow completes once you enter the right one. Ask the owner for it, the same password they give anyone opening their link. You can follow up to **100** boats. ### If the follow is refused - **"This boat is not publicly viewable."** The owner has not made their boat public, so there is nothing to follow. Only they can change that, on their own [Sharing settings](https://saillogger.com/docs/share-your-boat.md). - **"This vessel is not in our network yet, please try again later."** The MMSI is valid but no AIS receiver has heard that boat yet. Try again once they are underway near a receiver. - **"Invalid MMSI."** Check the number. An MMSI is nine digits. - **The maximum of 100.** Remove a boat you no longer follow before adding another. ### Boats that are not on Saillogger You are not limited to other Saillogger users. Any boat with an AIS transponder can be followed by its MMSI, and its position comes from the AIS network rather than from the boat's owner. That is how most people follow the yacht they met in the last anchorage, or the ship a family member works on. The trade is that an AIS-only boat shows you what AIS carries (where it is, where it is heading) and nothing of the owner's own logbook or journal. ### What you get from a boat you follow You get an e-mail when a boat you follow **departs**, and another when it **arrives**. That is the point of the feature for most people: you do not have to watch a map to know your friends are on passage. To stop those e-mails, turn off the **Friends** row on the notifications settings, which also covers new-follower e-mails. See [Alerts and notifications](https://saillogger.com/docs/alerts-and-notifications.md). ### Stop following a boat Open the boat on the friends list or tap it on the map, and choose **Remove friend**. You are asked to confirm, and the boat leaves your map and your list. It frees one of your 100 slots, and you can follow the same boat again later. ## Who is following you When someone starts following your boat, you get an e-mail about it. Your list of followers is at [https://saillogger.com/friends/followers/](https://saillogger.com/friends/followers/). Each row has an action: - **Follow back**, when their boat is publicly viewable, so you can add them to your own map with one tap. - **Ask to follow**, when it is not. That sends them an e-mail asking them to make their boat viewable so you can follow them back. You can only ask the same person again after a while, so a second tap tells you that you already asked them recently. > [!IMPORTANT] > Followers cannot be removed one at a time: there is no block button or per-person switch, so the levers you have apply to everybody. You can turn off **Live Tracking & Monitoring** on your [Sharing settings](https://saillogger.com/docs/share-your-boat.md), or turn on an access password and change it. Changing the password locks out every existing follower until you give them the new one, and that is how boaters usually drop a single person: change the password, then send the new one to everyone you are happy to keep. ## Fleets A fleet is a shared map for a group of boats: a rally, a club, a family with two boats, a charter operation. ### Create one 1. Go to [https://saillogger.com/fleets/new/](https://saillogger.com/fleets/new/). 2. Fill in **Name** and **Description**. 3. Decide **Public fleet**: on, and anyone with the link can see the fleet map; off, and it is for members. 4. Create it. You land on the fleet map. You can own up to **5** fleets, and a fleet can hold up to **100** boats. ### Add boats Owners add boats from the fleet's **Manage** screen, reached from the fleet map. Add a member by MMSI, one at a time. Both kinds of boat can be members: a Saillogger boat, and a boat that only shows up on AIS. A Saillogger boat can only be added if its owner has made it public: **Sharing** on, **Live Tracking & Monitoring** on, and no access password. This is deliberate, because fleet membership shows the boat's live position to every member, and that has to be the owner's decision rather than yours. If the add is refused, ask the owner to check their [Sharing settings](https://saillogger.com/docs/share-your-boat.md). You cannot join a fleet yourself, and there is no directory of fleets to browse. Ask whoever runs it to add you, and give them your MMSI: it is on your **Sharing** settings and under **Settings** > **Boat**. Turn **Sharing** and **Live Tracking & Monitoring** on and your access password off first, or the add is refused. ### If you are a member rather than the owner Members get their own **Settings** screen for the fleet, with two things on it: - **Add to favorites**, which pins the fleet into your own navigation so you can reach it in one tap. - **Leave fleet**, which removes you and your boat from that map. ### Fleet chat Every fleet map has a **Fleet chat** button, and it is for members: a single group conversation for the whole fleet. Membership is checked every time the page is opened, so somebody who has left the fleet cannot read on, even on a public fleet. ## Messages Direct messages live at [https://saillogger.com/messages/](https://saillogger.com/messages/). You can start a conversation with a boater who: - you follow, or - follows you, or - is in one of your fleets. That is the whole rule. It means a stranger cannot open a conversation with you out of nowhere, and it means the person you met in the anchorage last night can write to you as soon as one of you follows the other. Conversations are titled by **boat name**, which is how boaters recognise each other. ### What to expect | Limit | Value | | --- | --- | | Messages are kept for | 30 days | | Longest message | 2000 characters | | Photos per message | 3, up to 10 MB each | | Messages a day | 200 | Messages older than 30 days are removed for everyone, along with their photos. If something matters, keep it somewhere else: a message thread is not an archive. Each message you send results in an e-mail to the other person (and a push notification, if they have set one up), so a conversation works even when neither of you is looking at the site. Your own side of that is the **Direct Messages** and **Fleet Messages** rows on the notification settings: see [Alerts and notifications](https://saillogger.com/docs/alerts-and-notifications.md). Deleting a conversation clears **your** copy of it. The other person keeps theirs. Nobody can delete a conversation out of somebody else's inbox. ## If your friends do not use Saillogger Friends, fleets and messages are for boaters with an account. To let family ashore follow you, send them your link or point them at AIS Fleet: [For family and friends without Saillogger](https://saillogger.com/docs/follow-without-saillogger.md) is written for exactly that, and is safe to forward. > [!NEXT] > The page to send to whoever wants to follow you: [For family and friends without Saillogger](https://saillogger.com/docs/follow-without-saillogger.md). --- # For family and friends without Saillogger Source: https://saillogger.com/docs/follow-without-saillogger/ Two ways for people ashore to follow your boat, with nothing to install and no Saillogger account. The people who most want to know where you are usually do not want a boating app. They want to open something on their phone, see that you arrived, and get on with their day. There are two ways to do that, and both work in any phone or desktop browser with nothing to install. | How they differ | Your link | AIS Fleet | | --- | --- | --- | | They need an account | No | Yes, an e-mail address only | | They have to check it | Yes, they open the page | No, they get an e-mail on each departure and arrival | | Good for | One boat, anyone at all | Someone following several boats | | Works if you have set a password | Yes, once you send them the password | Yes, they are asked for it when they follow | ## 1. Send them your link The simplest way. You publish a page, they open it. **What you do:** 1. Open **Settings**, then the **Sharing** tab: [https://saillogger.com/settings/?tab=sharing](https://saillogger.com/settings/?tab=sharing). 2. Turn on **Sharing**. 3. Make sure **Live Tracking & Monitoring** is on. Its public address appears on that row, something like `https://saillogger.com/svrenaissance`. 4. Copy that address and send it to them. 5. If you have turned on **Require Access Password**, send them the password too, or they will be stopped at a password screen. [Share your boat](https://saillogger.com/docs/share-your-boat.md) covers the rest of that tab, including how to keep the page for a chosen few rather than for everybody. **What they do:** They open the link. That is all. They see your boat's position and your latest news, and they can add the page to their phone's home screen if they want it a tap away. No account, no app, no password unless you set one. > [!TIP] > Send the link in the family group chat rather than one by one, and send it again after any change to your boat name: renaming the boat changes the address and the old link stops working. ### What to put in the message Four short things save most of the follow-up questions: - the address itself, as a link they can tap - the access password, if you set one, and the note that it is not a Saillogger account password - one line about what they will see: where the boat is, and how recently it reported - a warning that the position can be hours old when you are offshore, so an old position is normal and not a reason to worry The page keeps itself up to date while it is open, so nobody needs to reload it to see the boat move. ## 2. AIS Fleet [AIS Fleet](https://aisfleet.com) is our companion product for people who follow boats rather than log their own. It suits somebody who wants to follow more than one boat, or who wants to be told rather than to check. **What they do:** 1. Go to [https://aisfleet.com](https://aisfleet.com). 2. Sign in with an e-mail address. There is no password to invent: a sign-in code arrives by e-mail and they type it in. 3. Follow your boat by its **MMSI**, the nine-digit number you give them. 4. Your boat appears on their own map, alongside the other AIS traffic around it. From then on they get an e-mail every time you depart and every time you arrive. Following a few boats is free. **Where to find your MMSI:** it is shown on your **Sharing** settings, in the AIS Fleet note under the **Sharing** switch, and under **Settings**, then **Boat**. ## What both ways need from you - **Sharing** turned on. - **Live Tracking & Monitoring** turned on. Without those two, there is nothing public to follow, and both routes fail with an unhelpful shrug. For AIS Fleet there is one more condition, and it is not something you can switch on: your MMSI must already be known to the AIS network. A boat that has never been heard by an AIS receiver cannot be followed there yet. If someone gets "not in our network", the answer is to wait until you have been underway in range of a receiver and try again. ## What they will see They see the pages you switched on under **Sharing**, and nothing else. For most boats that means: - **Live Tracking & Monitoring**: where you are now, and the instrument readings you have chosen to show - your **journal**, which is published with live tracking rather than by a switch of its own - **Stats**, **Logbook List** and **Individual Log Pages**, if you left those switches on They do not see your settings, your account, your subscription, or anything you have not published. If your boat has been offline for a while, the page shows your last known position and when it was recorded, rather than an empty map, which is usually the reassuring answer rather than the worrying one. ## AIS Fleet followers show up on your Followers page An AIS Fleet follower is a follower like any other: - they appear on your followers list at [https://saillogger.com/friends/followers/](https://saillogger.com/friends/followers/), with an **AIS Fleet** badge on the row - you get an e-mail when a new one starts following you, exactly as you do for a Saillogger follower - the same switches control both: the **Friends** row in your notification settings, and, on the privacy side, **Live Tracking & Monitoring** and your access password If your boat is password protected, an AIS Fleet follower is asked for that password when they follow you, just as a visitor to your link is. So the password is still the lever that decides who gets to see you, whichever route they came in by. See [Alerts and notifications](https://saillogger.com/docs/alerts-and-notifications.md) for the e-mail switches and [Share your boat](https://saillogger.com/docs/share-your-boat.md) for the privacy ones. ## If the people following you do use Saillogger Then neither of these is the right tool. Boaters with their own Saillogger account should follow you through **Friends**, which puts your boat on their own map next to their own, and gives them the same departure and arrival e-mails. That is covered in [Friends, fleets and messages](https://saillogger.com/docs/friends-and-fleets.md). ## Stopping it later You are not committed to any of this. Three levers, in order of bluntness: 1. **Turn off Live Tracking & Monitoring** on your [Sharing settings](https://saillogger.com/docs/share-your-boat.md). Your link stops working and AIS Fleet followers stop seeing you. 2. **Turn on an access password**, or change the one you have. Everyone who had the old one is locked out until you send them the new one, and that includes AIS Fleet followers, who are asked for the current password. 3. **Turn off the master Sharing switch.** Everything goes private at once. None of this deletes anything of yours: your logbook, journal and statistics stay exactly as they were, they are just no longer visible to anyone else. ## If it does not work - **"The link asks for a password."** That is your access password, not their Saillogger password (they do not have one). Send it to them. - **"The link says nothing is here."** Check that **Sharing** and **Live Tracking & Monitoring** are both still on, and that you have not renamed the boat since you sent the link. A rename changes the address. - **"The map is empty, or the position is old."** The page only shows what your boat has reported. If your device is off or offline, the page shows the last known position rather than nothing. Check your own [live monitoring page](https://saillogger.com/docs/live-monitoring.md) first: if it is stale for you, it is stale for them. - **"AIS Fleet cannot find my boat."** Your MMSI has not been heard by an AIS receiver yet, or the number was mistyped. Nine digits, no spaces. - **They stopped getting e-mails.** On AIS Fleet, they control their own e-mails from their account there. From your side, the **Friends** row in your notification settings controls the mail you get, not the mail they get. Anything else, write to [info@saillogger.com](mailto:info@saillogger.com) or ask on the [community forum](https://community.saillogger.com). > [!NEXT] > What Saillogger costs, and how to pause it for the winter: [Subscription and seasonal pause](https://saillogger.com/docs/subscription-and-seasonal-pause.md). --- # Subscription and seasonal pause Source: https://saillogger.com/docs/subscription-and-seasonal-pause/ What Saillogger costs, when the trial starts and ends, how the seasonal pause works and what it locks, how to cancel, and how referrals earn free months. Saillogger is free for 45 days and then USD 7.99 a month. This page covers the whole of the money side: the trial, the bill, pausing for the winter, cancelling, and the free months you earn by referring other boaters. Everything here is on the website. The **Subscription** tab is [saillogger.com/settings/?tab=subscription](https://saillogger.com/settings/?tab=subscription). ## The free trial You get 45 days free, and you do not need a credit card to start. The 45 days start **when your boat first sends data**, not when you sign up. Create your account in February, fit the device at launch in June, and the trial starts in June. Until the first data arrives, the **Subscription** tab tells you the trial has not started yet. ## What it costs USD 7.99 a month, or the approximate equivalent in your local currency. Billing is monthly. There is no annual plan, so there is nothing to commit to for a year and nothing to work out pro rata. ## Before your trial ends Saillogger e-mails you before the trial runs out, in good time to decide. What the mail says depends on whether you have added a card: - **With a card on file**, it confirms that the card will be charged when the trial ends, and there is nothing for you to do. - **With no card on file**, it asks you to add one, because otherwise the account is paused when the trial ends. If you would rather not continue, you do not have to do anything at all. It is worth reading **If a payment fails, or the trial ends without a card** below first, though: once the account is paused you have 30 days to get your data out. ## The Subscription tab Open **Settings** and go to the **Subscription** tab. It shows: | Row | What it means | | --- | --- | | **Plan** | The plan you are on. | | **Price** | What you pay, and how often. | | **Status** | What state the subscription is in right now. | | **Period Started** | When the current billing period began. | | **Period Ending** | When it ends, which is when you are next charged. | Below the table are two buttons: - **Manage** opens Stripe's billing portal in a new tab. Stripe handles Saillogger's payments, and the portal is where you change your card, download invoices and cancel. - **Seasonal Pause** stops billing and service for the off-season. Read the section below before you press it. > [!NOTE] > The **Subscription** tab is on the website only. It is deliberately not shown in the iOS and Android apps, so if you are looking for it on your phone, open [saillogger.com/settings/?tab=subscription](https://saillogger.com/settings/?tab=subscription) in the phone's browser instead. ## If a payment fails, or the trial ends without a card The account is **paused**, which is a different thing from the seasonal pause further down this page. Of the two this is the softer one, because you keep your own access to everything you have already logged: - Logging and monitoring stop. No new trips are recorded. - Your public pages go dark, so anyone following your links sees nothing. - You can still sign in, read your logbook and export your data for 30 days. Saillogger e-mails you when this happens. Adding a working payment method restarts the service. > [!WARNING] > After 30 days in that state the account is cancelled and closed, and your data is scheduled for deletion. That does not happen the instant the clock runs out, but it is not something to plan around either: if you are not going to continue, export what you want to keep inside those 30 days. [Your account, data and privacy](https://saillogger.com/docs/account-and-privacy.md) lists the exports. ## Seasonal pause The seasonal pause is for boaters who leave the boat for months at a time and would rather not pay for a service that has nothing to log. It goes further than the payment pause above: your subscription costs you nothing for as long as it lasts, and in exchange Saillogger closes for the season, to you as well as to your boat. The sections below cover what that means in practice, so you can set it up the way you want before you leave the boat. ### What it needs A payment method on file. If you have none, pressing **Seasonal Pause** shows a page headed **No Payment Method on File** with an **Add Payment Method** button, and nothing is paused. The card is not charged while you are paused: it is there so the subscription can restart when you come back. ### What it does - It voids the pending invoice, so you are not charged for the months you are paused. - Logging and monitoring stop. Nothing your boat sends is turned into logs. - Saillogger e-mails you to confirm the pause has started. ### While the pause is on One thing is worth knowing before you press the button: the pause closes Saillogger for you as well as for your boat. > [!NOTE] > While you are paused, your logbook, statistics, moorages, stays, timelapse, settings and exports all rest until you come back. Each of those pages shows a single screen headed **Seasonal Pause**, with one button on it: **Resume Subscription**. Nothing is lost in the meantime. Your data sits exactly as you left it and is all there again the moment you resume; it is simply out of reach until then. > [!TIP] > If you like to look back over your season during the winter, take your exports **before** you pause: the logbook CSV, the stays CSV, the moorages GPX and the track GPX. Each takes about a minute, and they are covered in [Your account, data and privacy](https://saillogger.com/docs/account-and-privacy.md). The export pages pause along with everything else. ### Pausing 1. Open **Settings** and go to the **Subscription** tab. 2. Press **Seasonal Pause**. 3. Read the confirmation, which spells out that logging, monitoring and access to most Saillogger pages will stop, and confirm. ### Resuming Sign in and press **Resume Subscription** on the screen you land on. Confirm, and monthly billing restarts along with logging and monitoring. > [!IMPORTANT] > If your subscription was already due for renewal, resuming charges you immediately. The resume screen says so. ### Staying paused for a long time You can stay paused for up to 12 months without paying anything. If you are away longer than that, Saillogger writes to you first, so nothing ever happens to your account without warning. If you are between boats and want to keep your history, reactivating your subscription briefly, even for a few days, keeps everything safe for another year. ## Cancelling Cancelling is done through Stripe, not through a Saillogger button: 1. Open **Settings** and go to the **Subscription** tab. 2. Press **Manage**. Stripe's billing portal opens in a new tab. 3. Cancel the subscription there. The cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing cycle, so you keep the service you have already paid for. There are no refunds for the remaining days of a cycle. If you are cancelling because you are away from the boat for a season rather than leaving Saillogger, the seasonal pause above is the better fit. ## Referrals Every account has a referral code, in **Settings** > **Referrals**. - **Your Referral Code** is the code itself, with **Copy** and **Reset** buttons. - **Share Link** is the same code as a link, in the form `https://saillogger.com/accounts/create/?referral=CODE`. Sending the link is less error-prone than dictating the code, because it fills the field in for the other boater. - **Free Months** shows how many you have earned, and how many are not yet applied to a bill. - **Your Referrals** lists the boats that signed up with your code, when they signed up, when their boat was activated and where each one has got to. What the code is worth: - The boater you refer gets 25% off their first paid month. - You get one free month once they make their first payment, applied automatically as credit against your upcoming bills. - There is no limit on how many boaters you can refer. > [!IMPORTANT] > The code has to be entered while they create their account. It cannot be added to an account that already exists, by them or by support. If they have already signed up without it, the discount and your free month are both gone. **Reset** issues you a new code and stops the old one working for new signups. People who already used the old code are not affected, and neither are free months you have already earned. Use it if you have posted your code somewhere you regret. ## In the mobile apps Subscription and referral money are not shown inside the iOS and Android apps. The **Referrals** tab is there, with your code, your share link and your list of referrals, but the prices, discounts and free-month totals are stripped out, and there is no **Subscription** tab at all. Use the website for anything to do with billing, cancelling or the seasonal pause. > [!NEXT] > Read [Your account, data and privacy](https://saillogger.com/docs/account-and-privacy.md) for passwords, exports and what other people can see about you. --- # Your account, data and privacy Source: https://saillogger.com/docs/account-and-privacy/ What is private by default, how to change your password, how to get your data out, what other people can see, and how to close the account for good. Where your boat has been is sensitive information. Saillogger treats it that way: a new account shares nothing at all, and every public page is something you switch on yourself, one at a time. This page covers the account itself: your password, your data, what other people can see, and how to leave. ## Nothing is public until you turn it on Everything is private by default. Your logs, your positions, your moorages, your stays and your monitoring data are visible only to you until you open the **Sharing** tab and turn **Sharing** on. Even then, nothing else follows automatically. Each page has its own switch: live tracking and monitoring, timelapse, stats, your logbook list, individual log pages. You choose which of them visitors can open, and you can add an access password so that only people you give it to can see them. If you never open the sharing settings, nothing you record is ever visible to anyone. The whole subject, including the access password, is in [Share your boat](https://saillogger.com/docs/share-your-boat.md). ## Changing your password 1. Open **Settings** and stay on the **General** tab. 2. On the **Password** row, click **Change Password**. 3. Fill in **Current Password**, **New Password** and **Confirm New Password**. 4. Click **Update Password**. The dialog says your password has been updated and closes itself. You stay signed in on this device, and nothing else about your account changes. If the dialog shows a message in red instead, it is telling you what the problem is: the current password was wrong, the two new ones did not match, or the new one was rejected for being too short (the minimum is 8 characters), too common, all digits, or too much like your name or e-mail address. > [!NOTE] > The access password on your public pages is a different thing entirely. It controls what visitors can open; it does not protect your account, and it is not your login password. Never make the two the same. ## If you have forgotten your password Use **Forgot your password?** on the sign-in form, or go straight to [saillogger.com/accounts/password_reset/](https://saillogger.com/accounts/password_reset/). You get an e-mail with a link that lets you set a new one. **If it does not work:** - Check you typed the address you actually signed up with. The reset only goes to an address Saillogger knows. - Look in your spam folder. Password reset mail lands there more often than it should. - If your account was closed or cancelled, the reset can fail without explaining why. Write to info@saillogger.com from the registered address. ## Changing your e-mail address Your e-mail address is your username, and there is nowhere in Saillogger to change it. If you need it changed, for example because you have left an old provider behind, write to info@saillogger.com from the address currently on the account and ask. ## If you think someone else has your password Do these in order: 1. Change the password, using the steps above. That is enough on its own to lock the account again, and you stay signed in. 2. If your public pages use an access password, change that too, on the **Sharing** tab. It is separate and does not rotate with your login. 3. Check **Settings** > **Sharing** for anything switched on that you did not switch on. 4. Write to info@saillogger.com if anything looks wrong. Saillogger staff can look at the account with you. ## Your Collector ID is a credential **Settings** > **Boat** shows a **Collector ID**. That is the identifier your device uses to send data as your boat. > [!WARNING] > Treat the **Collector ID** like a password. Anyone who has it could send data that appears to come from your boat. Do not paste it into a forum thread, and check for it before you post a screenshot of your settings. If you think yours has been exposed, write to info@saillogger.com. ## Getting your data out Your data is yours, and you can take a copy at any time. Nothing here needs a subscription. | What | Format | Where | | --- | --- | --- | | Your logbook | CSV | [saillogger.com/logs/export/](https://saillogger.com/logs/export/) | | Your stays | CSV | [saillogger.com/stays/export/](https://saillogger.com/stays/export/) | | Your moorages | GPX | [saillogger.com/moorages/export/](https://saillogger.com/moorages/export/) | | Your tracks | GPX | [saillogger.com/timelapse/export/](https://saillogger.com/timelapse/export/) | The CSV files open in any spreadsheet. The GPX files open in chartplotter software and most navigation apps. The track export asks you which range of logs you want before it builds the file; the other three download straight away. What is in each one: - **The logbook CSV** has a row per trip: its name, the boat, the moorage you left from and the one you arrived at, start and end times, distance, average speed and your notes. If your boat reported sensor data on a trip, the row also carries the minimum, maximum and average of each reading. - **The stays CSV** has a row per stay: the moorage, the type you gave it, when you arrived, when you left, how long you were there and your notes. - **The moorages GPX** is a waypoint per moorage, named, ready to load into a chartplotter. - **The tracks GPX** is the recorded track across the logs you selected. > [!IMPORTANT] > A seasonally paused account cannot reach any of these. The pause locks every page, exports included. If you are about to pause for the winter, export first. See [Subscription and seasonal pause](https://saillogger.com/docs/subscription-and-seasonal-pause.md). ## What other people can see about you Short version: your public pages, and your boat's name. - **Your public pages**, but only the ones you have switched on, and only if you have turned **Sharing** on at all. If you set an access password, only people who have it can open them. - **Your boat's name.** This is how you appear to the people you share with: to fleet-mates, to friends and to anyone following your boat. Saillogger identifies you by boat name, never by your e-mail address or username. - **Someone who follows your boat is shown its name.** Following is only possible for a boat whose owner has made it public, or whose access password the follower has, so a private boat cannot be followed at all. Your e-mail address is never shown to other boaters. ## Deleting your account 1. Open **Settings** and stay on the **General** tab. 2. Scroll to the bottom and click **Delete Account**. 3. A box asks you to confirm your e-mail address. Type it exactly as it appears on the account. Deleting the account closes it, cancels the subscription, and takes down every shared page, so links you have given to family or friends stop working. > [!WARNING] > This cannot be undone from the interface. Your logs, tracks, moorages, stays, photos and statistics go with the account. Take the exports above first: they take a couple of minutes and they are the only copy you will have. If what you actually want is a break rather than an ending, look at the seasonal pause in [Subscription and seasonal pause](https://saillogger.com/docs/subscription-and-seasonal-pause.md) instead. Your data survives a pause untouched. ## The formal documents Two things say what Saillogger commits to, and they are the authority rather than this guide: - The [Terms of Service](https://saillogger.com/tos/) - The [Privacy Policy](https://saillogger.com/privacy/) If something in them is unclear, ask on the [community forum](https://community.saillogger.com) or write to info@saillogger.com. > [!NEXT] > If something is not working rather than not clear, go to [Troubleshooting](https://saillogger.com/docs/troubleshooting.md). --- # Troubleshooting Source: https://saillogger.com/docs/troubleshooting/ The problems boaters actually hit, commonest first, with the checks and the fixes that resolved them. Something is not right and you want it working again. This page is organised by symptom, commonest first. Find the heading that matches what you are seeing, then work through its steps in order. Two things are worth doing before anything else, because between them they account for a large share of what follows: - **Update the Saillogger plugin.** Several problems on this page were fixed by a plugin release, not by anything you can change aboard. Update it from the Signal K app store, and check the version Saillogger is receiving in the **Plugin Version** row of **Settings** > **Boat**: [saillogger.com/settings/?tab=boat](https://saillogger.com/settings/?tab=boat). - **Restart the Signal K server.** A crashed process inside Signal K looks exactly like a Saillogger fault, and a restart clears it. --- ## My trips are not being logged, even though monitoring works **What it looks like.** The monitoring page shows live readings and your boat's position, so the device is clearly working, but no new logs appear in your logbook, day after day. **Why it happens.** Monitoring and trip logging are fed by different data. A device can be online, and can be sending instrument readings, and still not be delivering the position records that trip logging is built from. This is why "monitoring works" does not prove logging works. Work through these in order: 1. **Wait about an hour after you arrive**, with the device powered on and connected to the Internet the whole time. A finished trip does not appear the moment you tie up. If the device was off, no log will appear until it is back online. 2. **Restart the Signal K server.** Do this before anything more elaborate. 3. **Remove any GPS source from the plugin configuration.** Open the Saillogger plugin's settings in Signal K and empty the **GPS source** field, then save and restart Signal K. This field is for advanced use only, the plugin works without it, and a wrong value in it makes Saillogger ignore every position, which produces exactly this symptom. 4. **Read the plugin status line** on the Signal K dashboard. It reads something like `3 entries in the local cache, last connection to the server was 2 minutes ago.` The half that matters is the last connection: on a boat with Internet it should be recent, minutes rather than hours, and if it keeps growing the uploads are not getting through. The local cache is data waiting to go, so a low number, zero included, is healthy on a connected boat. It is only telling when the boat is offline and the number never moves, which means nothing is being collected, usually for want of a position. 5. **Read your boat's health panel.** Open **Settings** > **Boat**. The **Status** row is Saillogger's verdict on your boat, and the **Last Contact** row tells you when data last arrived. [Check that it is working](https://saillogger.com/docs/check-your-connection.md) explains what each status means. 6. **Check your Collector ID** character by character against the **Collector ID** row in **Settings** > **Boat**. A leading or trailing space counts as wrong. 7. **Last resort: turn on debug logging** for the plugin in your Signal K server's log settings, under **Server** > **Server Log**, and read the log while the problem is happening. The log lives on the device and is not visible to Saillogger from the cloud, so this is also what to capture if you end up asking us for help. > [!NOTE] > Older instructions tell you to look for **Unprocessed Records**. That row is no longer shown anywhere in the interface. Use **Status** and **Last Contact** instead. --- ## My last trip or arrival has not appeared **What it looks like.** You arrived yesterday. Everything else works, but the passage you just made is not in your logbook, or your boat still shows as underway. **Why it happens.** The monitoring device was almost certainly switched off, or lost its Internet connection, right after you arrived. Saillogger closes a trip from data the device has uploaded, so if the device stops reporting the moment you tie up, it cannot yet tell that you have stopped. The trip stays open until one of two things happens: - the device reports a position from the same place again, and the trip closes itself shortly afterwards, or - enough time passes with no data at all **and** the last positions show the boat had stopped, after which Saillogger concludes the trip on its own. A boat that goes dark while still moving is deliberately left open, because that is an offshore passage buffering its track. What to do: 1. **Power the monitoring device back on** where you are now, and leave it running with Internet for 10 to 15 minutes. 2. **Wait about an hour.** The log appears on its own. 3. If nothing has appeared after that, check **Last Contact** in **Settings** > **Boat** to confirm the device really is reporting again. > [!IMPORTANT] > No data is lost while a trip stays open. The log still shows up once the device is back online. The habit that prevents this: leave the monitoring device and the instruments on for about an hour after you tie up or set the anchor. Ten to fifteen minutes is the minimum worth doing, an hour is better. This is the single most repeated piece of advice in the community, because on most boats the chartplotter or the AIS transceiver is the GPS source, so switching the instruments off switches your logging off too. --- ## Zigzag tracks, my boat shown miles away, or 0-mile and duplicate trips at the dock **What it looks like.** Three symptoms that share one cause: tracks that zigzag back and forth, the boat drawn tens or hundreds of miles from where she actually is, and tiny 0-mile or duplicate trips created while you are tied up. **Why it happens.** An unreliable GPS source, or more than one GPS source on the network. When two sources report slightly different positions, the interleaved reports can look like movement, which is enough to start a trip while you are docked. A single wildly wrong fix is enough to bend a track. ### Fix the cause 1. **Check the antenna first.** It needs an unobstructed view of the sky, and the GPS should be reading consistently. Sort this out before changing any configuration. 2. **Find out how many GPS sources you have.** In the Signal K Data Browser, look at `navigation.position` and see how many devices are reporting it. 3. **Prefer Signal K's own priorities.** In Signal K, under **Server** > **Data Connections**, the priorities table lets you rank sources for `navigation.position` and push a standalone or USB GPS to the bottom, with a timeout of 5 or 10 seconds. Restart Signal K afterwards. This is the safer of the two fixes and it is worth trying first. 4. **Only if that is not enough, pin Saillogger to one GPS source** in the plugin, using the procedure below. ### Pinning Saillogger to one GPS source > [!WARNING] > A typo in the source name makes Saillogger ignore every position, so nothing at all is logged. Copy and paste the name, never type it. Do not use the monitoring page to test the result: this setting only affects trip logging. 1. Open the Saillogger plugin's configuration in Signal K and **enable debugging**. 2. Enter **random text** in the **GPS source** field and save. This is temporary. 3. Open the Signal K server log. You will see one line per source, reading `signalk-saillogger Skipping position from GPS resource PiCAN-M.130` and similar. 4. Pick the source you want to keep. Choose the one that is always available, not one that disappears when instruments are switched off. In the example above that is `PiCAN-M.130`. 5. Go back to the plugin configuration and paste that name into the **GPS source** field exactly as it appeared in the log, then save. 6. Check the server log again. Positions from other sources should now be skipped, and your chosen source should **not** appear in the skipped lines. If it does appear, the name is wrong: fix it before you leave. 7. **Turn debugging off**, then confirm records are still flowing using the status-line check in the first section of this page. ### Clean up the mess it made - **A few bad points:** open the log, click the offending trackpoint (the little boat icons on the map) and use the delete button in the popup. - **A whole bad trip:** open the log and use the red **Delete log** button at the bottom of the information panel on the left. This permanently deletes the log entry and the stays associated with it. > [!IMPORTANT] > A track that is thoroughly garbled cannot be repaired, by you or by support. One log that recorded 1819.8 NM instead of 210 NM after a GPS failure could not be recovered. Deleting individual points only helps when there are a handful of spikes. --- ## A reading is missing, zero or wrong on the monitoring page **What it looks like.** A gauge you expect is not there at all, or it is showing zero, or it shows a value you know is wrong. **Why it happens.** Saillogger shows only what your boat network reports, and only while it is fresh. A value that has gone stale is dropped rather than displayed, which is why a section disappears instead of quietly freezing on an old number. The same applies to your position: a stale fix is not used for monitoring. Work through these in order: 1. **Check the value in the Signal K Data Browser, and read its timestamp, not its value.** Signal K keeps showing the last value it received, so a dead sensor looks alive. If the timestamp is not updating, the problem is on the boat, not on saillogger.com. 2. **Check the source you have chosen.** Open **Settings** > **Monitoring & Tracking**: [saillogger.com/settings/?tab=monitoring](https://saillogger.com/settings/?tab=monitoring). Each reading has its own dropdown: **Depth Source**, **Wind Speed Source**, **Wind Direction Source**, **Inside Temperature Source**, **Outside Temperature Source**, **Water Temperature Source**, **Battery Voltage Source**, **Battery Charge Source** and the rest. Pick the Signal K path you confirmed in step 1. 3. **If the path you want is not in the dropdown, give it time.** Saillogger refreshes the list of paths your boat publishes periodically, so a path that has only just appeared takes a while to become selectable. Restarting Signal K brings it forward. 4. **If the sensor only reports rarely, it is not really suitable.** Some battery-powered Bluetooth sensors advertise about once a minute, which sits right on the edge of being fresh enough to display. The fix is at the sensor rather than in Saillogger. 5. **If every monitoring value vanished at once**, check that Signal K has an **MMSI** configured under its vessel settings. Monitoring data does not bind without one, and the symptom is a blank page rather than an error. Restart Signal K after setting it. > [!NOTE] > Sensor sources moved to saillogger.com with plugin **3.0.0**, and the plugin's own data-path fields, the battery one included, are gone from current versions. Any instruction that tells you to set a data path in the Signal K plugin is out of date. Three source choices that fix specific complaints: - **Batteries reading zero.** In the Data Browser, choose context `self` and search `batteries`. You should see paths like `electrical.batteries.1234.voltage` and `electrical.batteries.1234.capacity.stateOfCharge`. Choose those same paths in **Battery Voltage Source** and **Battery Charge Source**. Older instructions tell you to type just the instance, `1234`, into a plugin field: that field no longer exists. - **Depth reads shallower than your instruments.** Point the depth source at `environment.depth.belowSurface` rather than `environment.depth.belowTransducer`, so the transducer offset is included. Confirm the path exists in the Data Browser first, then restart Signal K. - **Outside temperature is wrong.** Signal K's convention is `environment.outside.temperature` and `environment.inside.temperature`. A cabin sensor such as a Ruuvi tag usually appears under a name of its own, for example `environment.venus.24.temperature`, and you point the source at that. --- ## Engine hours are in seconds, or RPM reads in Hz **What it looks like.** An engine gauge shows 0.30 instead of an RPM figure, or engine hours show as a huge number of seconds. **Why it happens.** Signal K stores these in its own units: revolutions arrive in Hz, runtime arrives in seconds. If the field has no type set, the raw value is displayed. 1. Open **Settings** > **Monitoring & Tracking**: [saillogger.com/settings/?tab=monitoring](https://saillogger.com/settings/?tab=monitoring). 2. Find the monitoring section holding that field. 3. Set its **Monitoring Type** to **RPM** for an engine revolutions reading, or **Duration** for a runtime reading in seconds, which is then shown in hours. 4. Save, and while you are there check that the section's **Data Fields** entry is not empty. An empty data field is a quiet way for a value never to be recorded at all. Two related points: - **Do not change monitoring configuration in the middle of a trip.** Make changes before you leave or after you arrive. - **From plugin 5.x you do not need any of this for engine hours.** Engine hours per trip, twin engines included, and the sailing versus motoring split are logged automatically from standard NMEA engine data. The split also needs your boat type set to **Monohull sailboat** or **Sailing catamaran** in **Settings** > **Boat**. --- ## Wind direction is missing, or the arrow looks backwards **What it looks like.** The wind panel has no direction arrow, or the arrow points the opposite way from what you expect. **The arrow convention.** The arrow points the way the wind is blowing **toward**, so an arrow pointing south means a northerly. That is the opposite of the weather barbs used in aviation and forecasting, which point at where the wind comes from, and it catches people out often enough that boaters write in about it. Nothing is wrong with your boat or your sensor: it is simply the convention Saillogger draws with. **Missing entirely.** Wind direction comes from `environment.wind.directionTrue` in Signal K, which most NMEA 2000 networks do not carry. The Signal K **derived-data** plugin calculates it: 1. Check the Data Browser first: your instruments may already publish `environment.wind.directionTrue`. 2. If not, install the derived-data plugin and then **configure** it. Installing is not enough. In its configuration, enable **True Wind Angle, Direction and Speed**. On a Victron GX, while on the boat network, that page is at [http://venus.local:3000/admin/#/serverConfiguration/plugins/derived-data](http://venus.local:3000/admin/#/serverConfiguration/plugins/derived-data). 3. Give it the four inputs it needs: `navigation.headingTrue`, `navigation.speedThroughWater`, `environment.wind.speedApparent` and `environment.wind.angleApparent`. 4. `navigation.headingTrue` is the usual missing piece. It normally comes from your heading sensor or autopilot (one boater's fix was restoring power to the course computer), or derived-data can calculate it from `navigation.headingMagnetic` plus `navigation.magneticVariation`. 5. Then set **Wind Direction Source** in **Settings** > **Monitoring & Tracking** to the resulting path. `navigation.speedThroughWater` reading zero at anchor is fine and does not break the calculation. --- ## The plugin will not install, will not start, or stopped after an upgrade **Start here: update the Saillogger plugin.** Most of the failures below were fixed by a plugin release, so an update is the first thing to try in every case, not the last. The install can take a long time on a Victron GX. Historically it was "longer than 30 minutes"; with plugin 5.0.0 it is usually under a minute. Do not interrupt it either way, because an interrupted install can corrupt Signal K. ### Install fails after 2 to 3 minutes on Venus OS v3.62 Venus OS v3.62 shipped without a package that the plugin's database dependency needed in order to build. 1. **Update the Saillogger plugin to 4.2.1 or later** from the Signal K app store. On its own this resolves it. 2. If you cannot update yet and you have not upgraded Venus OS, stay off v3.62. 3. If you are already on v3.62, you can downgrade on the GX display under **Settings** > **Firmware** > **Stored Backup Firmware** and choose an older release. 4. As a last resort, install the missing package over SSH (enable SSH root access on the GX first): ``` /opt/victronenergy/swupdate-scripts/remount-rw.sh opkg update opkg install python3-pip ``` Then exit the terminal and install the Saillogger plugin normally. One boater reported this step taking more than an hour. It is a build dependency only, so do not apply it to other failures. ### "Could not locate the bindings file" This appears after a Signal K or node upgrade: the plugin's native database module was built for the old version of node. 1. On a Raspberry Pi, reinstall the plugin so the binding is rebuilt for your version of node: run `npm install signalk-saillogger` inside `~/.signalk`. 2. Updating the `better-sqlite3` module itself inside the `.signalk` folder has also worked. 3. Restart Signal K. This dependency is known to be fragile and the Saillogger team has said a rewrite to remove it is in progress, so check for a plugin update before doing any of the above. ### The upgrade fails with `ENOTEMPTY` The npm log shows `ENOTEMPTY: directory not empty, rename ...` when updating from one plugin version to the next. 1. Retry the update once, from Signal K's **Plugins** > **Updates**, using the cloud icon on the Saillogger row. 2. If it fails again, treat Signal K itself as corrupted and reinstall it, as below. The root cause of this one was never established, so there is no better answer than the retry. ### `SQLITE_NOTADB` or `SQLITE_MISUSE` in the Signal K log 1. `SQLITE_MISUSE: Database is closed` was traced once to a Raspberry Pi Zero W running out of resources and kernel-panicking. Restarting the Pi cleared it permanently, and that model is not enough hardware for this job. 2. `SQLITE_NOTADB: file is not a database` appeared after a Signal K backup was restored onto a new OS install, going from OpenPlotter 3 to 4. Uninstall the Saillogger plugin, restart Signal K, reinstall the plugin, restart Signal K again. 3. If Signal K then fails on any plugin install or uninstall, the environment is beyond repair. The boater who reported this built a fresh OpenPlotter 4 install from scratch, **without** restoring the backup, and re-entered the plugin configuration by hand. That is one boater's conclusion rather than a tested procedure, but it is what worked. ### A Cerbo GX with no storage left Plugin updates fail and Signal K misbehaves because the partition is full. The older Cerbo GX has 1 GB of storage, newer ones have 4 GB. You can only see the fullness over SSH. 1. In the Signal K server settings, reduce **how many hourly log files to keep** from its default of **24**, and confirm **keep only most recent data log files** is on. On a 1 GB Cerbo, both together at 24 files were still not enough. 2. Make sure logging of data connections is **not** enabled. Those logs grow very fast and Saillogger does not need them. 3. Adding an SD card does not help, as the logs are not written to it. 4. If you forward AIS to MarineTraffic and later reinstall Signal K, re-add `nmea0183` alongside the default `nmea0183out` in the forwarder's NMEA 0183 events box, or it silently stops transmitting. ### Delete only the Saillogger cache Less destructive than a full reinstall. Use it when monitoring sources vanish or the local cache looks corrupt but the rest of Signal K is healthy. 1. Toggle Signal K **off** in the Venus OS menu. This matters: do not delete anything while it is running. 2. SSH into the device. 3. Delete the plugin's cache file. On Venus OS that is `/data/conf/signalk/plugin-config-data/signalk-saillogger/saillogger_v2.sqlite3`; on a Raspberry Pi it is `~/.signalk/plugin-config-data/signalk-saillogger/saillogger.sqlite3`. The filename varies with the plugin's major version, so match what is actually there. 4. Toggle Signal K back on. Data waiting in that cache and not yet uploaded is lost when you delete it. ### Reinstall Signal K from scratch on a Victron GX The last resort, for a Signal K that is genuinely corrupted: every app-store install fails, or the plugin cannot be removed. > [!WARNING] > This deletes all of your Signal K configuration, and the Saillogger team's own caveat is that these steps can corrupt Venus OS or Signal K. Try everything above first. 1. Toggle Signal K **off** in the Venus OS menu. Do this before deleting anything. 2. SSH into Venus OS. 3. Run `rm -rf /data/conf/signalk`. 4. Exit the SSH session. 5. Toggle Signal K back on. You get a fresh instance from the firmware already on the device, so you do not need to re-flash anything. 6. Reinstall the Saillogger plugin and enter your **Collector ID** again. The steps are on [Connect your boat](https://saillogger.com/docs/connect-your-boat.md). ### Other plugins that interfere - `hoekens-anchor-alarm` broke position reporting and monitoring for the same boat twice, in 2024 and again in 2025. Removing it restored normal operation both times. - Fixed-station plugins that publish a position once and never refresh it are unusable, because Saillogger ignores a stale position. [github.com/itemir/signalk-fixed-position](https://github.com/itemir/signalk-fixed-position) keeps republishing, so it works. --- ## My boat shows as offline, or "No GPS positions" **What it looks like.** The **Status** row in **Settings** > **Boat** reads **Offline**, or reads **No GPS positions** in red. **Why it matters.** A live GPS position is required for both monitoring and trip logging. It is not merely helpful. A device with a perfect Internet connection and no position logs nothing at all, and the boat is treated as offline. The two statuses mean different things: - **Offline** means Saillogger has not heard from the device recently, usually because the device or its Internet connection is off. This is normal every time you shut the boat down. - **No GPS positions** means the device is reaching the Internet but sending no position at all. Your Collector ID and your connection are fine, so the problem is the GPS. Check, in this order: 1. **The boat electronics and the GPS are powered on.** On most boats the position comes from the chartplotter or the AIS transceiver, so it disappears when you switch the instruments off. 2. **The monitoring device is on the boat network**, or has a GPS receiver of its own. 3. **The monitoring device is on the Internet.** 4. **The GPS antenna has an unobstructed view of the sky** and a valid fix. 5. **Read the Status row again** in **Settings** > **Boat** once you have fixed the above, to see whether it has changed. [Check that it is working](https://saillogger.com/docs/check-your-connection.md) lists every status and what each one means. If your GPS regularly disappears with the instruments, a dedicated USB GPS puck on the monitoring device keeps a position available. Give the NMEA sources higher priority than the puck so it is only ever a fallback. --- ## My journal is blank, or my live page shows no track **What it looks like.** The journal at [saillogger.com/monitor/journal/](https://saillogger.com/monitor/journal/) shows its heading and nothing else, or your live tracking page draws no track at all. **Why it happens.** Both are built from your logs starting at a chosen point, and that point is not set. Saillogger normally sets it after your first logged trip, so this usually affects new accounts and accounts where it was cleared. 1. Open **Settings** > **Monitoring & Tracking**: [saillogger.com/settings/?tab=monitoring](https://saillogger.com/settings/?tab=monitoring). 2. Set **Initial Tracking Position** to the trip you want the journal and the tracking page to start from. Choose your oldest log to show your entire history. 3. Save. 4. Reopen the journal. Your notes, stay notes and photos are there, newest first. To clear the setting again, choose the blank option at the very top of that dropdown. It is easy to miss, and missing it is why some boaters conclude the setting does nothing. --- ## Monitoring is not working, though trips are logged **What it looks like.** Trips appear in your logbook and **Settings** > **Boat** shows a recent position, but the monitoring page does not work, or shows a position or a time that is plainly wrong. **Why it happens.** The monitoring device and the chartplotter disagree about the time. Monitoring is time-sensitive in a way that trip logging is not, so a clock or timezone mismatch breaks one and not the other. 1. Check that your chartplotter and your monitoring device have accurate clocks. 2. Check that both are set to the same timezone, daylight saving included. 3. Restart both after changing anything. If a data point ends up dated in the future, it can wedge the "last updated" time on your monitoring page. Fix the clocks first, then write to info@saillogger.com: removing a future-dated record is done by the team. --- ## Known problems with no fix yet These are real, reported and open. If one of them is what you are seeing, report it with details rather than following an unconfirmed workaround. - **Logs that start about 30 minutes before you weigh anchor**, reported on a Cerbo GX with a USB GPS attached. Saillogger normally trims those starting points automatically. Reordering source priorities did not fix it. - **Engine start and finish hours that do not match the engine's own readings** on a twin-engine boat. - **A duplicated return trip after a multi-day connectivity outage**, where the hidden stop was never seen, and an average speed higher than the maximum speed in the same log. - **The standalone Signal K Windy plugin** stopped working when Windy changed its Station API at the beginning of 2026. An updated plugin was promised but has not been confirmed as released. This is the free standalone plugin, not the Windy Station option in your Saillogger sharing settings. --- ## When to ask for help Try the [community forum](https://community.saillogger.com) first. It is where boaters, the Saillogger team and people with your exact hardware answer each other, and a good number of problems on this page were fixed within days of being reported there. For anything account-specific, write to info@saillogger.com. Support is best-effort, so the checks above genuinely speed things up: a report that has already ruled out the common causes gets a useful answer much faster than one that has not. Include all of this: - **What you see**, precisely, and **what you expected** instead. - **When it started**, and what changed around then (a plugin update, new hardware, a firmware upgrade). - **Your plugin version and monitoring device**, from the **Plugin Version** and **Monitoring Device** rows of **Settings** > **Boat**. - **A link to the log** if it is about a specific trip, for example `https://saillogger.com/log/021878`. - **The Signal K log** if you have one. Turn on plugin debugging, reproduce the problem, and capture the log while it is happening. Those logs live on the device and Saillogger cannot see them. > [!WARNING] > Do not post your e-mail address or your Collector ID in a public forum thread. The Collector ID is the credential that lets a device write to your logbook. Send it by e-mail if you are asked for it. > [!NEXT] > Short answers to the questions boaters ask most are on [Frequently asked questions](https://saillogger.com/docs/faq.md). --- # Frequently asked questions Source: https://saillogger.com/docs/faq/ Short answers to the questions boaters ask most, each pointing at the page with the full instructions. Short answers, grouped by what you are trying to do. Each one points at the page that covers it properly, so use this as a switchboard rather than as the manual. If something is actually broken, go straight to [Troubleshooting](https://saillogger.com/docs/troubleshooting.md), which is organised by symptom. ## About Saillogger ### What is Saillogger? An automated logbook and monitoring service for your boat. A device aboard uploads position and sensor data, and Saillogger works out when you left, where you went and when you arrived, then writes the log entry itself. It also records your moorages and stays, builds statistics and timelapses, and lets you watch the boat while you are away. See [What Saillogger is](https://saillogger.com/docs/what-is-saillogger.md). ### Do I have to start and stop each trip? No, and that is rather the point. There is no button to press when you slip the lines and none when you tie up: trips are detected from your position data, and a finished trip normally appears about an hour after you arrive. See [How trips are logged](https://saillogger.com/docs/automatic-trip-logging.md). ### What do I need aboard? One of three things: a PredictWind tracking link, a Victron GX device wired to your NMEA 2000 network, or the Saillogger plugin on any Signal K server. You also need an Internet connection, though not a constant one. See [Connect your boat](https://saillogger.com/docs/connect-your-boat.md). ### Can I use two data sources at once? Best not to: stick with one at a time. A PredictWind tracker and a Victron GX both sending will log the same voyage twice and leave you with duplicate entries to tidy up. If you are moving from one to the other, stop the old one first and you will be fine. ### Can I have two boats on one account? Not on one account, no: each account is built around a single boat, so a second boat needs its own account and subscription. If you own two, create the second account and ask info@saillogger.com to link them. That puts a **switch boat** entry in your menu, so you can move between them without signing out. See [Create your account](https://saillogger.com/docs/create-your-account.md). ### Can I look at it before I sign up? Yes. There is a read-only demo account at [saillogger.com/demo/](https://saillogger.com/demo/) with real logs, statistics and a fully populated monitoring page. The credentials are filled in for you and you cannot change anything. ## Getting set up ### Does my boat need to be connected to the Internet? Not constantly, for trip logging. The device aboard caches everything locally and uploads when it next gets online, so weeks away from a signal are fine and nothing is lost. Live monitoring is different: to watch the boat right now, the boat has to be online right now. ### Is GPS required? Yes, for both trip logging and monitoring. A device with a perfect Internet connection and no position logs nothing at all, and your boat is treated as offline. On most boats the position comes from the chartplotter or the AIS transceiver, which is why switching the instruments off stops the logging too. ### How do I know it is actually working? Open **Settings** > **Boat** at [saillogger.com/settings/?tab=boat](https://saillogger.com/settings/?tab=boat) and read the **Status** and **Last Contact** rows. That page is the health panel for your connection, and the old boats page address now redirects to it. See [Check that it is working](https://saillogger.com/docs/check-your-connection.md). ### Where do I choose which sensor feeds each reading? On saillogger.com, under **Settings** > **Monitoring & Tracking**: [saillogger.com/settings/?tab=monitoring](https://saillogger.com/settings/?tab=monitoring). Each reading has its own dropdown of the Signal K paths your boat publishes. Older instructions say to do this in the Signal K plugin, which changed with plugin **3.0.0**. See [Make Saillogger yours](https://saillogger.com/docs/customise-saillogger.md). ### My battery readings are on the network but Saillogger shows zero. Check them in the Signal K Data Browser first: context `self`, search `batteries`, and you should see paths like `electrical.batteries.1234.voltage`. Then choose that same path in **Battery Voltage Source** under **Settings** > **Monitoring & Tracking**, and the matching `capacity.stateOfCharge` path in **Battery Charge Source**. Older instructions describe a battery field in the Signal K plugin, which current versions no longer have. Full steps are in [Troubleshooting](https://saillogger.com/docs/troubleshooting.md). ### How much data does it use? Standard monitoring with a couple of tanks uses about 1.5 MB a day, under 50 MB a month. AIS adds roughly 1 MB a day for every ten or so boats around you. On Starlink ocean roaming at USD 2 per GB, that is well under a cent a day. ### Can I import my old tracks from another service? Not by yourself, and there is no import button. Write to info@saillogger.com with the file and ask. One hard condition applies: it only works if nothing newer has been logged since the missing stretch, because Saillogger builds on what it has already processed. See [Your logbook](https://saillogger.com/docs/your-logbook.md). ### Can I use Saillogger as a live tracker with Starlink? Yes, and it is a common pairing. Turn on **Sharing** and **Live Tracking & Monitoring** in **Settings** > **Sharing** and send people the link. Starlink needs no extra setup for this: Saillogger treats it as an ordinary Internet connection. Your position comes from the boat's own GPS, not from Starlink, which no longer shares its position locally. See [Share your boat](https://saillogger.com/docs/share-your-boat.md). ## Using it day to day ### My last trip has not appeared. Where is it? Almost always because the monitoring device was switched off, or lost Internet, right after you arrived. The trip stays open until the device reports from the same place again, or until enough time has passed with no data at all and the last positions show the boat stopped. A boat that went dark while still moving stays open on purpose, so an offshore passage is not split in two. Nothing is lost, and leaving the device on for about an hour after you tie up prevents it. See [Troubleshooting](https://saillogger.com/docs/troubleshooting.md). ### Can I combine two trips into one? Not at present, no. A stop of about an hour ends a trip, and that rule runs through your stays, statistics and summaries alike, so an out-and-back stays as two trips: one leg out, one leg back, each as you sailed it. See [How trips are logged](https://saillogger.com/docs/automatic-trip-logging.md). ### Can I add a trip by hand? Not by hand, no. Logs are built from your boat's own tracking data, so a passage made with the system switched off has nothing to build from, and anything typed in would be a guess. If you have a track from elsewhere, do write to info@saillogger.com and ask: it sometimes works. See [Your logbook](https://saillogger.com/docs/your-logbook.md). ### Can I fix a bad trackpoint, or delete a whole trip? Yes to both. Open the log, click the offending trackpoint and use the delete button in its popup. To remove the whole thing, use the red **Delete log** button on the log page, which also deletes the stays attached to it. See [Your logbook](https://saillogger.com/docs/your-logbook.md). ### Can Saillogger log engine hours, RPM and sailing versus motoring? Yes. If your engine reports hours over NMEA 2000 they are logged per trip automatically, twin engines included. The sailing and motoring split needs your boat type set to **Monohull sailboat** or **Sailing catamaran** in **Settings** > **Boat**. For live RPM or runtime gauges, add a monitoring section and set its **Monitoring Type** to **RPM** or **Duration**: see [Make Saillogger yours](https://saillogger.com/docs/customise-saillogger.md). ### How do I put text on a timelapse? Notes attached to trackpoints appear in the timelapse as your boat passes them. Add them while underway with the pencil icon on the monitoring page, or afterwards by opening a log and clicking a trackpoint. See [Notes, photos and your journal](https://saillogger.com/docs/journal-and-notes.md). ### Can I export my logs? Yes. Logs and stays export as CSV, and tracks and moorages as GPX. See [Your logbook](https://saillogger.com/docs/your-logbook.md). ### My journal is blank. How do I fix it? Set **Initial Tracking Position** under **Settings** > **Monitoring & Tracking** to the trip you want your journal and your live track to start from, then reopen the journal. Saillogger usually sets this after your first logged trip, so a blank journal mostly affects new accounts or ones where it was cleared. See [Notes, photos and your journal](https://saillogger.com/docs/journal-and-notes.md). ## Sharing and privacy ### Who can see my data? Nobody, until you decide otherwise. Everything is private by default and sharing is a deliberate switch in your settings. See [Your account, data and privacy](https://saillogger.com/docs/account-and-privacy.md). ### How do I share with family and friends only? Turn on **Sharing** in **Settings** > **Sharing**, then turn on **Require Access Password** and set an **Access Password** of at least three characters. Visitors have to enter it before they see anything, so you give out the link and the password together. Changing the password locks everyone out until you send them the new one. See [Share your boat](https://saillogger.com/docs/share-your-boat.md). ### Can I customise my public link? Yes. With sharing on, the **Name** row builds your address from a prefix (**SV**, **MV** and so on) and your boat name, giving you something like `https://saillogger.com/svrenaissance`. See [Share your boat](https://saillogger.com/docs/share-your-boat.md). ### Can I put my live tracker on my own website? Yes, with a plain iframe pointing at your public monitoring link. The page itself cannot be restyled: you cannot change the map layer or the track colour for visitors. See [Share your boat](https://saillogger.com/docs/share-your-boat.md). ### How do I follow another boat? From the Friends page at [saillogger.com/friends/](https://saillogger.com/friends/), enter the boat's 9-digit MMSI, or use the follow button in a boat's popup on a public map. You can follow fellow Saillogger boaters who have made their boat public, and any vessel broadcasting AIS, up to 100 boats. You get an e-mail whenever a boat you follow departs or arrives. See [Friends, fleets and messages](https://saillogger.com/docs/friends-and-fleets.md). ### My family do not use Saillogger. How can they follow us? Two ways, both in a browser with nothing to install: send them your public monitoring link, or point them at AIS Fleet at [aisfleet.com](https://aisfleet.com), where they sign in with an e-mail code and follow your boat by MMSI. See [For family and friends without Saillogger](https://saillogger.com/docs/follow-without-saillogger.md). ### Can I stop one particular person following me? Not individually, as there is no block button or per-person switch. What you can do is turn off **Live Tracking & Monitoring**, which removes everyone's access, or set or change your access password, which locks out every existing follower until you give them the new one. In practice that is how boaters drop one person: change the password, then share it with everyone else. See [Friends, fleets and messages](https://saillogger.com/docs/friends-and-fleets.md). ### How do I turn my boat into a Windy.com weather station? Turn on sharing, then enable **Windy Station** in **Settings** > **Sharing**. If the switch will not enable, you need plugin 2.3.0 or newer, wind direction configured as `environment.wind.directionTrue`, and outside temperature published at `environment.outside.temperature`, which Windy requires. See [Share your boat](https://saillogger.com/docs/share-your-boat.md). ## Money ### What does Saillogger cost? Free for 45 days, then USD 7.99 a month or the local equivalent. You do not need to enter payment details for the trial, and the 45 days start when your boat first sends data, not when you sign up. See [Subscription and seasonal pause](https://saillogger.com/docs/subscription-and-seasonal-pause.md). ### Is there an annual plan? Not at the moment: the subscription is monthly only, so there is nothing to commit to for a year. Referrals are the way to bring the cost down, since each boater who signs up with your code and pays earns you a free month. ### How does the referral programme work? Your code is under **Settings** > **Referrals**. A boater who enters it while creating their account gets 25% off their first paid month, and when they pay you get one free month, banked if you do not need it straight away. The code has to be entered at signup and cannot be added to an account afterwards. ### We only boat for part of the year. Can we pause? Yes, with **Seasonal Pause** under **Settings** > **Subscription**. Be clear about what it does: everything stops, including your own access. While paused you cannot read or export your logbook, statistics or monitoring data, and nothing new is logged. Your data is kept and comes back when you resume. See [Subscription and seasonal pause](https://saillogger.com/docs/subscription-and-seasonal-pause.md). ### What happens to my data if I stop paying? It is not deleted the moment a subscription ends: there is a grace period, and an account can be revived within it by writing to info@saillogger.com. Export what you want to keep as CSV and GPX before you cancel, and note that you cannot export while a seasonal pause is in force. You can also delete the account yourself at any time, from **Settings** > **General**, which is permanent. See [Your account, data and privacy](https://saillogger.com/docs/account-and-privacy.md). ## Something is wrong ### My trips are not being logged, but monitoring works. They are fed by different data, so a working monitoring page does not prove logging works. Wait about an hour after arriving, restart Signal K, empty the **GPS source** field in the plugin, then check the plugin status line and **Settings** > **Boat**. Full steps in [Troubleshooting](https://saillogger.com/docs/troubleshooting.md). ### My track zigzags, or my boat is shown miles away, or I get 0-mile trips at the dock. One cause: an unreliable or extra GPS source. Check the antenna's view of the sky first, then, if you must, pin Saillogger to a single GPS source, which is an advanced step where a typo stops all logging. See [Troubleshooting](https://saillogger.com/docs/troubleshooting.md). ### A reading is missing, zero or wrong on my monitoring page. Saillogger shows only what your boat network reports, and only while it is fresh: a stale value is dropped rather than displayed. Check the value and its timestamp in the Signal K Data Browser, then the source dropdown in **Settings** > **Monitoring & Tracking**. A path that has only just appeared takes a while to become selectable, and restarting Signal K brings it forward. See [Troubleshooting](https://saillogger.com/docs/troubleshooting.md). ### The wind arrow points the wrong way. It is pointing where the wind is blowing toward, so an arrow pointing south means a northerly. That is the opposite of a weather barb, which catches people out regularly, but nothing is wrong with your sensor or your settings. If there is no arrow at all, your network is probably not publishing `environment.wind.directionTrue`: see [Troubleshooting](https://saillogger.com/docs/troubleshooting.md). ### My boat shows as offline. Either the device is not reaching Saillogger at all, or it is reaching Saillogger with no position. Check that the boat electronics and GPS are powered, that the device is on the boat network and online, and that the antenna has a clear view of the sky. See [Check that it is working](https://saillogger.com/docs/check-your-connection.md). ### Trips are logged but monitoring does not work. Usually the monitoring device and the chartplotter disagree about the time. Make sure both clocks and timezones are right, daylight saving included, and restart both after changing anything. See [Troubleshooting](https://saillogger.com/docs/troubleshooting.md). ### The plugin will not install, or stopped working after an upgrade. Update the Saillogger plugin first: several of these failures were fixed by a plugin release rather than by anything you can change aboard. The known error messages, with the commands that clear each one, are in [Troubleshooting](https://saillogger.com/docs/troubleshooting.md). ### I cannot reset my password. If your account was cancelled, the reset can fail silently. Write to info@saillogger.com from your registered address and ask for it to be re-enabled. See [Your account, data and privacy](https://saillogger.com/docs/account-and-privacy.md). ### My question is not here. The [community forum](https://community.saillogger.com) is the best place to ask: boaters and the Saillogger team answer there, and it is where new features are announced. For anything account-specific, e-mail info@saillogger.com. Support is best-effort, so say what you see, what you expected, and include your plugin version and monitoring device from **Settings** > **Boat**. > [!NEXT] > That is the whole guide. If your question is still not answered, the [community forum](https://community.saillogger.com) is where boaters and the Saillogger team work through problems together, and info@saillogger.com reaches a person.