Most boat software gives you a maintenance log that knows nothing about your trips, a trip planner that knows nothing about your equipment, and a receipt folder that knows nothing about either. AFTWISE runs the other way round: one record underneath, five phases on top.
You plan a run to Demopolis. That plan carries the crew list, the locks you’ll transit and the fuel you expect to burn. When you leave, it becomes the active trip: the checklist you run attaches to it, the hourly checks write into the log, the fuel stop becomes an expense with a receipt photo, and the engine hours you logged roll the port main’s service interval forward — which changes what Home tells you tomorrow morning.
Nobody re-typed anything. That is the whole idea.
A trip in AFTWISE starts as a plan you can change, not a form you have to finish.
While you type it offers and does not act: your text stands, and the cursor stays where you put it. Press the search button and it fills the field only when a result’s name is exactly what you typed — anything less certain stays a list you tap. On a departure, the one you tap keeps its position with the trip. It does not plot a course.
Readiness is not a feeling. It is a list of things that are either in date or not.
Registration, title, insurance, certificates and licenses, policies and plans, and a previous boarding report are there without setup, and a check box on any other document adds it — the fishing license you filed under Other, the survey, the warranty on the new plotter. A document keeps its own category; this is a second way of looking at the same papers, not a re-filing. One tap opens the collection as a single report — what officers commonly ask for at a stop, with the paper that answers each item nested under it, first page showing; tap one to open just that document, or hand across the whole collection as one PDF packet. Your choices travel in the backup.
Defer a step and AFTWISE™ raises a task for it, due when you said you would come back — and completing the step later closes the task.
These checklists are examples to start from, not official or approved procedures. You decide what is right for your boat, your crew and your waters: change any step, add your own, or delete what does not apply. Follow your manufacturer’s instructions, the law, and your own judgment.
Complete the step later and the task closes with it; put it off again and the same task moves, rather than a second one appearing behind you.
Two switches sit under a running checklist’s progress bar, both off until you turn them on. Read steps aloud speaks each step with Apple’s on-device voice, with no microphone and no network. Answer by voice, offered once the first is on, listens for about eight seconds after a step is read for Checked, Fail, Defer, Skip, Back or Repeat, recognizes your words on the device, and saves nothing; on a Number or Text step it takes Checked, Skip, Defer or Back, and the reading itself is typed. The buttons keep working as before; an engine or a crowded cockpit can garble speech, so it does not replace looking at the screen.
A shipped checklist you edit is marked Edited and can be restored to the original; one you write is marked Mine and can be deleted; a Manage checklists menu restores every edited one, or deletes every one of yours, in one go.
Both voice switches on, under the progress bar. The speaker and microphone marks beside 4 of 6 mean the step is read out and a spoken answer is accepted for about eight seconds after it; the buttons keep working, and nothing you say is saved.
On Aftwise Captain a step can be marked so that failing it raises a task. The run keeps going and stays open; the task carries the step and the trip it came from, and it is closed by fixing the fault, not by ticking the step later.
Pre-Departure — Engine Room on the demonstration boat: the leaks check failed and the run moved on to the next step, with the failure counted at the top. That step raises a task when it fails, and the Tasks frame shows what comes of it.
The other end of a failed step, on Aftwise Captain. The task names the step that produced it, carries the trip it came from, and is due the moment it was raised, so it leads the list. Below it an overdue Normal task sits above a High one that is not yet due: overdue work comes first. The task is deliberately not closed by ticking the step later. A failed exhaust elbow is closed by fixing it.
Underway is the worst possible time to be typing. AFTWISE keeps this phase to a few taps: start the trip, run the hourly check, note the lock, close it out.
A tow service, a marina or someone ashore asks where you are. Send My Location, on Home and on a trip under way, takes a fresh fix and shows it large enough to read over the radio, with when it was taken and how close it is.
Open Messages fills in the position in the format you chose, an Apple Maps link, and the boat’s name and MMSI; you pick who gets it and tap Send. Copy Message and Share Another Way put the same text anywhere else. Without a fresh fix it says so and gives your last known position and its time.
Not a distress call, and AFTWISE sends nothing itself: the sheet says so and points to VHF channel 16 or 911. The text goes through Messages, so the phone needs a signal to send it.
On the demonstration boat at a marina in Cape May: the fix in degrees and decimal minutes, when it was taken and how close it is, the place name, and the four ways to pass it on. The footer is the app’s own.
From the helm the two feel identical, and confusing them is how a maintenance schedule quietly stops advancing. So AFTWISE keeps them apart and tells you which one you just did.
Stops the GPS. The route is saved and the trip stays under way — what you want when saving battery mid-passage or lying alongside before moving on the same day. AFTWISE says so rather than assuming, and offers to end the trip if that is what you meant.
Opens the close-out: arrival time and place, ending port, starboard and generator hours, fuel aboard, the distance run — measured from the recorded route when there is one, or typed — and the sea service day. Every maintenance interval measured in engine hours moves from those readings, which is why finishing a trip is one deliberate action rather than a side effect of switching off the GPS.
What the close-out produces. Every figure here was measured or entered at the time — the engine meters show what was added to each, the generator its own hours and how many sessions they came from, the fuel what was used, and the sea service day is recorded as near-coastal service.
You cannot end a trip there, though you can defer a checklist step for 30 minutes, 1 hour or 4 hours, with the iPhone setting the reminder; Skip stays on the iPhone. Ending one records arrival, ending engine and generator hours, fuel aboard and the sea service day, and a sea service claim is built on exactly those fields — a wrist button that skipped them would fill them with silence.
The edit screen used to offer “Complete” in a status list, and a trip could reach it with no arrival, no hours, no fuel, no service day, and no meters moved. That option is gone.
Close the trip and the hours, the fuel aboard and the log are filed. The rest of the evening is yours.
Three moments where a boat’s record usually goes wrong: the trip you meant to start, the arrival you never logged, and the trip still sitting open a week later. There is a prompt for each, and every one of them offers rather than acts, because a departure and an arrival are facts your sea service is built on. Those are yours to confirm.
Still marked Planned, and the departure time has arrived — within the last four hours or the next one — and AFTWISE offers to open it. The window leans late deliberately, because boats run late far more often than they leave early.
If the trip carries a departure point and your phone has a fix, being two miles off corroborates it; having no fix does not count against it.
Planning a trip also sets a reminder on your phone for the departure time you typed.
It fires at that time rather than when the boat moves — leave an hour early and it arrives an hour late, because the phone is not watching the dock. And it does not start the trip for you: it opens AFTWISE and asks. If a reminder never arrives at all, the usual cause is notification permission rather than the trip.
Forty-five unbroken minutes inside about a hundred and twenty meters, and AFTWISE asks whether you have arrived — long enough to clear a lock, a fuel dock, a lunch stop and a bridge opening.
Asked once per stop. Say you are still under way and it stays quiet until the boat moves and stops somewhere else.
This one asks how long since anything happened on the trip — never how long it has been open. A passage is legitimately under way for days.
Thirty-six hours of silence on a trip with no expected return, and not while it is recording. A trip still under way past the expected return you set is raised at once as a Critical alert, Past expected return; with Alert Texts turned on for Trip past expected return, a notification arrives at that moment too. Otherwise it waits in Alerts rather than interrupting you, and the button opens the trip rather than ending it.
Every one of these is an offer with a decline attached. Nothing is started, ended or completed unless you are the one who does it.
Texts work the same way. Alert Texts, switched on by you, add a Text button to the alerts you choose, for the people you choose, with the wording filled in and the last recorded position when there is one; it opens Messages, and you tap Send. And when a trip with an expected return at least ten minutes away starts, AFTWISE on iPhone sends a notification suggesting Apple’s Check In in Messages for your float-plan contact, with the timer to set, and opens Messages with your float plan filled in, addressed to that contact when the trip has their number; you set the Check In up in Messages yourself. It is Apple’s feature, not ours, and not a safety device.
Documenting a boat properly is not hard. It is just tedious, which is why it doesn’t happen. AFTWISE makes the record a by-product of work you were doing anyway.
Every asset aboard with its maker, model, serial, location, manuals, photos, parts and warranty — and the full history of what has been done to it, by whom, for how much.
Photograph the receipt at the fuel dock and deal with it later. It waits in the inbox until you file it against a trip, a vendor and a piece of equipment.
Registration, documentation, insurance, surveys and manufacturer manuals, stored on the device with expiry dates that surface on Home before they lapse — and the four plans AFTWISE writes with you, on its own letterhead.
If you film the trip: project plans with their shot lists, release forms, camera gear with its cards, batteries and mounts, and project exports. (Cruiser)
A boat record earns its keep on five days: the day you claim, the day you sell, the day you hand over, the day you are boarded, and the day something breaks a long way from home.
These are the actual workspaces in the app, and the plan each one opens on. Every plan carries everything in the plan below it; a Captain mark means Aftwise Captain deepens that workspace rather than unlocking it.
Captain is the whole of AFTWISE™ — every workspace on this page, on up to five boats — and then the things a professional record is expected to produce. Some owners need that standard because a license, an insurer or a buyer will be reading.
Days toward a license, built from the trips you already logged — vessel, tonnage, waters, capacity served, and the attestation kept attached to it.
What the boat actually costs, by category. Fuel, dockage, maintenance, insurance, upgrades, provisions — the split that tells you where the money went.
The packet you hand an adjuster: identification, the policy number and the insurer’s claims line, every item aboard with values, dates and photographs.
A controlled ownership handoff package, and import on the receiving boat. Backup and restore stay on every plan.
Per checklist step: an acceptable range for a reading that fails the step when the reading is outside it, a photo as evidence, and a High-priority task when the step fails.
Against three on Cruiser and one on Owner — plus lock and bridge ETA Window Check, reminder tasks, and PDF and CSV passage packages.
Each plan includes the one below it: Cruiser has everything in Owner, and Captain has everything in Cruiser as well as the features above. See what each plan includes
Range, endurance and burn come from what your engines actually used, at the speed you actually ran — and where a figure is missing, AFTWISE shows nothing rather than an estimate.
Fuel, burn curve and range ringsThe record for that exact piece of gear opens in about two seconds — in the engine room, on your back, with a flashlight in your teeth.
Its service history, its manual, the impeller size and the belt number, what you paid and who you bought it from. No signal needed; it is already on the device.
AFTWISE keeps your vessel record on your devices, and iCloud sync keeps them the same through your own iCloud account, on every plan. There is no server of ours to breach and no subscription lapse that locks you out of your own history. You keep it safe with backup, export and archive — all of which produce files you hold.
Nothing to sign into, no password to lose, no email list you land on by installing the app. Your Apple ID handles the subscription the same way it handles every other app on your phone.
AFTWISE is built for the person responsible for the boat — an owner, a couple, a captain. Plans cover one, three or five vessels. If you manage forty hulls for a charter company, we are honestly not the right tool.
Seven manuals ship with AFTWISE and open offline, from the Five-Minute Getting Started to the full Operations Manual and the supplement for the build you are running. Mid-river with no bars is exactly when you need them.
AFTWISE installs with a fully populated demonstration boat, your choice of two, Quick Start walks you through six steps, and the CSV importer takes the spreadsheet you already keep.
Getting started
