Steve Bradley Keeping a detailed ships log, accurately recording position, heading, wind strength and direction, weather conditions, sea state and boat speed on a regular basis is undoubtably an important and necessary task. But we live in a digital age where paper charts are disappearing and our boats are buzzing with data. So in 2021 I was keen to find a better way of automating the more tedious aspect of writing the log. I came across a wonderful little app called Ships Logbook for Captains (or “Logbook” for short) developed by Florian Kriesche in Germany.
Since 2022 (running on an iPad that we also use for some of our navigation and planning) our Logbook app has been busy writing and creating 99.9% of our ships log by consuming GPS position and NMEA instrument data from network. Initially using a Shipmodule unit but more recently, and more efficiently using our Predict Wind Data hub that broadcasts this data over our WiFi network via TCP and UDP.
Logbook automatically appends this data with weather data, sea state and additional geocoding sourced from the Internet. It’s also possible to manually edit or add to this data with text and photos if needed.
The Logbook app seamlessly synchronises the logbook records via the cloud and these can be accessed on multiple devices (up to 16). The app also creates an online tracking page and offers multiple formats for export and including the creation of a nicely formatted PDF that you could print if you so desire.
A feature we recently discovered (and are just starting to experiment with) is the ability to interrogate the photos library on the device the app is running on. It suggests matches by date and time between photos and log entries and with a simple click add the photo to the log entry. It’s a really neat way of enriching the ships logbook.
Logbook is available for IOS (iPhone and iPad) and Android for a one off fee of around $15, plus a small voluntary annual donation for the optional sync functionality. It’s incredibly rich in features and its under continuous development so it really is excellent value for money.
You need to spend a little time adjusting the settings and learning about all the apps features but once that’s done it’s accurate and reliable. Then you just have to remember to start and stop the log, and change the status between motoring, motor sailing, sailing etc. The Logbook app will do all the rest by recording regular log entries rich with data. It’s then entirely up to you if you want to add further information to these entries or create further manual entries. We tend not too but we do recommend checking the log and the statistics view at the end of each day to ensure there are no errors in the GPS track or anomalies recorded from the NMEA data.
If you decide to try it for yourself please get in touch with me ( Contact Steve ) and I will explain how and why I have configured the settings in the way I have and how to get the best out of the app.
Below you can see the result we achieve by viewing and/or downloading PDF exports of our logbooks covering the last there years and here is a link to this years tracking.
You can read more, download the manual, and see the upcoming feature list on the developers website here: