Searching for a boat tracker in NZ? 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, and Plus, which includes the link, is free during the beta.
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.
A Coastguard trip report puts your boat, route and ETA on record under your callsign, so a search can start in the right place. Keep logging one (how trip reports work). But Coastguard doesn’t follow up a trip report unless someone tells them you’re overdue, so someone ashore still has to notice. A live link helps them notice: they see where you actually are, not where you said you’d be. If you’re past your return time, the app asks you, on your own phone, whether you’re OK. It doesn’t text anyone else yet; the Coastguard app does text your shore contact (Coastguard app vs a live link). 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 flat 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 111 and ask for Police. 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 whānau 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.