Kedgelog

The date is not a legal figure. It is stamped on the item

People talk about “the legal expiry date” of safety gear, but almost nowhere does the law set one. Japan’s inspection body states plainly that the validity period of a hand flare “is set by each manufacturer.” In the US, 46 CFR 160.021-5(b) caps what the maker may print (not more than 42 months from manufacture); the rule that applies to you, 33 CFR 175.125, says only that the date marked on the device must not have passed.

So Kedgelog does not judge statutory lists. It works from the date you read off the item and typed in. That is why the app still works completely in the UK (under 13.7 m), Germany and New Zealand, where no statutory equipment list for private pleasure vessels exists at all.

If the stamp reads 10/24, it stays October

Most real stamps give a month, not a day. Hammar and UML cartridges read REPLACE BY 06 2021; Halkey-Roberts bobbins read EX10/24. Adding a day to that is inventing data: pick the 1st and you warn too early, pick the 31st and you warn too late.

Kedgelog stores year, month and day separately. A month-precision stamp shows as 2029-03 on screen and in the PDF, exactly as it reads. The calculation treats the end of that month as the effective date, but no fabricated day is ever printed.

“No expiry” and “not entered yet” are different states

An anchor, a set of oars, a bucket and a compass have no expiry date at all. A flare you bought last week might simply be sitting in its box unread. Collapse both into one blank field and you can no longer count how many dates are still missing — which is the whole point of the app.

So each item can be marked “this item has no expiry date,” and that is counted separately from “not set.” Switch an item to “no expiry” after typing a date and the date is kept aside, not silently thrown away.

The screen shows a count, not a verdict

Kedgelog has no way of knowing what your boat should be carrying. Showing “All clear” on top of that ignorance would be a claim it cannot support.

So the departure screen carries no verdict word and no lone green light. What it shows is three numbers: 12 tracked · 3 not set · 0 expiring. Even when nothing is expiring, the three items with no date are visible in the same glance. A footer that cannot be switched off reads: “This list is what you entered. Kedgelog does not determine what your boat is required to carry.”

Reminders that do not break as gear is added

You are reminded 90, 30 and 7 days before a date and on the day itself. Items falling due on the same day are collapsed into one notification, so a long gear list does not turn into a flood. Delete an item or correct a date and the schedule is rebuilt on the spot — no stale reminder waiting for the next time you open the app.

Boating is strongly seasonal, and an owner who does not visit the boat in winter does not open the app either. So there is a separate quarterly nudge to open Kedgelog and look. The departure screen also shows “Reminders set for M of N items with a date,” so a gap is visible rather than silent.

The pre-departure list never blocks the record

You decide what is on the list. It carries over from last time, so you are not rebuilding it every trip.

Blocking a record because a checklist was not ticked gets it backwards in an emergency, so you can cast off having skipped it. What Kedgelog does is record that it was skipped, and mark the passage with a badge. You enter when the check was carried out; the device time is stored alongside it, so a record written after the fact can be told from one written at the time.

Reference checklists, with sources and the date they were checked

Kedgelog includes 18 categories and 213 items from the United States (33 CFR Part 175), Japan, France (Division 240), New South Wales and Victoria. Statute and agency names are shown in the original language, never translated, always beside the source URL and the date the source was checked.

These are suggestions, not automatic application. You choose which items to take, and you can edit or delete them afterwards. When a template is updated, items you have already edited are never rewritten for you.

Where nothing is included, the wording distinguishes three different things: “no statutory list has been identified” (UK under 13.7 m, Germany, New Zealand), “we have not yet confirmed whether one exists” (Netherlands), and “not included yet”. None of them is written as “unsupported”, because none of them means that.

The track does not hide where it stopped

Location is requested as “while using the app” only. That means the track stops when the app closes. Kedgelog therefore does not claim that the log writes itself while you sail — because it cannot.

Any gap longer than two minutes is left out of the distance and reported: “There are N minutes of missing track in this passage,” on screen and in the PDF. Distance is the sum of great-circle distances between recorded points, with stretches under 0.5 knots (a boat swinging at anchor) excluded. If the figure still looks wrong, you can enter it yourself.

A GPX file contains your mooring

Share a track on a forum or on social media and you have published where the boat lives. That is a theft risk, not an abstract privacy point.

Kedgelog puts a notice on the export sheet that cannot be turned off, and offers to drop the first and last 5 or 20 points of the track. There is deliberately no option to round the coordinates: a rounded track is no longer a passage record, so the choice is to leave the ends out or not.

Pricing

Free covers one boat, an unlimited number of gear items, expiry reminders, pre-departure lists, the reference checklists and a full JSON export. Capping the item count would disable the one thing the app is for, so it is not capped.

Full access is a one-off purchase. It lifts the boat limit and adds GPX, CSV and PDF export, exporting all photos as a ZIP, and moving gear between boats. There is no subscription.

Going back to free never deletes anything. Boats beyond the first become read-only — you can still read them, export them, and their expiry reminders keep arriving, because a date still falls due whether or not you can edit the record.

What this app is not

Kedgelog is not affiliated with any inspection body and is not certified, inspected or endorsed by any authority. A PDF it exports is a record you entered, not a certificate.

The app performs no network requests and has no accounts. If iCloud Backup is on, its data is included in that backup like any other app’s — which is why the app never claims that your data “never leaves the device”.

Requirements

iPhone running iOS 17.0 or later. 34 languages.