VesselSOS turns your phone into a live boat tracker. The people ashore follow your position, course and battery in an ordinary browser link, 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: in Maltese waters it dials 112. It’s a TestFlight beta on iPhone now; the link is part of Pro (2.99 € a month or 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 SMS: one tap opens the message, then you tap 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.
The classic sail plan, a route and a return time left with someone ashore, fails in one predictable way: plans change and the note doesn’t (leaving a sail plan in Malta). A live link means your shore contact sees where you actually are, not where you said you’d be. If you’re past your return time and don’t answer the app’s “Are you OK?”, your Emergency and Live contacts get an automatic SMS with the live link; it never alerts a rescue service, so they decide whether to call 112. And if the dot stops somewhere it shouldn’t, what to say on the radio is one page away.
Outside a trip the app does not 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 dying phone never reads as a drifting boat. And the same principle holds ashore: 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, use VHF channel 16 or DSC if you carry a radio, and call 112. The app’s SOS screen makes that call fast, and offshore you should still carry a PLB or EPIRB.
No. The link opens in any browser, on any device, with no account. That is the point — the least technical person in your life can watch you.
Yes — set your craft 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 own phone keeps its GPS fix fully offline, so the SOS screen still has your position and MAYDAY text.