The paper logbook has served rowing clubs for a century, and it gets one thing exactly right: it lives at the water, where the decision to take a boat out is actually made. Any replacement that asks members to log a trip later, from home, has already lost.

So OarLog starts there — at the dock — and changes three things.

It’s readable while it’s happening

A paper page is a wall of handwriting. You can’t glance at it and know that four boats are out, two are free, and the single with the cracked seat rail should stay on the rack.

OarLog gives every boat one of four states, and only four: available, on the water, in maintenance, needs repair. That’s the whole language. A captain reads the fleet in a second; a member sees the same board when they go to log a trip, so nobody reaches for a boat that’s flagged.

It remembers, so you don’t have to

When the page is full, a paper logbook becomes a box in a cupboard. The distance it recorded is gone as far as anyone’s concerned.

Every trip in OarLog feeds three things automatically:

  • each rower’s season total,
  • the club leaderboard,
  • the stats your committee wants at the AGM.

No one transcribes anything. The logbook is the database.

Damage gets a queue, not a margin note

On paper, “fin scratched, still rowable” ends up scrawled in a margin and forgotten. In OarLog, reporting damage in the moment puts the boat in front of the equipment team as a task with a status — reported, scheduled, fixed. The fleet stays healthy because nothing falls through.

What stays the same

Plenty, on purpose.

You still log who took which boat, where, how far, how long — the same four facts the paper book always captured. Trips are still in international rowing terms: single, double, four, eight; distance in whichever unit your club rows in — kilometres or miles. And the tone stays out of the way. The app is a calm clubmate, not a coach barking at you.

The goal was never to reinvent the logbook. It was to make the good one faster, readable, and impossible to lose.

Want OarLog for your club? Say hello — we’re setting up new boathouses now.