About Verified Sailor
Built by a sailor who wanted his own experience to count. Now the logbook every Outbound Sailing alumni sails away with.
The short version
Verified Sailor started in 2021, as Charter Rode, with one sailor's problem: how to keep track of his experience and certifications so that, as he traveled, people with a boat to charter would let him take it out. The digital logbooks available were marginally better than Excel, or paper, and none of them gave a charter base any reason to believe what was in them.
So he built one where every entry is signed by the sailor, countersigned by whoever verifies it, and written to a permanent record that nobody can quietly edit. That's still what it does. Sailors use it to build a Trusted Sailing Resume that charter companies, insurers, and licensing agencies can check for themselves.
For the technically curious, the permanent record is a purpose-built blockchain, and there's a white paper. For everyone else, all you need to know is that your history can't be altered after the fact. Not by you, and not by us.
On the record so far
Jason Burns
Jason started sailing on a Hobie Cat. A few seasons on local lakes later he was whipping around dodging ski boats and tubers, and his wife signed him up for ASA 101 with Outbound Sailing in Austin, Texas. He kept going: 30′ monohulls on Lake Travis, 45′ catamarans in the US and British Virgin Islands, and every certification along the way.
Jason is certified as a student and qualified as an instructor to teach ASA 101, 103, 104, 105, 106, and 114, and holds the ASA International Proficiency Certificate (IPC). He built Verified Sailor while he was learning to sail, because he wanted his own experience to count for something when he showed up at a charter base.
Part of the bedrock
Jason now owns Outbound Sailing, the school on Lake Travis in Austin, Texas where he took his first class. Its whole point is to turn beginners into sailors who can go out on their own, and Verified Sailor is part of how it does that.
Course days are only the start. Outbound Sailing keeps its alumni on the water with community sails, boat rentals between classes, liveaboard adventure learning trips in the Virgin Islands, and alumni flotillas around the world, Greece so far, Thailand next, aboard monohulls and catamarans up to 50 feet. Every one of those days goes into the student's logbook, verified by the instructor who skippered the boat.
So an Outbound Sailing alumni doesn't leave with an empty logbook and a stack of stickers. They leave with a Trusted Sailing Resume that keeps growing every time they sail with the community, and that a charter company anywhere in the world can check. It's free for them, and it stays theirs.