The electronic logbook

1. Why a logbook

The ship's log is a sailor's tradition, and in some cases an obligation. It serves first to fix your position: if the electronics fail, the last position noted by hand becomes the starting point for dead reckoning. It also serves to understand afterwards — why that leg took so long, when the sea got up, when you should have reefed.

Solano offers an electronic version, designed for recreational sailing: entry is fast (an entry fills in a few seconds, the position comes from GPS), the journal is shared with the crew, and above all it carries the weather forecasts of the trip so they stay readable once the network is lost.

2. The boat and the crew

It all starts with a boat. You describe it once — name, registration, home port, MMSI, length, beam, draught and air draught — and you fill in its sail wardrobe: mainsail with its number of reefs, genoa, staysail, spinnaker… This list will then be used to record the sail plan set in two clicks, without retyping anything.

Sharing with the crew

A boat can be shared. From its configuration, you generate an invitation that gives a code and a link: the code can be read out over VHF or by phone, the link sent by message. The crew member who joins sees the tracks and can add entries.

The boat owner remains the only one able to change its configuration and remove a member.

3. The track: from departure to arrival

A track is one passage: a day sail, a leg, a crossing. You give it a name, optionally the crew aboard, and you can associate a saved route with it — it's this link that will let you carry the weather (see below).

4. The voyage: organising your tracks

A cruise is not one passage, it's a series of passages. The voyage is the folder above: "Sardinia 2026", "Delivery Brest → La Rochelle", "2026 season". You file the tracks that belong to it there.

Nothing forces you to create one. A day sail stays an isolated track, and the panel groups them under that label. You can also attach an already-sailed track after the fact, or detach it: the organising is done whenever you want, it isn't decided at departure.

5. What you record in an entry

Each entry carries a time, an event type and whatever you think worth recording. Nothing is mandatory except the time: a quick fix can be limited to the position.

Position

The "Acquire" button reads the device's GPS and fills in latitude, longitude, course over ground (COG) and speed over ground (SOG). Location is never requested when the app opens: it is only used at your request.

The boat's progress

Compass heading, speed through the water on the log, pressure on the barometer. The gap between the compass heading and the course over ground tells the leeway; the gap between speed through the water and speed over ground tells the current.

Observations

Observed true wind (direction and force), cloud amount in oktas, sea state on the Douglas scale — shown in plain language ("Smooth", "Rough", "High") rather than as a bare number. These observations are valuable: it's them that, read back later, say whether the forecast was right.

The boat's operation

Propulsion (sail, engine, or both), point of sail, sail plan set with the number of reefs taken, name of the lookout on watch.

Engine and levels

On the departure and arrival entries only, Solano offers the usual readings: engine hour meter, fuel level on an eighths gauge (E to F, like a dashboard gauge) or in litres, and an oil-check tick. Recorded at departure and arrival, they give the consumption for the leg and keep a record of the checks done before getting under way.

6. Photos from aboard

A photo attaches to an entry in the journal, not to the passage loosely. It therefore inherits the time and position already noted: you find Tuesday's 2 pm sea squall at the right place on the track, without having filed anything.

On capture, the image is reduced to 1600 pixels and re-encoded. A logbook photo is not a print: it goes from 4 MB to 300 KB, which makes sending possible from an anchorage. Re-encoding erases the EXIF data in the process, so the shot's original location is not published.

They are stored privately and visible to the crew only, via a signed link with a limited lifetime. Your own photos stay viewable offline; those taken by a crew member load when you have a network, like the frozen weather. Count on about thirty photos per passage: it's a logbook, not a holiday roll.

Finally, the exchange formats don't carry them: GPX and CSV export the track and the readings, not the images. Those live in the app and in the summary sheet.

7. Point of sail: true wind or apparent wind?

When you sail, Solano computes the point of sail from the observed wind and the heading: close-hauled, close reach, beam reach, broad reach, running, dead run — with the tack, port or starboard.

Two details matter, and the app leaves both up to you.

Which wind did you enter?

Onboard instruments most often display the true wind, which they compute themselves from the apparent wind measured at the masthead and the boat's speed. A bare anemometer, on the other hand, gives the apparent. So you specify which one you're recording: without this information, the app might count the boat's speed twice.

Three ways to record the wind, depending on what you have in front of you:

• True — direction as a heading ("wind from 270"), as announced by the bulletin or the instrument.
• Apparent — direction as a heading too, but that of the wind the boat feels while moving.
• Relative — the angle to the bow and the side (starboard or port): "45° starboard", exactly what a masthead wind indicator shows. The speed is then the apparent speed.

The relative mode is a way to enter, not to store: Solano converts the angle to a direction using your heading, because a wind direction must stay comparable to that of the models and bulletins. If you haven't entered a heading, the direction is not recorded — better nothing than a false direction — but the point of sail is still computed: it depends only on the angle.

Which wind is the point of sail named on?

By convention, points of sail are defined relative to the true wind: close-hauled at 45°, beam reach at 90°, broad reach at 135°, dead run at 180°. The apparent wind is used for sail trim — it's always closer to the bow, because the boat's speed pulls it forward.

Solano therefore shows the two angles and a single point of sail: "45° off the true wind, 35° off the apparent, so close-hauled". No toggle to set — a point of sail has a definition, and seeing both angles is enough to understand the difference.

The conversion needs the wind force and the boat's speed: without them there's nothing to convert, and the point of sail is then named on the angle you entered — Solano says so rather than pretending.

8. Carrying the weather to sea

This is the most useful part once offshore: the network drops, the forecasts stay.

If your track is associated with a saved route, Solano freezes a snapshot: for each hour of the trip and for each weather model of the route, the forecast at the position you'll be at that time. Added to this are the official documents for the area, in two distinct forms:

• the routine bulletins — the Météo-France coastal bulletin, AEMET costera, Meteomar, Inshore Waters — with the general situation then, forecast period by period, the wind, the sea, the swell, the weather and the visibility;
• the warnings in force (BMS, gale warnings, MeteoAlarm), with their full text and instructions.

Both count, and for different reasons: "no warning in force" is good news, but it doesn't tell you what the weather will be. It's the bulletin that says that.

Which moment to freeze?

If your route's departure is more than an hour away, Solano asks what to freeze: the weather of the planned departure or that of now. A route planned for tomorrow morning must obviously freeze tomorrow morning's weather.

Reviewing the detail without a network

The panel shows a summary (mean and maximum wind, gusts, sea height, rain). For the detail, a button reopens Route mode itself, fed by the snapshot: you find your usual tables and curves, hour by hour and model by model, without any request going out.

When you're not sailing at the planned speed

That's the normal case at sea. So the snapshot doesn't just freeze the planned time at each point, but a window of hours around it (± 25 %). You then just correct the speed in the panel and all the forecasts recalibrate to your actual pace — offline.

More direct still: the "Recalibrate on my position" button measures your real progress along the track via GPS, deduces the speed actually held since departure, and shifts the forecasts accordingly.

9. Reviewing the passage on the map

The noted positions are shown on the map, joined by coloured segments. The colour criterion is chosen according to what you're trying to review:

Coloured by propulsion, the track shows at a glance the sections done under engine. Coloured by point of sail, it tells the tacks made. Clicking a point highlights the corresponding entry in the journal, and vice versa.

10. Limits and good practice

• It is not a regulatory log. Solano does not claim to replace the official logbook required for certain passages or flags. Check what your regulations demand.
• Frozen forecasts age. A snapshot frozen the day before stays that of the day before: it won't see a deepening low. At sea, the bulletins received by VHF or SSB remain the reference.
• A phone's GPS is not a navigation instrument. Its accuracy degrades below deck, and it replaces neither the compass nor the log.
• Entry stays manual. Positions are not recorded automatically: it's you who decides when an entry deserves to be written — as on a paper logbook.