Those that follow us will know I am a bit of a electronics guy and our boat has a network that shares all the NMEA data (SOC, POS, AWS etc) to any device that cares to read it.
Because of this we use an electronic boat log. It hooks up, via the wifi on the iPad, to the NMEA and automatically logs where we are, what speed we are doing, our direction, temperature, air pressure.. Even waves and forecast if we still have 4G connection , every 30min (configurable).
We can edit every log and add our own, which we do on a regular basis, but if we don’t have any thing significant to say the autolog does it for us.
At the end of the trip, we save the log onto a cloud drive, as a PDF document, and also print out a hard copy for our records.
If anything happened during the voyage we’d have it on all our devices immediately available and also we could quickly export it.
We love this thing as it makes our life easier, safer and also allows us to create logs with photo’s and narration that makes it a good read to those of our family that are interested in the more detailed account of our passage.
2 Responses
I love this idea, I am getting as much as I can on the NMEA network. I see you like Logbook for iPhone, are you aware of any android/PC apps that are good?
Hey Colin,
Unfortunately we are a iPhone boat :-)… that coming from an ex Microsoft Principal, does seem a bit odd :-).
But if anyone does have positive experience with an android logbook, please comment, I am sure lots of other might benefit.