I get asked a fair bit how I actually use the app I built, so this is a small field report from the three kinds of boats I sail — a tiny dinghy, a daysail keelboat, and the occasional charter yacht. Different boats, different layouts, and the same iPhone running Sailing Companion. The thing I have learned the hard way is that the boat does not need much for the app to be useful. It mostly needs a place to put the phone and a charged battery.
1. The dinghy — phone clipped to the mast
My own little boat has no electronics at all: no plotter, no instruments, no depth sounder, no shore power. There is also no obvious horizontal surface to rest a phone on. The trick that has worked best is a small handlebar-style mount clipped to the mast, just below the hounds, where the phone sits vertically and is visible from the tiller. From there I can glance down and see SOG, COG, the trip distance, and the elapsed time. The track is recorded for the whole sail without me ever touching the phone, which is the entire point — I am sailing, not screen-watching.
2. The daysail keelboat — phone on the metal rail by the companionway
The daysail boat I sail on most weekends is slightly better equipped, but only slightly. There is still no plotter and no other instruments, and the cockpit is small. The natural spot for the phone turned out to be a simple spring-clip mount on the metal rail just inside the companionway, where it is visible from the helm but out of the way of sheets and bodies. That is where Sailing Companion basically takes over: GPS track, logbook entries with a photo and a one-line note when something memorable happens, and a clean GPX at the end of the day. The crew is happy because the helmsman has a number to look at; the helmsman is happy because the logbook writes itself.
3. The charter yacht — phone above the built-in plotter
The interesting case is the charter yacht. Many of them have a plotter at the helm, but not all of them work, and even when they do, the user interface can be a generation behind what you are used to. So my habit now is to clip the iPhone to the helm console, right above the built-in plotter, and run Sailing Companion in parallel. The plotter still does what the plotter is good at — it shows the chart, the depth, and the AIS. Sailing Companion does the things I trust it to do — the GPS track, the logbook, the anchor watch, the cockpit metrics in the layout I already know, and the waypoint routes I can hand to the co-skipper. The two screens are doing different jobs, not fighting each other.
There is also a quiet but real benefit to running the app on a charter: my track is recorded on my device, in the export format I control, regardless of what happens to the boat. When the charter ends, the trip leaves with me. That alone is worth the small effort of clipping the phone in.
The anchor alarm is the real win on a charter
And then there is the anchor alarm — which on a charter is quietly the headline feature. When you tuck into a bay for the night, the boat's plotter and most of its instruments can be switched off at the breaker panel. The fridge stays cold, the beer stays cold, and the boat's house battery lasts a lot longer. The boat is essentially asleep. Your anchor watch, by contrast, is still very much awake — running quietly on the iPhone clipped to the helm, watching GPS, ready to wake the whole cockpit if the swing circle breaks.
There is a second, slightly less obvious advantage. Because Sailing Companion is a plain iOS app, I can run it in parallel on a second device — most often my iPad, lying on the chart table below. The two are watching the same GPS, the same anchor point, the same radius. If one of them has a hiccup — low battery, a glitch, anything — the other is still on the job. Two independent anchor watches, from two independent devices, sharing the same definition of "still anchored." It is the kind of redundancy I would not go without on a longer passage.
One small practical note, because people ask: at night, I always keep the phone and the iPad plugged into a power bank. Anchor watch is honest work for a battery — it is basically the GPS running the whole time — and a dead phone at 03:00 is the single most preventable anchor-alarm failure mode. A 10,000 mAh power bank and a short cable in the cabin is, in practice, the cheapest insurance on the boat.
What the app does not do (yet)
It is only fair to be honest about the limits. Sailing Companion currently does not show water depth — neither a chart with depth contours, nor a live depth readout from a sounder. It also does not show wind — not true wind, not apparent wind, not a wind shift graph. On the dinghy and the daysail those have never been a problem for me, because the wind is right there in my face. On the charter, the boat's instruments cover it. So the app is honest about being a sailing logbook and a track tool, not a full instrument package. If a future version reads wind or depth from external sensors, that is a story for another day.
Three boats, three mounts, one iPhone, one app. The common thread is simple: the phone is always where my eyes already are.
The point of all this
I built the app first and foremost for the way I actually sail, which is to say on a wide variety of boats, most of them modest, with whatever the boat happens to have on board. If Sailing Companion works on my own no-electronics dinghy and also plays nicely with a charter plotter, it will probably work for the boat you sail on too. And if it does not, that is the kind of feedback I want to hear about.
Fair winds,
— Bernd
B
Bernd Bornhauser
Creator of Sailing Companion
