Frequently Asked Questions

Verified Sailor is a logbook and sailing resume built for mariners, so that charter companies, insurers, and licensing agencies can trust your experience.

It is a logbook for tracking your experience. It is not a general purpose vessel logbook for maintenance or other records. It is a standards-based way to document the experience you accumulate on and off the water, so that any interested party can independently view it, verify it, and decide by their own rules whether you have the experience and competence for a specific situation.

The major difference between Verified Sailor and any other digital logbook is that every entry is cryptographically signed and permanently recorded. You can share your resume with anyone, and anyone in the world can trust that it is authentic and that the underlying logbook entries have not been modified since they were created and verified.

Yes. Charter Rode was a sailor's pun: a rode is the line or chain that secures your anchor, the most secure rode is chain, and chain nods to blockchain. Clever, but it didn't tell anyone what we do, and plenty of people read it as "Charter Road."

Verified Sailor says it plainly. Nothing else has changed. It's the same app, the same account and wallet, the same Trusted Sailing Resume format, and every entry you have logged is still there. You will still see charterrode.com addresses when you sign in and in our email addresses for now.

No! Sailors, sailing, and sailing resumes all refer to your overall boating experience. Log your powerboat, sailboat, 100m+ super yacht, and super tanker experience. Are you a professional mariner working through your licenses and ratings? Track every trip on every vessel and use crewmate verification to have your captain digitally sign your log. You don't want to log your SUP, jet ski, kayak, or white water rafting, but even 18′ ski boat experience can be relevant to earning your US Coast Guard Captain's License.

Yes. Log your on-the-water experience and your resume classifies it by Gross Tonnage (GT), which the US Coast Guard will ask you to document on your application. Qualifying days and the resume's time periods are counted to the same standard the Coast Guard uses, so the numbers you need for your application are already there. The Coast Guard's own forms are another matter, and you'll still fill those in yourself. The test, however, is another matter. Good luck!

Two reasons. One, they aren't needed. Sign in on your phone or tablet, add a bookmark to your home screen, and it behaves like a native app. This article shows you how.

Two, app stores charge fees as high as 30%, and we are doing everything we can to keep fees low. The protocol is also open, so anyone may build their own interface. Check out the developer docs if you want to embed it in your app.

Creating an account is free. Verifying your identity is free. Logging experience and self-verifying it is free. Qualifying certifications and licenses are free.

You pay only when someone else verifies an entry: $1 for crewmate verification, or $9 when we confirm your trip with the charter company. Fees come out of a prepaid balance in the app, held in credits called CRT, where 1 CRT is $1. There are no subscriptions. See the pricing page for examples.

A free logbook records what you say happened. Nobody reading it has any reason to believe it. Verification is what turns a logbook into a resume a charter base or underwriter will take seriously, and it takes real work: confirming identities, contacting charter companies, and keeping a permanent record that can't be altered. You pay a small fee when that work is done for you, and nothing otherwise.

Charter company verification is the highest and most trusted. If you chartered a boat, we contact the charter company and verify your charter for you. If you did not charter, use Crewmate verification if someone else was on the boat with you. If you were out by yourself, on your own or a friend's boat, use Self verification.

Self verification may lead insurance companies, charter companies, or other agencies to ask for other proof of experience, such as an on-the-water checkout with a licensed captain before a bareboat charter. More on verification types.

Verified Sailor is for mariners who are serious about tracking their experience. A crewmate verification is trusted because every account has its identity validated and only one account per person is allowed. In other logbook systems you can create a second account with a different email address, verify your own experience as a "crewmate," and cheat the system. Identity verification is one of the things that makes a Trusted Sailing Resume trusted. It's free.

Yes. Your government ID photos are used only to validate your identity and are never published. If you do not share your public key and sailor ID, no one can tie the entries on the public record to you. You will want to share and prove your identity to insurance companies, charter companies, and agencies such as the US Coast Guard. You may also choose to tell the world, for example sharing your sailor ID on your YouTube channel so everyone can follow your logbook.

Fix it. You can correct your own entries, and only the final version counts on your resume. What can't happen is someone quietly altering a verified record after the fact, which is what makes the record trustworthy.

We know they can be confusing. Each logbook entry you make becomes a transaction, and goes on its own journey through the statuses below until it is permanently recorded.

A blockchain, which we call the Sailing Resume Blockchain. Blockchain is a way of recording information that makes it difficult or impossible to change, hack, or cheat. It uses cryptographic keys to digitally sign data and prove who created it. In Bitcoin, that data is who owns which coins. Here, it is who logged and who verified the sailing experience on your Trusted Sailing Resume.

For a resume to be trusted by someone who has never met you, the data has to be provably unaltered, including entries you logged years or decades ago. Cryptographic proofs and an immutable ledger solve that problem perfectly, and they protect your privacy even though the data is public.

It also means the data isn't locked up with us. Anyone can build apps and services on top of it. Don't like the default resume format? A developer can create a different one without rebuilding a logbook from scratch. As a user, you only have to verify wallet ownership to unlock those apps.

It's a hybrid. Only verified transactions, without identity information, are published for anyone in the world to see. Your ID photos and personal details are never published.

Not everyone may join, either. If you refuse identity verification or create fraudulent entries, your account may be denied, suspended, or banned for life. Only verified accounts may provide crewmate verification. Charter companies may only verify experience on their own fleet, and education providers such as ASA or US Sailing may only verify their own students.

Publicly verifiable data is what lets an insurer, charter company, or agency trust your experience without having to trust us. The public record contains what's needed for your resume to be trusted, while your identity stays private unless you share your key information, the same as on public blockchains such as Bitcoin.

A new block is formed when around 1,000 unconfirmed transactions are waiting. That can take anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks depending on volume. Entries appear on your resume as soon as they are Unconfirmed, so there's no waiting to share.

Yes. Once a block is published it is immutable, and it is simultaneously written to multiple secure storage locations around the world. Each transaction is cryptographically signed, so anyone with the public keys of the signing parties, which are included in each transaction, can verify its authenticity. You can inspect any of it in the block explorer.

Before a transaction is confirmed, your data is encrypted in transit and at rest. ISO/IEC 27001:2013, PCI DSS v3.2.1 Level 1, and Cryptocurrency Security Standards (CCSS) are all employed to keep data secure and safe.