Fleeting acquaintance has always been part of sailing, particularly for bluewater cruisers. A friendship struck up over a rum cocktail or a kids’ playdate in one anchorage might be rekindled weeks or even months later when your paths cross again. But while yachties once exchanged visiting cards to stay in touch, they are now turning to dedicated apps.

Two in particular – NoForeignLand (NFL) and SeaPeople – aim to provide a social media platform tailored specifically to sailors. As is the way of the digital world, these services offer far more than their analogue equivalents.

As well as managing contacts, they allow you to identify boats near and far, find crew, go on a date, log your track and get timely local information from people who know which side of the bay offers the best holding, or when the bus into town runs.

Online sailing communities

There’s plenty of good user-generated content online, from Navily to Noonsite, but dedicated social apps for sailors have emerged more recently. Riley Whitelum and Eleyna Carausu are the famously photogenic cruising couple from Australia whose successful YouTube channel ‘Sailing La Vagabonde’ boasts 1.9m subscribers.

Working with Logan and Caroline Rowell and Brian Currier, founders of the Young Cruisers Association, they helped create the newest app, SeaPeople, which launched in autumn 2024. They say the concept grew out of frustration with existing means of communicating at sea.

“Before SeaPeople, we mostly used WhatsApp, which was really annoying,” says Carausu. “And before that it was nothing! Eventually my dad bought me a satphone, so I was sending SMS with that, which was a nightmare. We used Instagram just for posting.”

“It was really obvious that we needed something, but I don’t think it was a particularly original idea,” adds Whitelum. “Like most sailors at some point, we thought it would be nifty to have something like this to communicate.”

It’s a similar story for NoForeignLand, developed by liveaboard sailor Steve Neal and his wife Helena. “We set it up while staying at the Marina di Ragusa in Sicily in 2017,” Neal tells me.

“It was a very sociable marina with 70 liveaboard boats in contact. To begin with, it was pins moving around a map and showing you where people had got to. It was a really niche thing originally, but it became apparent that it was a good idea and more people wanted in.”

A social medium

Along with the Cruising Association’s (CA) Captain’s Mate, these apps allow you to see and connect with other users via a scrollable map. While the CA draws from a smaller pool of around 6,400 members, NoForeignLand and SeaPeople have active users of several tens of thousands and are free to use.

From the Falklands to the Philippines, you can find boats online, see when their owners last posted and contact them directly.

Where the SeaPeople platform excels is in its detailed understanding of its users’ profiles, which allows it to include dating and a crew exchange.

“We differ from other apps people are using because it’s really about sailors and communication,” says Whitelum. “People can find each other, communicate and create little communities together as they come and go.”

When users sign up, they choose from a list of interests: playdates with kids, running or surfing, for instance. You can quickly and easily filter to find others with common ground, and follow those you like. Tina Roach explains how SeaPeople was useful from the start of her cruise down the New England coast in a Tartan 34.

“I decided to follow as many folks that had the same boat as us, in case we had any issues,” she says. “We got in touch with Chris, another Tartan owner 45 minutes from us, and he sold us his dinghy and outboard a few days before our trip. He’s been a huge help as well!”

You can also list specific boat skills or services and, because SeaPeople attracts those who simply admire boats, there’s a category for ‘shoreside support’. “You can sign up and offer to drive sailors to the shops, or let them stay at your house, use your washing machine,” says Whitelum.

“Things like that are very easy for someone on land but make a world of difference to a sailor. It could be out of the kindness of their heart – or there could be a monetary aspect.”

On NoForeignLand, users join groups of people who share their interests, and then see which members are nearby. There’s a very active group for families with children on board and another for pets. You can join groups like Women Who Sail, Scuba Divers, Lagoon Owners or Starlink on Boats.

In this way, both apps streamline the process of finding and meeting like-minded people, eliminating the haphazardness of yacht club bar or marina encounters.

Plenty of cruisers also use older apps like Facebook for staying in touch, although it’s slower and less well equipped for the casual mobility of sailors. Some Facebook sailing groups have been in existence for many years now, and act more like an online forum – a repository of knowledge and experience.

“I use Facebook groups because they’re so well established,” says Jeanneau 54DS sailor Jack Andrys. “There’s a Jeanneau 54DS dedicated group with lots of useful history over the years. And if you put something up on it, you will get a response. A closed group is pretty good because they’re oriented towards the topic.”

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Navigation aid

Besides social connections, NoForeignLand has a whole extra dimension of location information. Viewing options include a night mode as well as NASA and satellite photography that gives an incredibly useful view of the seabed.

“We discourage people from using NoForeignLand to navigate, but we know they do,” says Neal with a wince. This is confirmed by all the users I speak to.

The app goes a step further, by showing short posts from other users on anchorages, moorings and harbours, often giving details of the best line of approach or holding.

“We use NoForeignLand every time we go to a place we don’t know – a new anchorage, island or country – that’s how we find out about customs and immigration,” says French sailor Hervé Schelcher, currently in the Caribbean with his family.

NoForeignLand also helps cruisers decide where to visit, with a raft of user generated pins about what to do ashore. They range from hiking routes and dog walking spots to bus timetables and chandlers, often with a short comment highlighting friendly service or a special capability. Any user can drop in a scrap of information which appears with an appropriate icon on the chart.

Other apps also do this – Captain’s Mate from the CA is the pick of the bunch, blending thousands of recent reports from members with factual information about approaches and landing.

Author of the UK & Ireland Circumnavigator’s Guide, Sam Steele, recounts a lucky escape courtesy of the app during a passage from the island of Bornholm to Ystadt in southern Sweden. The wind backed, allowing her to make landfall further west in Smygehamn, closer to the ultimate destination of Malmö.

“If you read the pilot, it sounded fine, but the intro on Captain’s Mate said the stench of rotting seaweed was unbearable. It has also turned to silt and made the inner harbour unusable. We went elsewhere.”

Real-time help with online sailing communities

Where both SeaPeople and NoForeignLand outperform other navigation apps is in soliciting rapid advice, such as how to approach a new anchorage or whether a little-used harbour is viable.

“Not everyone sits with the VHF on at anchor, but if you send a message via NoForeignLand, it pings up on the phone,” says Neal.

“When we arrived in Honduras last year, we had quite a tight reef to pass through. You can’t always trust the charts over here, so we messaged forward to other boats in the anchorage and got a message telling us how to get in. We feel like we’re allowing people to communicate more readily.”

SeaPeople has taken a slightly different route that allows its users to put out a virtual VHF ‘hail’ using the app. You drop your message onto the map and a notification pops up on the phones of users within a set radius.

“This app didn’t exist 10 years ago because there was no point in being able to hail people nearby when none of them had connectivity,” says Whitelum. “It’s local knowledge at your fingertips.”

NoForeignLand has just introduced a similar feature, which allows you to pin a question to the map. It pops up only to those within a given radius and disappears after a certain amount of time. You can also post warnings – about an obstruction or poor holding, for instance. And you can even post an event, from a barbecue to a beach clean-up, in the same way.

Changing tech

Experienced cruisers will have noticed a flaw in discussing the benefits of apps and instant notifications: they require a mobile phone connection. Even in busy parts of the world, don’t expect much network unless you’re within a few miles of a cell tower, but if you’re off grid or at the bottom of a steep cliff, the chances are slim.

But the growing array of low earth orbit satellites is transforming the role of the mobile phone. More than any other service, Starlink has brought ultrafast satellite broadband to bluewater sailing, meaning you can now stream, post and surf your way across most of the world’s oceans for £247/month with a £2,470 equipment cost.

The developers of both apps have Starlink on board, as do many thousands of bluewater cruisers. It enables you to browse for information ahead of landfall and identify friends or contacts who might have made it before you. Live position logging will also work in real time, keeping friends and family in the loop.

But short-range VHF radio nets still seem to be thriving in the Caribbean, no matter how much social apps look to supersede them. “Every morning, every island has a different channel for a VHF net between 0730 and 0830,” says Schelcher.

“They have an agenda that includes safety and security, new arrivals, local business ads, kit for sale and activities. It’s pretty cool, because it’s just the people around you.”

Sophie Curran crews on a 56ft custom catamaran in Malaysia and owes her job to SeaPeople. With no sailing background at all, she downloaded the app during a backpacking trip in Sri Lanka because she realised she was interested in exploring the coast by boat.

“We flew to Thailand, where we replied to a few hails – hoping people were looking for crew,” she says.

“It was a few weeks later when everything fell into place. We were sitting on the beach in the small island of Koh Yao Noi looking at yachts pass in the distance and trying to find them on the map on SeaPeople. A few days later, a couple who had just bought a catamaran saw our profile and sent us a message seeking crew in Malaysia. The timing seemed too good to be true as we were beginning to make our way south through the islands in Thailand.”

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