That stack of paper logbooks in the nav station — decades of positions, weather, crew, repairs, landfalls — is the real story of your sailing life. BrainCopy reads the handwriting, plots the routes on a map, matches the photos to the right day, and makes the whole thing searchable. No typing, no re-entering.
You have the logbooks — some faded, some water-stained, some from a boat you sold twenty years ago. They contain the best parts of your sailing life: the night you made landfall at Horta, the storm off Cape Finisterre, the crew who joined you for one unforgettable leg. But they're trapped on paper. You can't search them. You can't share a specific voyage with grandkids. You can't cross-reference them with the hundreds of photos from the same trips.
Typing it all in is out of the question — that's hundreds of hours of data entry for a thousand entries. And generic scanning apps give you searchable text at best, not a route on a map, not your photos matched up to the right day, not the story.
Meanwhile the logbooks keep ageing. Water leaks, moves, fires, estate clear-outs. Once they're gone, they're gone.
Take photos of logbook pages the way you'd photograph a document. BrainCopy's handwriting OCR is specifically tuned for navigation logbooks: structured grids with times, coordinates, courses, speeds, wind, barometer, plus narrative remarks. For two-page spreads, we auto-rotate and split them. For page grids the OCR tiles into top/bottom halves to get the cell-level data that single-pass OCR misses.
Extracted coordinates become waypoints; waypoints become a route on an interactive map. Anchors are detected where the vessel sits in the same position for hours. Common digit misreads (that 36°N that was obviously 46°N) get flagged. If you import your voyage photos with GPS, we use them as ground-truth to correct misread coordinates and reconstruct the real route.
Import the photos (Google Photos, iCloud, loose files). BrainCopy places each one on your voyage timeline by date and GPS, so the photo from the rail at sunset ends up on the same page as the log entry that describes it. No manual tagging.
Search "Azores" and get every mention across every logbook, with the photos from those trips and the crew who were aboard. Export a specific voyage as a photobook to give to a former crew member, or as a narrative diary chapter.
The original scans stay in your own cloud storage (EU-hosted Nextcloud we provision for you). Even if you stop using BrainCopy, your photos of the pages are yours. This matters: many sailors are digitising logbooks precisely because the originals are irreplaceable.
BrainCopy exposes your very own MCP server (MCP = Model Context Protocol — an open standard that lets AI assistants like Claude and ChatGPT read data from systems you control). "Summarise every night watch I stood north of 60° N." "Which crew sailed the most miles with me?" "Show the wind data from the delivery from La Rochelle."
50% off the €10/month subscription, forever, for sailors who join during the beta. Your discount never expires.
SAILORS50: €5/month, forever). Includes 100 GB of EU storage, sync client, daily digest, weekly review, extended upload time. OCR is priced per page — typically €5–€25 for a multi-year logbook archive. Face recognition and AI vision on photos are separate, per-use, each with exact cost calculation from your data.Takes about 30 seconds to sign up. You can start importing immediately.
Start your sailor trialDifferent people, same problem: too many memories scattered across too many places.