> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://svsabado.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Logbook That Writes Itself - URL: https://svsabado.com/the-logbook-that-writes-itself/ - Published: 2026-09-15T21:54:12.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-15T21:54:12.000Z - Description: The tool automatically records departure, arrival, distance, duration, speed, wind, all of it and each passage is named after where we left and where we ended up making it easy to find them - Author: Ray Hendricks - Tags: Boat Life We use a [custom hardcover logbook](https://svsabado.com/boat-logbook-template/) for not only our passages but also to track maintenance, anchorages, and fuel purchases. We do this for every single passage, large and small. Okay, that is not even close to the truth. We try, but we're human and we have a lot on our plate so we forget to do this a lot. What we do have that we can always rely on though is [Saillogger](https://saillogger.com/?ref=svsabado.com). The tool **automatically** records departure, arrival, distance, duration, speed, wind, all of it and each passage is named after where we left and where we ended up making it easy to find them. We've been running it since 2022 and over 18,000 nautical miles, most recently fed by [Sereno](https://svsabado.com/sereno-anchor-watch-beta/), the anchor watch we built. This post covers what Saillogger does in detail, what it costs, and what the pairing with Sereno looks like in use. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/43/0b/430bbca4-113f-4e23-b72d-96a7c0bcf98d/content/images/2026/09/IMG_0953-1.png) ## How the data gets there Saillogger doesn't sell hardware and doesn't collect anything by itself. Something aboard has to send it data, and their documentation lists three ways: - **A PredictWind tracking link.** No new hardware if you already carry the tracker, but it sends position only. You get trips, tracks, moorages, and statistics, and no instrument monitoring. - **A Victron GX device**, a Cerbo GX or similar wired to the NMEA 2000 backbone. This is the route their setup pages recommend, and the hardware runs roughly USD 300. - **The SignalK plugin** on a server you already run, typically a Raspberry Pi with a PiCAN-M board. Free if the Pi is already aboard. Sabado feeds it a fourth way: **Sereno**, our own anchor watch. Sereno is standalone hardware whose job is to sound an alarm, and reach you, when the boat isn't where you left her. It's in beta with testers around the world, and in beta it's firmware only: you supply an ESP32, a buzzer, and NMEA over wifi. The beta is open [here](https://svsabado.com/sereno-anchor-watch-beta/). Sereno has a Saillogger collector built in. Paste your Collector ID from the Saillogger boat settings page into Sereno's setup screen, press **send now** to confirm the Status card hears you, then turn reporting on. From there Sereno sends telemetry every minute, AIS targets every five minutes, and boat details every hour. One caution from Saillogger's own guidance: use one data source at a time. The service identifies your boat by Collector ID, and two sources reporting one voyage produces duplicate trips. If you already run the Saillogger SignalK plugin, leave Sereno's reporting off. If you want to try Sereno's reporting without disturbing a log you care about, make a second account with its own Collector ID and point Sereno at that. Treat the Collector ID like a password. It's the credential that connects a device to your boat, so keep it out of screenshots. ## How trips get logged There's no start button. Saillogger watches the positions your boat uploads and works out, a little after the fact, that a trip started. Routine swinging at anchor is filtered out so the logbook doesn't fill with false departures. A trip ends when the boat has stayed put for about an hour, and the recorded arrival is the moment you stopped, not the hour later when the service became sure of it. A finished trip carries the track, the start and end times trimmed to when you moved and stopped, distance, average and maximum speed, average and maximum wind, engine hours where the engine reports them, and a names the passage based on your start and end location (e.g. From Musket Cove to Denarau), which you can change. A couple of really cool details about this that we like: - **Coverage gaps don't split a passage.** A boat that stops reporting while moving is assumed to be on passage outside coverage, and the trip stays open so a later upload continues it. Logging needs only an occasional connection; the device aboard holds data and sends it when it next gets online. - **Sailboats get a sailing versus motoring split.** Set your boat type to sailing catamaran or monohull, and if the engine reports over NMEA 2000, each trip shows how long you sailed and how long you motored, worked out from when the engine was running. Nothing to switch on and off as you go. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/43/0b/430bbca4-113f-4e23-b72d-96a7c0bcf98d/content/images/2026/09/IMG_0954-1.png) The first time a trip starts or ends somewhere new, Saillogger creates a **moorage** and names it. The time between two trips becomes a **stay**, named automatically (e.g. 3 days stay at Musket Cove in September 2026), and each stay carries a type: at anchor, at a dock, on a mooring buoy, or types you define. The season reads as a list of places and is a great list of your trips. ## Watching the boat live The dashboard shows the boat on a chart with her latest readings beside it: wind, depth, batteries, temperatures, tanks, whatever the boat reports. A **History** page charts the last 24 hours, 48 hours, or 7 days of any reading. Under way, you can drop a destination flag on the chart and the boat card shows distance to go as you run it off. ![Saillogger monitoring dashboard with wind and depth gauges](https://storage.ghost.io/c/43/0b/430bbca4-113f-4e23-b72d-96a7c0bcf98d/content/images/2026/09/IMG_0955-1.png) The map carries layers beyond your own track: AIS traffic your receiver hears, broader coverage from their AIS Fleet service, boats you follow in green, and fleets you belong to in amber. There's even a layer of nearby Wikipedia points of interest, which we love. ### The anchor circle This is the part of the Sereno pairing we've been involved the most with: a circle around your anchored boat reflects the anchor position and radius published by Sereno, and changing the alarm radius aboard changes the displayed circle with it. While the watch is armed, Sereno sends the anchor position and swing radius along with the telemetry. The dashboard draws the circle around the drop point with a popup showing the swing radius and the boat's current distance from the anchor, and the track draws behind the boat, so a night's swinging shows on the chart as it happens. We wanted to be sure the circle was ours and not something the site inferred, so we changed the radius on the device and watched the map. Set to 420 feet, the dashboard showed 128 meters. Set to 500 feet, it showed 152 meters. Both are the same distance in different units, so the circle on the map is the one Sereno is holding the boat to. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/43/0b/430bbca4-113f-4e23-b72d-96a7c0bcf98d/content/images/2026/09/anchor-holding.png) Saillogger has since taken the pairing further for Sereno. The anchor popup now reports the state of the watch itself, straight from Sereno: **Holding** or **Dragging** and how long ago that changed, whether the alarm sound is muted aboard, the swing radius, the boat's current distance from the anchor, and the furthest she has been from it. That last figure answers the morning-after question, how far did we swing last night, without anyone reading a track by eye. When the alarm triggers, the page says so everywhere you'd look. The boat card carries a red **Anchor alarm: Dragging** banner, the popup switches to Dragging with the time, and the swing circle draws red with the boat sitting outside it and her track showing how she got there. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/43/0b/430bbca4-113f-4e23-b72d-96a7c0bcf98d/content/images/2026/09/anchor-dragging-1.png) Here's why that's useful. Sereno's alarm reaches your phone directly. But if you're off the boat when you get that alarm now you can pull Saillogger up and see exactly what is happening. The Saillogger page answers it with the same verdict the device is sounding: boat, circle, holding or dragging, distance from anchor, all live, on a link they already have. The anchor position Sereno sends isn't where you pressed the button. It's the marked drop point with the bow offset applied, which after backing down can sit a couple hundred feet from where the helm was standing when the anchor went down. The circle on the map is drawn around the anchor, not around a spot on deck. ## Saillogger Alerts Saillogger splits this into two settings pages, **Alerting** decides what raises an alert, **Notifications** decides how it reaches you. The thresholds cover wind speed, barometric pressure, pressure drop over 12 hours, indoor and outdoor temperature, water temperature, depth, battery charge, and battery voltage. The starting values are sensible, 30 knots of wind and 50% battery among them, and every row can be cleared to turn it off. The temperature and voltage rows alert in both directions, so a fridge that fails while you're away from the boat, or a charger stuck high and cooking the batteries, both get caught. A minimum time between alerts, six hours by default, keeps a long gale from repeating itself all night. There's a geofence alarm as well, an area around the boat that alerts if she moves outside it. Alert delivery is email, or push through Pushover, a small paid app from another company that Saillogger sends phone notifications through. Sereno alerts through Pushover too, so on Sabado both the anchor watch and the monitoring service reach the same app on the same phone from the same Pushover account. **Critical** notifications such as when your boat comes online or goes offline are defined too. You need to know if your onboard device has stopped reporting for some reason. An anchor watch aboard plus an independent service noticing silence covers that failure mode. As you can tell, both Sereno and Saillogger makes sure they do everything possible to provide notifications when you need them. ## The journal, timelapse, and getting your data out Notes and photos are also an option. A note posted from the dashboard lands on the boat's position at that moment, and it comes back in four places: on the map, in the finished trip, in the journal, and as a caption in a timelapse as the boat reaches that point. Photos upload directly from your phone. The journal collects it all newest first, prints to PDF for keeping a season, and notes attached to a stop belong to that visit, so next year's return to the same anchorage starts clean. The timelapse replays any stretch of your logged tracks as a moving boat on a chart, satellite or marine, with moorage names and your notes fading in as captions. You can share it as a link that carries the range you picked, or render it to an MP4 in their cloud, portrait and sized for social feeds. Tracks export as GPX at your choice of point density, coarse enough for an old chartplotter or fine enough to keep every wiggle of a harbor approach, and the logbook exports as .csv. The data stays yours and saillogger doesn't hold you hostage. ## Statistics and badges The stats page keeps running totals for any year or for all time: trips, distance, time under way, longest trip, max speed, max wind, moorages, countries with their flags, and nights broken down by how you stayed, at anchor against at a dock against on a mooring. Every figure links to the records behind it. Badges sit on top of the same data, awarded on their own: your first logged trip, 25 nights at anchor away from home, a trip through winds over 30 knots, a 16-hour run through the night. They arrive the day after you earn them and are never taken away. It's a small thing but we like it. A weekly summary email reports the week's trips, places, max wind, and the battery low points, and skips a week with nothing to report. On a long passage a daily update takes over, triggered only by more than a day under way with real distance behind you. ## The maintenance log Saillogger also carries a maintenance log. A log entry takes a title, a date, a category, who did the work, engine hour meter readings, the parts used, and notes. The starting categories are Fuel, Oil Change and Pumpout, and you add your own. Vendors work the same way, starting with Boat Crew. ![The maintenance log, grouped by year with a filter chip per category](https://storage.ghost.io/c/43/0b/430bbca4-113f-4e23-b72d-96a7c0bcf98d/content/images/2026/09/IMG_0956-1.png) Three details from the form: The engine hours fields match the boat, so Sabado gets a port engine meter and a starboard engine meter rather than one box. The location picker is your own moorage list, so a record reads as a new impeller at Musket Cove rather than a date and a blank. And a parts inventory sits beside it, for the impeller, the belt and the filters you keep aboard, so a log entry names the spares it consumed. ![A port engine entry with its meter reading](https://storage.ghost.io/c/43/0b/430bbca4-113f-4e23-b72d-96a7c0bcf98d/content/images/2026/09/IMG_0957-1.png) We have years of maintenance records in there: Entries across generator, propulsion, and hull and rigging, back to the 2021 haulout. The service history lives beside the trips that put the hours on, and "how many hours since the last impeller" gets answered from one place. ## Sharing, and who sees what Everything is private until you turn on **Sharing**: - The master switch publishes a set of pages, each with its own switch and public address: live tracking, timelapse, stats, and the logbook. The journal has no switch of its own; it publishes with live tracking, which you want to know before writing anything personal in a note. - An **access password**, separate from your account password, turns the public pages into pages only your people can open. - The live page embeds in your own website with one iframe line. Then three integrations that share some of your data if you choose to: **AIS Fleet** keeps your position current on their AIS map even in waters no receiver covers, **Windy** turns the boat into a weather station on windy.com, and **NoForeignLand** gets your position about once an hour so that community sees where you are without you updating anything. ## What it costs USD 7.99 a month after a 45 day free trial, no credit card needed to start. The trial starts when your boat first sends data, not when you sign up, so there's no clock running while the hardware is still in a drawer. Subscriptions pause for up to 12 months, which fits a haulout or a cyclone season. ## Trying it Create an account at [saillogger.com](https://saillogger.com/?ref=svsabado.com), add your boat, and point a collector at it. If the collector is Sereno, the whole setup is two fields and a button, and your anchor watch becomes visible and you can start monitoring it remotely immediately. ![Shared live map on a phone](https://storage.ghost.io/c/43/0b/430bbca4-113f-4e23-b72d-96a7c0bcf98d/content/images/2026/09/IMG_0958-1.png) If you pair the two, tell us how it behaves on your boat. The beta testers' reports are what Sereno gets built from.