Why Yachty Exists: To Make Your Life on the Water Easier

If you've ever done any basic level of cruising on your boat, you likely have a binder, folder, photos on your phone, or just a pile in the chart table composed of your proof of registration and your insurance, maybe even a photo of your boat. All this is kept organized (or not organized) so that when you check in to a marina you can give them those documents to make copies of. Even for your long term slip rental where you store your boat, the marina will want to keep an up-to-date copy of your registration and insurance on file.

After coming back to our home port in San Francisco Bay following a summer cruising in Southern California, a friend and I started talking about the inconvenience and analog style of cruising, and in particular maintaining and communicating documents to marinas along the way. As with most inconveniences in the San Francisco area, the next statement is "there should be an app for that!" In this case there was no perfect app for that, so we decided to make it.

Of course the app would include a place to store documentation, but that's not all it would need to do in order to truly live up to the potential we saw. It would also need to be a place cruisers go to for all the other inconveniences of owning a boat. Other apps tried in a piecemeal fashion to solve these individual needs, but our goal was and is to pull it all together into one place: a place to take the things that make boating suck, and create a tool to make it suck less.

It took some time to find a technical co-founder who could help us build the product, but when we did, we knew it was a perfect fit! He owns a boat and knows how to sail, and he's familiar with the administrative and technical inconveniences of owning a boat, so he was a perfect fit to work with us to build the platform.

Jump ahead to present day, and we have a platform that includes a cruising guide aimed at being a resource of quality information; we have a maintenance log where you can enter all the maintenance information you want to keep track of, including boat-specific fields like engine hours; we have a personal log where you can write down your hours on the water, who you were with, and what boat you were on, which can help those who are tracking hours for a course or a captain's license; and of course, we've included a document safe where you can keep all your documents in one place, ready to share with whatever marina you're checking in to.

That's not the whole picture though, you can also find boats for sale on Yachty List, and as more marinas partner with us and support slip reservation via Yachty, you'll be able to book slips directly through Yachty for those marinas. Right now you can buy, manage, cruise, and sell a boat through Yachty. Our goal is to notice all those little things in each of those activities that can make owning and using your boat suck, and to make them suck less so you can spend more time enjoying your life on the water.

Sign up for Yachty for just $24 a year and get access to all the features on the platform, and start making your life on the water that much easier.