I took this past summer off and took my latest love, the motor vessel

Puffin, for a 3-month cruise from my home state of Washington to Alaska. During that journey I had the time to review many of my old cruising habits, refine some, and help bring others up to date.

One of those old habits came under scrutiny when I welcomed Soundings Deputy Editor Pim Van Hemmen aboard in Ketchikan, Alaska.

I introduced Pim to the crew, gave him a tour of the boat and helped orient him to the systems, but somewhere along the line Pim passed by the chart table and eyed the sloppy-looking, scratched-on, yellow legal pad that served as my daily logbook. Pim later told me that he’d been surprised that Puffin, with all its traditional nautical features, did not have a “leatherbound logbook with the boat’s name embossed on its cover.” I sensed that my stature as boatbuilder, boat designer and in this case captain was considerably diminished, at least in his eyes.

I didn’t forget that look and weeks after Pim left Puffin, when I’d had time to cogitate about the logbook topic, I started to forge a plan to turn my legal pad scribbles into a neater and more comprehensive journal.

After more than 50 years as a boatbuilder and designer, and a few years working on tugs in Alaska during my college years, I’d developed certain logbook habits. Some of them were good, and some of them were a bit out in left field, and maybe—possibly—overdue for refinement.

My primary reason for using the yellow legal pad is that my handwriting is simply awful. I can blame much of it on boat motion and my habit of hurrying through boat chores, but suffice it to say that I am not neat and tidy about my log entries while underway. But at the same time, I desire a neat and nicely hand-printed logbook, one that shows as much pride in completion as I would like to project. But what I have done over the years is to get the initial information down as quickly as possible and then transpose that information later when I have the chance to sit down and work it more neatly into the official, final version of the logbook of my time on the water.

The term “logbook,” “ship’s log” or simply “the log” came into being sometime after the chip log was invented in the late 1500s. The chip log got its name from the log—a piece of wood—that was tied to a line to measure a vessel’s speed. A navigator would have a sailor drop the chip log over the ship’s stern and the log would remain roughly in place while the vessel moved away from it. The sailor would let the log line run out for a fixed amount of time—as measured by a log glass, ie. a sandglass—while counting the pre-tied knots in the line as they slipped through his hands. The number of knots counted would give a rough idea of the boat’s speed and the information from the “chip log” would then be “logged” in a “logbook.”

Eventually a logbook’s role would expand to include anything that concerned the voyage and the vessel, whether its global position, ship’s condition, weather conditions, a crew’s health and mood, or the myriad of factors that affect a vessel, the safety of that vessel and its crew.

In time, shipping authorities and admiralties would specify that logbooks be kept to provide a record of events, and to help crews navigate in case the radio, the radar or the GPS failed. Ship’s logs are often used after maritime incidents, much the same way a flight data recorder or black box is used on airplanes, making logbooks important pieces of legal evidence.

But why keep a logbook on a recreational vessel? What place does it have in our lives besides being relegated to a scrapbook of our cruising adventures, the same way young parents might make a scrapbook of their youngsters’ first few years of life? The answer is that in many cases the logbook is the only true ongoing record of the safety and condition of the vessel and its occupants. And if there were ever a case to question those particulars, the logbook would be a record to prove that the captain kept both categories safe, sound and floating.

There are many reasons to keep an accurate and up-to-date logbook. For instance, a logbook contains critical information for future navigation of same waters, or it can jog your memory to relate stories about the voyage. In those instances, the logbook can help establish the true story of what happened and when it happened.

I think my primary reason for keeping a logbook is that I tend to transit similar waters in a wide variety of boats that have different cruising speeds and requirements of use. The log provides me with a variety of data points that might be of use at a later date. The more comprehensive and accurate I keep my logbooks, the better the data aids me in retracing my steps on future trips.

For example, if I plan to head north on a summer trip, I can look back at my logbook and find a number of instances where I headed from my homeport of Olympia, past Tacoma and Seattle, through Deception Pass, and ended up at a mooring ball or dropped the hook off Spencer Spit in the San Juan Islands. With my logbook telling me when I left the dock and what the tides were, both in timing and in height, I can easily extrapolate that information to the voyage that I’m planning. If the tides and my leave time are similar, I can see that I should expect a very long 13-hour day to Spencer Spit.

Logbooks can also jog your memory about places and things, sea and wind conditions, wildlife spottings, fuel sources, water sources, great hiking spots, and many other features that a good trip on the water can contain.

As noted earlier, my log started with a simple yellow legal pad full of scribblings, but by the middle of the summer, even though I had transposed over half of the original entries into a neater and more legible final version, I found another issue creeping into my consciousness. My early log entries had some consistency as to what I was keeping track of, but later in my cruise the entries morphed and contained slightly different information. This made me wish that I had kept track of the same items from day to day and not allowed myself to deviate from the items I had been monitoring.

My desire was to come up with a format that would nudge me to include the same information from day to day and keep it brief enough so I wouldn’t be concerned with the initial neatness of the log. I wanted to create a form on the computer that I could print out and use as the base for my log, and that is exactly what I did.

The form that I created is specific to the Northwest Coast in the Inside Passage from Washington to Alaska. If I were to cruise in other areas I might include different data, and if I were sailing offshore I would most certainly want to keep hour-to-hour GPS coordinates. An offshore log could be created by simply adding and/or subtracting data points from the base log.

There’s one more thing. I would like to point out that I have learned my yellow legal pad scribblings aren’t so crazy. Commercial ships and naval vessels often keep a scrap log—a preliminary draft of the ship’s course, speed, location and other data, which is then transcribed into the smooth log or official log—the final version of the ship’s record.

So you see, Pim, my log is just like the professionals’.

April 2025