The heart of our system is the ability to report your position and have it displayed in a way which Family and Friends find easily accessible and simple to understand.

Whether you are a yachtsman with a full suite of navigation equipment, or a canal cruiser with a personal GPS and a mobile phone, you can report daily and have your loved ones follow your progress in an easily digestible way.

Having sailed around the world on one of the first organised cruising rallies, we are fully aware of the problems which most long distance travellers experience, as well as the reassurance that a steady stream of correspondence and information gives to family and friends, and our system is carefully constructed to make it simple for all to use.

We provide you with a set of simple tools to update and maintain your own personal web site with position reports, narrative logs, photographs of yourself (and your boat) and photo albums.

Whenever you can connect to the Internet you can create, review and update your entries : even at sea and not directly connected, you can tell us what amendments you want made to your logs, bulletin boards or biography pages and we will do them for you.

Yachtplot is not a publicly-accessible system - you choose who sees where you are and what you're doing by defining a login and (optional) password. The fact that you are a Yachtplot subscriber is never broadcast on our web site for anyone to see so if you're sailing in areas of the world with questionable security, your impending arrival is not pre-announced to all and sundry.

On each page of your web site, there is a 'Send a message' link. Without having or understanding email, visitors can send you a message which you can choose to have forwarded to an onboard email address, or held pending your ability to connect to the Internet and use the Yachtplot message administration system.

Messages are forwarded as plain text without attachments and are limited to 1kb in size, making them eminently suitable for shipboard HF systems with their relatively slow speeds and restricted ability. They are also invulnerable to viruses and other offensive attachments which might compromise your own email system.

We understand the difficulties which exist, even in this hi-tech age, for those who are travelling to update a web site or other Internet resource.

That's why we make it so easy to keep in touch. You can tell us by email, SMS text message or fax, and we will update your web site for you.

Alternatively, if you have access to the internet, you can update your own entries - post a log report, upload photographs of your latest excursions, read and review all messages sent to you, print a PDF log of your voyage(s).

Your friends and family have a simple login on our front page, which takes them directly to your own home page. There they can read your latest log entry and see the position reported on a map which they can zoom, resize and move so that they get a full appreciation of your situation and achievements.

Visitors can also choose to see the latest 5, 10, 15 or 20 position reports so that they can track the progress of your journey and see what you have done.

You can also post messages and updates to the bulletin board on your home page, so that (for example) they can see your anticipated arrival date at a destination

You can define an unlimited number of Photo Albums which are accessible from your web home page. Uploading images is a simple process and you can caption each picture to give it relevance.

Family and friends follow a link from your home page to see your Photo Albums which provide simple 'point and click' accessibility which has been specifically designed to provide quick responses on most internet connections.

A multi-level resource depending on whether you are a member of an informal group or an organised event.

As a member of a fleet, whether a formally organised event or a temporary informal 'buddy group', you can check on where your travelling 'buddies' are and plan meetings and reunions.

For the professional fleet manager, we provide a number of tools for you to monitor the subscribers in your fleet either as a group or individually, plus the ability to enter position reports from your participants, plot their positions or broadcast mini messages to them (*coming soon)

We recognise that there are many demands on the travellers budget. That's why we've made our pricing so simple - for less than the cost of an international postcard home, you can have a weeks' subscription to our service - less than a good meal out for two pays for a whole years' subscription. You can't say fairer than that!