Captain's Log
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Two sidebar items: ⚓ Captain's Log (this boat's trips) and 🧭 My Trips (every trip you're on, across every boat, plus any crew invites waiting on your response).
Logging a trip
+ Log Trip captures departure and, optionally, one or more stops beyond it, in the order you'll visit them — a multi-stop cruise shows its full route, not just a single destination. Add the date — or a date range for a multi-day trip — and optionally a departure time and expected return time (with time zone), conditions, notes, distance offshore, and, if it was a race, the regatta name, fleet/class, and finish position. You can log your own hours underway and role in the same form, or come back and add them later.
Departure and stops use the marine location picker. Type to search known marinas, harbors, and anchorages, or pick a spot on a map. Linking a real location gives the trip a NOAA forecast (see Marine Locations & Weather). Reorder stops with the up and down arrows, and use 🗺️ View all destinations on map to see the whole route.
Forecast
An active trip shows the NOAA forecast for its departure location on the trip's date: wind, gusts, waves, and the next tide. Forecasts only reach about a week ahead, so a trip further out says to check back closer to departure.
Automatic Float Plans
If you've saved a Default Float Plan for the boat, logging a new trip queues a Float Plan to your usual recipients automatically. See Float Plan.
Heading out on a multi-day trip?
Saving a multi-day trip that isn't purely in the past shows a one-time nudge: your mooring will be free while you're out, with a one-tap email to your harbor master or yacht club letting them know (plus a copy-to-clipboard fallback if you don't have a mail client set up). "Not this time" dismisses it for good — it won't ask again for that trip. The same "notify harbor master" option is also available any time from that trip's card, while viewing or editing it. See Home & Vessel Summary for the full mooring-days report this feeds into.
Your hours, and USCG sea service
Hours, role, and attestation are tracked per person — a trip with three people aboard has three separate entries, not one shared number. The USCG Sea Service Summary at the top reflects only your own logged hours, not the boat's totals:
- Sea days — trips where you logged ≥4 hours underway.
- Total hours — your hours underway, summed.
- Nautical miles — distance offshore across trips you're on.
An entry you log yourself is attested automatically if you're the one who created the trip. Anyone else's entry — crew you added, or someone who logged their own hours after accepting an invite — shows Pending until you (the trip's owner) tap Attest on it.
Once an entry is 30 days old it locks — you can no longer edit the hours or role directly.
Crew without a ReadyHelm account
+ Add guest crew (no account) lets you log someone's name, role, and hours directly — useful for a guest who was aboard but isn't going to sign up.
Inviting crew
Under a trip's Invite crew, enter an email and (optionally) their role, then Invite. What happens next depends on the invite's status:
- Pending — waiting on a response. You can cancel it any time before they respond.
- Accepted — they'll show up in the trip's "who's aboard" line, and can log their own hours (which you'll then need to attest).
- Declined — shown with their reason, if they gave one.
Trip Invites are separate from full crew/vessel sharing (both are on the Free plan) — inviting someone to crew a trip doesn't give them ongoing access to the rest of the boat's record.
Who sees what on an invite
Visibility is deliberately asymmetric:
- You (the trip's owner) see every invite's real status, and any decline reason.
- The invitee sees their own invite in full.
- Everyone else aboard sees only a plain list of who's accepted — not who's pending, who declined, or why.
My Trips
🧭 My Trips (under Crew Corner, fleet-wide) pulls together every trip you can reach — your own boats, boats you're shared on, and any trip you've accepted a crew invite to — even if that boat isn't otherwise in your fleet. It's also where pending trip invites show up for you to accept or decline, with a reason if you decline.
This is the only place a crew invite is visible if you don't otherwise have access to that boat — including on the very first sign-in screen, before you've claimed (or explicitly skipped) a boat of your own.
Searching and filtering
A search box plus a vessel filter and a status filter narrow the list down; Clear resets all three at once.
Trip detail and editing
Click a trip to expand its full detail in place — crew log, invites, any Float Plan sent for it (see Float Plan), and, if you have edit access and the trip is still active, an edit form for its dates, stops, timing, conditions, and other details.
Float Plan
Send a trip's safety details to people who aren't aboard, so someone knows where you are and when to worry — see Float Plan for the full workflow.
Common questions
Can ReadyHelm track sea time for a USCG captain's license?
Yes. Captain's Log tracks each person's own hours, and a trip with at least 4 hours underway counts as a sea day. The USCG Sea Service Summary shows your sea days, hours and miles, and Home's USCG sea service tile shows progress toward an OUPV or Master license. It's a day count to help you prepare, not a check of every USCG rule.
Can crew without a ReadyHelm account be logged on a trip?
Yes. + Add guest crew (no account) records a guest's name, role and hours.