RYA & ASA Logbooks Explained: Your Sailing CV Is Not the Ship's Log

Two Books, Two Owners

The cleanest way to separate them is by who asks the question each book exists to answer:

Notice what the split implies: a diligent ship's log kept on a boat you do not own is evidence you leave behind. The delivery you crewed, the fortnight on a friend's boat, the charter in Croatia — all of it lives in books that stay with those boats. The personal logbook exists to extract your share before you step off.

The RYA Logbook: Evidence for a Threshold

The RYA's version is the G158 Yachtmaster Scheme Syllabus and Logbook, and its purpose is blunt: to prove, page by countersigned page, that you have crossed the experience thresholds for the certificates of competence. The numbers it exists to defend:

Two rules sit over the whole table. First, miles expire: qualifying sea time must fall within the 10 years before your exam, so a logbook is a rolling window, not a lifetime trophy shelf. Second, the evidence standard: entries should be contemporaneous — written at the time, with dates, distances in nautical miles, your role aboard, and the skipper's signature. An examiner has seen the alternative many times: fifty passages reconstructed in one weekend, one pen, one optimistic memory. Log the passage the day it ends, and collect the signature before the crew scatters — chasing a skipper's signature across two years and three countries is the single most common way real miles die.

The ASA Logbook: A Ladder, Then a Passport

The American Sailing logbook is built around a different spine. Where the RYA proves hours and miles, the ASA proves standards passed: the official logbook carries the seal and instructor signature for each certification — 101 Basic Keelboat, 103 Basic Coastal Cruising, 104 Bareboat Cruising, and the advanced standards beyond — alongside log pages for the experience that turns certificates into a sailing resume.

The reason the resume pages matter is chartering. A charter base weighs two documents: the certification level, and the recent experience behind it. And for sailing outside the United States there is a third: ASA members certified through 104 can order the International Proficiency Certificate (IPC), valid for five years, which is the paper most Mediterranean and other European charter companies expect from American sailors in place of Europe's ICC. The pattern is the same as the RYA's in the end: the certificate opens the conversation; the logbook wins it. A 104 seal from 2019 with no logged sailing since loses to the same seal backed by twenty documented days last season.

The Confusion That Costs Miles

Here is the failure the one-word-two-books collision produces. A sailor keeps a conscientious ship's log on their own boat — and nothing anywhere else. Ten years of other people's boats, flotilla weeks, deliveries and club racing exist only as scattered lines in logs they will never see again. When the Yachtmaster ambition finally arrives, the evidence hunt starts from zero. The inverse failure is just as common: a personal logbook faithfully tracking miles, on a boat whose own history — services, repairs, incidents — was never written anywhere, which the next owner discovers at survey.

The fix is a pipeline, not more discipline: the ship's log is the source; the personal logbook is the extract. If the boat's record of each passage carries the fields that thresholds are made of — date, distance, night hours, tidal or non-tidal waters, and who was aboard in what role — then anyone aboard can lift their personal entry from it in a minute, and the skipper's confirmation is a signature on something that already exists. Our guide to what belongs in a ship's log sorts every candidate entry by who will ask for it; the RYA examiner is simply one more person on that list, asking years in advance.

What Neither Book Records

One last boundary, because it is where both certificate logbooks go quiet: neither the RYA nor the ASA book cares about your impeller. Engine hours, the winterizing that did or did not happen, the rigging inspection, the anode that was due in March — none of it counts toward any certificate, and all of it decides whether the boat is worth buying and whether she gets you home. That half of the record belongs squarely to the ship's side — a maintenance log with hours and next-due figures — and it pays out at survey time in a way no certificate ever will. Keep the CV for the examiner; keep the boat's book for everyone else.

The Bottom Line

The RYA and ASA logbooks are not ship's logs — they are your professional record afloat: miles, days, night hours and standards, countersigned and portable. Keep yours contemporaneous, collect signatures the day the passage ends, watch the tidal-water split and the 10-year window, and let the ship's log feed it rather than competing with it. One passage, logged once at the source, becomes three documents: the boat's history, your CV, and — when the examiner or the charter base finally asks — the answer.