Terms of use

The service is provided by SternWise LLC (“we” or “Sternwise”). We provide the place for records and the rules they live by. The records themselves are made by people — we neither write nor commission them.

There is one exception, and it is marked: worked examples. We wrote those to show what a filled-in page looks like. Every such record carries a visible “demo” badge, and both the boat and the company in it are invented. Worked examples are never attached to real companies.

You can inspect a boat and tell others about her without an account. An account keeps the records yours: they survive a new phone, they don't vanish when you clear the browser, and you can add to them or withdraw them.

You sign in by a link sent to your email, or with Google. You can set a password later — after that no more sign-in emails.

An account belongs to a person, not to a device. Do not pass it on: a record in the logbook means the person who made it saw the boat.

Facts — what you saw with your own eyes: the condition of a fitting, the date on a label, a meter reading, what a document says. A fact can be checked.

Opinion — how you judge it. Opinion is allowed, but it is kept apart from fact and labelled as opinion.

You may not present opinion as fact, write about what you did not see, or move somebody else's account into the logbook as your own observation.

You may not publish personal data of other people: names of base staff, their phone numbers, photographs of people. The product is about the boat, not about a person.

Attach your own photographs. By uploading a file you confirm that you made it or are otherwise entitled to share it.

A published report is immutable: an edit creates a new version and the previous one is kept. This is deliberate — otherwise a dispute about “what it said originally” cannot be settled.

You can withdraw your own publication at any time. Withdrawal takes it off display; the record and its versions stay in the system, because others may have referred to them.

Records about a boat belong to the boat, not to you. If you delete your account, your name and address disappear from the records while the observations remain: the next crew is not at fault for your leaving.

A company a report is written about can verify its representative and answer publicly. The answer is shown next to the report and does not replace it.

A company can complain about a record. A complaint is reviewed by a person, the review has a deadline, and the decision is given to both sides with reasons.

We remove or restrict records that break these rules, and we tell the author what exactly was broken.

A decision can be appealed. An appeal is reviewed by someone other than the person who made the original decision, and the appeal window is counted by the system, not by a human.

Different sides see different texts of a decision: a party to the dispute gets the reasoning; internal staff correspondence stays closed.

We do not verify every record and cannot: records about boats are made by people in a marina, not by us. We answer for the rules and for applying them, not for the content of somebody else's observations.

A logbook entry is not a surveyor's report and not a technical expert opinion. The decision to go to sea is the skipper's.

We do not promise uninterrupted service. Deploying an update takes about a minute, and the site may be unavailable during it.

You can delete your account at any time; how, is described in the privacy policy.

We can close access to anyone who breaks the rules systematically — above all to anyone writing about boats they have not seen. That decision can be appealed too.

The rules change together with the product. The date of the last change is at the top of this page; significant changes are announced to people who have an account.