
Sailor's Companion
Sailing logbook, track & log
About
What's New in Sailor's Companion
1.6.0
September 12, 2026
Sailor’s Companion 1.6 — your own marks on the chart, and the one vessel you want to keep an eye on. • Markers on the chart — hold the chart → “Drop a marker”: a mark of your own with a symbol, shape, colour, name and note. Markers belong to the chart, not to the voyage: they outlive the logbook you set them from, travel with device sync and sit in the iCloud backup. Fifteen symbols from the app and the six animal symbols of the sightings are yours to pick from, plus a chart layer of their own. An existing marker is edited in place — what you change applies at once. • Follow an AIS target — tap a vessel, press the pin: it stays drawn even with the AIS layer off, and it outlives the six-minute ageing as a hollow silhouette stamped “last heard”. Bearing and distance stand in the control panel, and on request it raises the alarm when that one vessel comes closer than a distance you set — explicitly while lying still too, because “tell me when he is within two miles” is exactly what you want when you are waiting at anchor. An aged target claims nothing: no heading arrow, no CPA, no speed, only its last position with the time on it. • Several measurements at once — up to six routes on the chart, each in its own colour, and they stay until you take them away. A tap makes one of them active; the active one gives the numbers: bearing and distance on the compass rose, the time of arrival, the GPX export. A long press opens the menu to add, recolour and remove. • Type or dial in a coordinate — the chart search now takes a position as well: decimal degrees, degrees with decimal minutes, degrees-minutes-seconds, with or without N/S/E/W, point or comma. Below it sits a digit wheel for entry without a keyboard, and a preview shows what you typed in both notations before the chart jumps there. • The battery lasts longer — the GPS receiver sleeps when the boat lies measurably still or you are ashore; the system wakes the app as soon as the boat leaves its place. Alongside it, four switches that each throttle what runs in the background: the Lock Screen display, the control panel, AIS and sharing. The anchor watch is exempt from all of it — an alarm that comes late because of a battery setting would be a safety defect. • Sightings and chart notes carry the boat’s course and speed at the moment of the entry, visible in the logbook and in every export. If the boat lay still the fields stay empty rather than claiming a zero. Older entries are not filled in after the fact. • AIS sea marks now arrive over NMEA 2000 as well, not over NMEA 0183 alone. Also fixed: a long passage in busy water no longer kills the app — every speed label beside a vessel created an image that was never released again, and after barely three hours the memory was full. And if the launch ever hangs, the way now leads out of the splash screen instead of nowhere, including the option to read a repaired database back in. As always: offline-first, one thumb, out at sea.
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Sailor's Companion Premium
PDF & KML export, multiple logbooks, iCloud backup










