Do You Count

[Jim Cate]

Originally Posted by JoeRobertJr

Another important measure of sailing experience is number of meaningful CF posts.

Edit to improve accuracy...

Jim

[sailorboy1]

well that killed the thread

[MVDarlin]

I've kept a simple ledger book log for over 20 yrs.
Date time and engine hours for starting / ending trips. Comments. Also add maintenance items. Over 2000 hrs logged. Seems like an important part of any vessel operation.

[Amapola]

I keep track in my daily journal/log book.

[kev_rm]

My log records, one record per trip (trip = boat moving more than an hour):

Date , Vessel, Route ,Hours Underway, Miles, Crew, Spd Kt, Start Time, End Time, Max Winds, Engine Hours Ending, Odometer(GPS) , Notes

For multi-day passages, I have a noon report, which includes the above, plus crew condition, detailed wind conditions, and position.

I use google sheets, and then a paper journal if not near civilization

And the only time I've ever used this data is to support insurance purchasing...

[capt jgw]

I'm licensed so I need 360 days at sea every five years to renew. That's 72 days per year and here on the Great Lakes that ain't easy. The commercial boats I run aren't on a regular schedule so I don't get a lot of days there, and due to the virus we didn't work at all in 2020. . I need every day I can get so yes, I keep track.

[Tanqueray]

Originally Posted by sailorboy1

Do you count the number of days you sail, the miles, days at anchor etc.? I read lots of post with "I did "X" number of ........".

I don't count. Yes I write down engine hours and dates etc in the maintenance log. I have a sail log with dates and where we went etc but no miles in it. I could if pressed go through that log for underway days, but I don't have a running total. Counting etc just doesn't matter to me to know.

I started jotting down each sail, date, crew, miles sailed, wind and sea conditions, etc. when my son told me was shooting for 40 days skiing (he is in Colorado)...I figured I would see how many days on the water I had (short season on Lake Michigan).

I think due to Covid, I beat him this year...

Greg

[Chotu]

I gave up the practice about 15 years ago when an ex “lost” my prized logbook overboard.

I no longer prefer to spend time doing a log. It’s a very busy life and you only get so many hours.

I do, however, always transfer my course and waypoints to paper every day just in case.

[NPCampbell]

I have traveled to the same office in a large downtown city for 23 years. About 15 years ago I found a phone app that tracks your distance and time. Surprisingly, it identified that the no stoplight but high traffic route that I had used for years was several minutes slower than the slow route with many traffic lights. This has saved me about 25 hours of commuting per year.

I can see where detailed logging would make a difference if you were making the same passage over and over again but otherwise it's probably unnecessary overkill.

[BillKny]

Originally Posted by sailorboy1

Do you count the number of days you sail, the miles, days at anchor etc.? I read lots of post with "I did "X" number of ........".

I don't count. Yes I write down engine hours and dates etc in the maintenance log. I have a sail log with dates and where we went etc but no miles in it. I could if pressed go through that log for underway days, but I don't have a running total. Counting etc just doesn't matter to me to know.

I download our track data from the MFD to google maps to keep track of where we have been, and share it. When I do this google calculates the length of the track for "free." That's how I know.

It is easy for us to keep track of days at sea, we just look at the blog postings.

Days at anchor is another easy one. 365-(The number of days underway)- (the few days in a marina)

For those of us with USCG licenses, keeping track of days at sea is required for renewal.

No extraordinary effort involved...

[Kaimana]

This is a shaggy-dog story about counting on the ocean.

I had a Jim Brown Searunner 37 cutter-rigged trimaran back in the day; I built her myself, it was the only way I could afford a boat. They're fairly fast: a sistership of hers won the Multihull Transpac in 1972.

While sailing my boat in San Francisco Bay, I realized I'd never met a retired person who was enjoying their boating life. They all seemed like grumpy old farts who could barely move around on deck.

I thought it was sad that by the time you could afford to retire on a boat and sail around the world, you were too old to handle the heavy physical work it demands. And so, I decided I was going to retire first, sail around the world while I was young, then go to work and have a family.

So, the day came when I was 24 years old, on my first passage, headed from San Diego to the Marquesas on my way around the world, on my 37-foot cutter.

There was no need for me to keep a log of engine hours. That's because I had a 6 hp inboard diesel with a 1-1/2 gallon tank on top of the engine, plug a 5-gallon jerry-jug. At a quart an hour at full throttle, doing 6 knots in a flat calm, I had 26 hours of fuel on board.

And that was a lot! Because I didn't use the engine to motor through the ITCZ, or in calms, light headwinds, and so on, the way most boats with engines do; I cranked it up for five minutes to get the anchor up and get headed onto the first tack out of the anchorage, then turned it off. Used like this, I had a 1-year supply of fuel on board.

It was a cute little Farymann diesel with no transmission; it spun the Martec folding prop through a Dayco Cogbelt drive. Trimarans are sensitive to engine weight, or to weight period; and my entire engine installation, including mounts, exhaust, prop shaft, strut and prop, and fuel, weighed about 280 pounds. And even though she only did 6 knots in a calm, she could also hold her head up against 35 knots and make about 1-1/2 knots good against it, if I ever had to motor directly into the wind to get into harbor.

So I didn't log engine hours. But I did keep a log of nautical miles run per day. And I found out about the cruiser's game of "comparing daily runs" when I got into harbor at Taiohae in the Marquesas, at the end of that first passage. This was back in the day when almost all the cruising boats were deep-draft ballasted monohulls.

A guy with a 50-footer was getting a lot of attention because he'd had a passage that averaged 154 nautical miles and had a best day of 178. Then someone asked me what "my boat had done".

I had to think for a moment, then said "224". A hush fell over the group; and finally someone said: "Wow! That is an incredible best day!".

And then realized I'd said it wrong; I'd given my average daily run; my best day had been a screaming reach for 24 hours when we'd done 284 nautical miles. And so I innocently corrected myself. Then I looked at the faces around me and realized I'd stupidly ruined their day.

Since then I haven't played the daily run game; when asked, I just say: "It was so much fun, it seemed like we were going really fast". And "We caught two mahi mahi!".

And that's all that matters: are you having fun with your boat, or not? If you are, share it. If not, figure out how to fix it. Life's too short not to enjoy it if at all possible.

With Warm Aloha, Tim

[wingssail]

Yes, we count, sort of.

We have a log which is kept every time we get underway, it is paper, and it is scanned, digitized, and periodically placed on the cloud. There are currently 1468 logged trips, some may be a few hours, some may be several days. You can view it here, Log Book Pages You can see what we record. Most maintenance items are also logged on the same pages, even if they occured when we were not underway. Most of the important information is digitized and searchable. We find it very valuable after the fact.

For example if we have an alternator problem we can look on the log and search for all the alternator entries and see a history of the alternator issues on the boat. There are many things we can search on.

We also keep a spreadsheet of all the fuel used and engine hours. This data goes back many years. We can add up the amount of fuel used (685 gallons). This is not loaded to the cloud but we might do that.

We also have an OpenCPN route of all of our cruising passages. It adds up to over 55,000 miles but does not include side trips, races, day sails etc.

Averaging 100 miles per day that is 550 sea days (it could be less since we usually cover more miles in a day than that)

Do we tally days/hours sailed? No. But we have reverse calculated it. We know how much fuel we've used at anchor charging the batteries. Putting it all together we've used 90% or more of our fuel charging the batteries and less than 10% motoring.

[Donald Bryden]

My log books are the pocket sized spiral bound type. I have an underway log where I log departures, courses, and when appropriate speeds, weather, etc. After arrival, I log the GPS mileage and also the engine hours and instrument readings. I also have a log for the generator and the watermaker. At the end of the year, I recap miles run, countries visited, islands visited, numbers of anchorages and mooring and any other information that might seem relevant. I keep this recap in my laptop.

[George_SD]

Don't count anything really. I only keep records of upgrades and maintenance done, but nothing related to distance, time, etc. Just don't really care for that data.

More importantly, there are other things that have more value that I would rather spend my time on.

[carstenb]

Well we are not anal or anything but we keep a written log. Whenever the hook comes up it is entered. If on passage, we fill in our log every 4 hours (at watch change). It records, date, time, position, barometer, weather conditions, swell height/period, speed, wind speed, course, sail trim/engine run and anything else unusual. We also record clearing in/out name of the officer who did it and any other contacts we have with authorities

It really takes only a few moments and we do it for ourselves (a momento) but also because if we ever lose the boat, we can explain conditions exactly to the insurance company.

In regards, to checking in/out - if you've ever had any issues with authorities and they get sceptical about something and you can pull out your log and say " Officer so-and-so told me on the (date) that this was allowed and not an issue" then you gone a long way to defusing any issues.

But we really do it because it is good seamanship.