VesselSOS turns your phone into a live boat tracker. The people ashore follow your position, course and battery in an ordinary browser link — no app, no account. Tracking runs only while you switch it on, and the same data pre-fills the emergency screen if the day turns.
One switch in the app when you cast off. Nothing runs in the background before or after.
Send it by SMS or any messenger. It opens in a browser — the person ashore installs nothing and creates no account.
Position, course and your phone's battery level, live on a map — instead of waiting for an ETA that may or may not come.
The classic float plan — a written route and a return time left with someone ashore — fails in one predictable way: plans change and the paper doesn't. ETA-alert schemes like RYA SafeTrx (closed December 2025) automated the paperwork but still hinged on a timer. A live link removes the timer entirely: your shore contact sees where you actually are, not where you said you would be. If the dot stops moving somewhere it shouldn't, they know — and what to tell rescue is one page away.
Idle, the app uses essentially no power — it never tracks you in the background. You start tracking, you stop it; 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.
A tracking link is not a distress system. It tells your people where you are; it does not alert rescue. In a life-threatening emergency the right call is 112 or VHF channel 16 — the app's emergency 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 — one account covers every craft you use: sailboat, motorboat, yacht, jet ski, SUP, rowboat, kitesurf, windsurf. The craft profile travels with the link and with any alert.
The link shows your last known position. Your own phone keeps its GPS fix fully offline, so the emergency screen still has your position and MAYDAY text; the Plus plan adds calling over satellite internet such as Starlink.
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