Why I'm building OceanLog

I have been flying simulators since I was 8 years old. I love every single minute of it, it's an amazing hobby! But it leaves no trace. There's no "what did you learn?", and usually no objectives.

So when I started flight school at 18, I built my first electronic logbook. I knew I had to improve fast, and learn from my mistakes. Fuel was expensive, the school ran a strict programme, and every flight had a purpose (we called them missions) which at eighteen felt pretty serious. The only way to know whether a mission had worked was to write down what happened and go back and read it afterwards.

There was nothing to do that with. Pen and paper, and the paper logbooks on sale were built for one thing: proving to an authority that you had flown the hours. Fine for that. Useless for learning anything.

So I made my own in an Excel document… and it worked! Not because it was clever, but because writing down what I was trying to do, and then reading it back, turned out to be the fastest way to get better at anything I have ever found.

The thing that happened in Florida

Then I went to fly in the United States.

My official paper logbook stopped being useful overnight. Everything in it was true (same flights, same hours, same aircraft) but it was written for European rules, and I was now inside a different system that counted things slightly differently. The record was accurate… and it did not fit.

I had to translate it.

That word has stayed with me for twenty-three years, and it is most of what OceanLog is. But that is a longer story and it deserves its own post.

I am just a longboarder

I would like to be clear about who is writing this.

My father was a professional powerboat racer. I am not. A lot of my friends are proper surfers, some of them even ISA instructors, most of them very good. I am not that either. I am a longboarder who goes out for the fun of it, and I am not going to pretend otherwise in the hope it makes the product sound better.

What I do know something about is training, instructing and logbooks, and about what happens when the record you keep is built for somebody else's purpose.

And the thing I keep coming back to is this: I am genuinely surprised nobody has taken this seriously.

Through my work, I get to talk to a lot of professional athletes. What keeps surprising me is that in water sports you find a gap that would be unthinkable in most other sports. The tools are thin. What exists mostly counts things. That is not a criticism of anyone; it is just an observation, and honestly it saddens me a bit, because it is not a hard problem. It is a neglected one.

What a number cannot tell you

If you wear a smartwatch in the water you will come out with a total. Time, distance, wave count. All true, and all fairly useless a week later. It records that a session happened.

The part worth keeping is the part no device can measure. What you were trying to do. Whether it came good. How it felt when it did.

That is what a coach asks the moment you walk up the beach, and it is the thing nothing writes down.

The human part, which is the whole point

Everything I have ever learned about training, I learned from somebody standing next to me.

A coach sees you for an hour, and then you go away and practise for a month without them. That gap is the problem. Not a technology problem, a memory problem; and a language problem. By the time you next see each other, neither of you can reconstruct what actually happened.

So OceanLog is built around that. You log your own sessions, in your own words. You choose what to share. Your coach sees the pattern across a month instead of guessing from a conversation on the sand.

The app is not the coach. It never will be. It is the thing that carries what you noticed from the water to the person who can do something with it.

It will never give you a score

Not out of ten. Not a grade, a rating, or a ranking against anyone else. Ever.

This is not modesty about what the technology could do. It is that I do not think a number is the right answer to "how am I doing". If you had a good session you already know. If you had a bad one you know that too, and a machine agreeing with you helps nobody.

What it does instead is notice things. That your best sessions cluster in certain weather conditions or with specific equipment. That the thing you have been working on shows up on one side and not the other. Then it stops talking, and leaves the conclusion to you and your coach, who between you know things about your surfing that no app ever will.

There is an AI in here that writes your session report (if you want to). It is called I.A.N. (Intelligent, Artificial, Non-human) because I would rather the name tell you what it is. When the data is thin it says so, instead of inventing something. When you mark a spot secret, it does not appear in the report at all.

This is just a system, a tool. The whole point is to help you have more fun doing what you do: understanding the conditions, the equipment, the places, even the people who keep you happy. It has been helping me for over 9 years. I do hope it will help you too.