The Log

I suppose it's a little grandiose to call a logbook for a 33 foot sailboat a "Ship's Log" but we need a little puffery to have enough confidence to go out and dodge freighters, ferries, and crazed sportsfishermen.

Mandy designed a custom passage log format for us and had it printed and bound. We just got it today and it looks good. She's too freaked out right now to write anything for the blog, but maybe she'll talk about how she did it at some point.

Keeping a log is one of those finer points of seamanship which seems to find little agreement in the sailing community. Some sailors keep logs religiously; others not at all. There is no legal requirement to do so on small, non-commercial vessels, and with the advent of chartplotters and other modern devices there seems less and less practical reason to do so. Anyone can look and see what the weather was at practically any position for any time and date from recent years. Memories of trips are increasingly to be found in home videos or digital photos.

Indeed, opinions vary widely on what should be kept in a ship's log even if one is kept. Some people simply log their mileage or engine hours, or jot a note or two indicating where they've been on a day sail and who was along. Others follow a more traditional format with hourly notations of position, wind and sea state, course, speed, and the like. There are also different sorts of logs; the above comprises a sailing log, but it's equally valuable to keep a log of maintenance activities, fueling, or stores.

It may be that I am among those predisposed to keep a log by my childhood exposure to my grandfather's meticulous record-keeping for his automobiles. At every fuel stop, he'd get back in the truck or camper and carefully note his mileage, the amount of fuel taken on, and miles used per gallon since the last fill-up.

So I have kept a combined logbook since we have had the boat, tracking both our sailing and maintenance activities. It has been somewhat unsatisfactory, however, in that it is difficult to find items of either category when one wishes to refer back to them.

So now that I have this fancy sailing log, with a page for each day and a line for each hour, I'll be able to track our passages in it and save my "Captain's" log for maintenance and other items of interest.