Looking for a boat tracker in Canada? To see ships and ferries, use an AIS app. To let the people ashore see your own boat, use a live link, and that’s what VesselSOS does. They follow your position, speed, course and battery in an ordinary browser, with no app and no account. Tracking runs only during a trip you start, and the same data fills in the SOS screen if the day turns. It’s a TestFlight beta on iPhone now. The link is part of Pro: CA$3.99 a month or CA$19.99 a year, with a 14-day free trial.
Tap Going to sea, pick who sees you and set a return time. Tracking stops when you tap I'm ashore. Nothing runs before or after.
Your Live contacts get it by text: one tap opens the message, then you hit Send. It opens in a browser, so the person ashore installs nothing and signs up for nothing.
Position, speed, course and your phone's battery level, live on a map. You choose how often it updates, from every 5 seconds to every 5 minutes.
Transport Canada asks you to file a sail plan with someone you trust before every trip, with your route and a description of your boat, and to have them contact a Joint Rescue Coordination Centre if you’re late. Keep doing that (how a sail plan works). But a sail plan only says where you meant to go, and someone ashore still has to notice you’re late. A live link helps them notice: they see where you actually are. If you’re past your return time, the app asks you, on your own phone, whether you’re OK. Its automatic texts to your contacts don’t reach Canadian (+1) numbers yet, so it doesn’t text anyone else here. And if the dot stops somewhere it shouldn’t, what to say on the radio is one page away.
Outside a trip the app doesn’t track you at all. During a trip it reports in the background, every 30 seconds by default (roughly 4% battery an hour by our estimate), and below 20% battery it slows to every 5 minutes on its own. The people watching see your battery level, so a dead phone never reads as a drifting boat. Trip history is kept for 12 months, then deleted automatically. And this website sets no tracking cookies unless you allow them.
A tracking link is not a distress system. It tells your people where you are; it doesn’t alert anyone. In a life-threatening emergency, make a Mayday on VHF channel 16 if you have a radio, and call the Coast Guard rescue centre for your waters (911 on inland lakes and rivers). The app’s SOS screen makes that call fast, and offshore you should still carry an EPIRB or PLB.
No. The link opens in any browser, on any device, with no account. That’s the point: the least techy person in your family can watch you.
No. Those apps show other vessels’ AIS signals. VesselSOS shares your own position, from your phone, with the people you choose, with no AIS hardware on your boat.
Yes. Set your boat type in the profile: sailing boat, motor boat, SUP/kayak or jet ski. Its name, type and colour go into the call script, and its name into the texts you send.
The link shows your last known position and that the signal is lost. Positions recorded without signal are queued and sent when coverage returns. Your phone keeps its GPS fix fully offline, so the SOS screen still has your position and Mayday text.