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.
The timing below explains when to expect a new trip and why a passage may remain open after arrival.
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 the positions from your boat show that it is genuinely under way. Routine movement while anchored or tied up is filtered out so that it does not fill your logbook with false departures.
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.
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.
Saillogger needs positions during that period to confirm the boat has stopped. If the device goes off as soon as the anchor is set, the trip stays open until reporting resumes.
For prompt finalisation, leave the monitoring device and instruments running for about an hour after arrival. On most boats the GPS comes from the chartplotter or AIS transceiver, so it becomes unavailable when those instruments are switched off.
If a trip is genuinely stuck, Check that it is working shows you where to read your boat's status, and Troubleshooting covers the case where trips never appear at all.
A stop of about an hour ends a trip
Because of the rule above, a stop of about an hour gives you two trips rather than one. Each leg remains a separate part of the recorded journey.
The same principle answers three things boaters often ask us for:
- Merging trips. An out-and-back stays as two recorded legs.
- Splitting a trip. A recorded trip stays whole.
- Adding a trip by hand. Manual trip creation is not currently available because a log needs a recorded track. If another service recorded the track, contact us and we will check whether it can be imported.
The stop duration used to finish a trip is not currently a user setting.
If you have a track from elsewhere you would like added, see the import note in Your logbook. 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 | The route reported by your boat |
| Start and end moorage | Created automatically, see below |
| A name | Automatically From <start> to <end>, 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.
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 gives it a practical place name. Later visits nearby are grouped with that place.
That is worth knowing before it surprises you: nearby stops may share one moorage. A harbour with an anchorage, mooring field and marina may therefore appear as one place in your logbook.
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.
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 <moorage> in <Month Year>1 day stay at <moorage> in <Month Year>Short stay at <moorage> in <Month Year>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.
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.
This is usually fixable by checking which GPS position Signal K prefers. Start with Signal K source priorities. If that does not resolve it, contact support before changing the plugin's advanced GPS source, because an incorrect choice interrupts trip logging. Troubleshooting has the safe sequence.
Once the GPS source is reliable, you can correct affected records. On the trip page, the red trash button at the bottom of the panel removes a false trip entirely. If only one incorrect position affects an otherwise useful track, delete that position from the map instead. Both are covered in Your logbook.
If a trip is missing
Work through these in order:
- Wait an hour, with the monitoring device powered and online. Most "missing" trips are not finished yet.
- If reporting stopped when you arrived, power the device on again at the same place and leave it connected for about an hour.
- 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 explains what you are reading.
- 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.
- If no trip appears, write to [email protected] with the date and your boat name. We can check whether enough tracking data is available to help.