For sailors who want to keep more than a handful of photos.
Your logbook. Complete, searchable, exportable.
Yachtlogbuch is a web application for keeping a digital ship's log. You record a voyage the way it actually unfolds: from the rough plan down to the individual sailing day and the individual waypoint. What you enter stays structured and machine-readable — and can be handed out as a finished logbook at any time. The application runs in the browser and on mobile, including those stretches where there is no signal at all.
What you record
Five levels that fit into one another. Each has its own purpose — together they make a logbook that does more than list days.
Voyage
The bracket around everything: a summer in the Mediterranean, an Atlantic crossing, a season on Lake Constance. A voyage carries a title, a period, a boat and a logo. It is the unit you export and pass on at the end.
Passage
A coherent leg within the voyage — the crossing from Mallorca to Sardinia, the week with a particular crew. Passages break long voyages into readable parts and can be evaluated on their own.
Sailing day
The core of the logbook: a day on the water with departure and destination harbour, distance, weather, sail configuration and crew. Exactly what the paper log asks for — without smudged ink, and without wondering which box holds the 2019 notebook.
Day for other activities
Not every day of a voyage is a sailing day. Harbour days, maintenance, shore trips, waiting for weather. Record them and you end up with an unbroken voyage instead of a chain of unexplained gaps.
Waypoint
A single point with coordinates, time and a note. Waypoints turn a sailing day into a traceable track: where the anchorage was, when the wind arrived, at which mark you bore away.
Planned, tracked, observed
Waypoints come in three flavours. The distinction sounds like a detail, but it is the reason the logbook is worth something later: it keeps apart what you intended, what actually happened, and what caught your eye.
Planned
Set before casting off: the intended route, today's destination, the fallback bay. Planned waypoints are your preparation — and, in hindsight, an honest comparison between intention and reality.
Tracked
Recorded automatically from the device's GPS while you are under way. The tracked trail appears without any effort on your part and gives you the distance actually sailed — the basis for mileage and for the map in the export.
Observed
Set by hand when something happens: a wind shift, dolphins, damage, a manoeuvre, the moment with the best light. Observed waypoints are the places you will want to remember.
Recording — as fine as you need it
While you sail, the yacht logbook records your position automatically. You decide how densely — and whatever turns out too dense, you thin out afterwards.
Adjustable recording interval
The spacing between two recorded points can be set in seconds, from five seconds up to an hour. A short interval captures every harbour manoeuvre; a long one is plenty for a quiet passage and saves battery. The setting belongs to your account and applies on every device.
Saved as it happens
Every recorded point is stored the moment it is taken — not when you stop. An accidental reload, a closed tab or a browser crash no longer costs you a recording. Whatever fails to get through on a weak signal is held back rather than dropped. The screen stays awake while recording, so the device keeps writing in its mount.
Optimise tracking
A long sailing day leaves hundreds of points on a straight course. One click thins them out without distorting the track: you choose how coarsely to simplify, see in advance how many points remain, and only then confirm. Course changes, start and finish, and every point with a photo, manoeuvre or note are always kept.
Getting back out what you put in
Data you cannot export is data on loan. Yachtlogbuch hands every voyage back in three forms — at the push of a button, with no rework.
PDF logbook
A typeset document covering the whole voyage: passages, sailing days and days for other activities in chronological order, with map extracts, waypoints and pictures. To print, to file, to give away — or as evidence of nautical miles sailed.
Minimal website
The same voyage as a lean HTML export with no application behind it: easy to send, to archive, or to drop onto any web space. Crew and family need neither access nor an account to read along.
PDF with original images
The same logbook as a ZIP archive: the PDF alongside a “bilder” folder holding the photos at full resolution. The document itself carries space-saving preview images that link to the original file once unpacked — a manageable PDF without losing any quality in the shots.
Raw data for administrators
Beyond the two logbook formats, administrators can pull a voyage in full as raw data: a ZIP archive with one Excel file each for the voyage, passages, sailing days, days for other activities and waypoints, plus the pictures and an index. Foreign keys stay consistent within the export, and unlike the logbook export it also contains every tracked waypoint. Intended for backups, your own analysis, and moving to another system.