BoatMe started as eyes on the water. It is now the whole station: the live board your duty crew watches, the member and volunteer records your office keeps, the roster, the fleet, the distress board, tows, dives, text paging and the incident file — in one place, on a phone at the ramp or a screen in the radio room. Free for not-for-profit rescue organisations, and membership fees go straight to your own Stripe account.
Admin, operations, volunteers, maintenance and IT each get their own view. People only see the divisions they belong to, so a deck trainee never lands on the membership ledger and an IT volunteer never has to wade through crews.
The live board, radio log-ons, overdue monitoring, the distress board and the end-of-day reports.
Members, membership fees and tiers, renewals, station settings, feature switches and the audit trail.
Volunteer records, tickets and expiry, the duty roster, availability, hours and crew qualifications.
Rescue fleet register, service book, defects, registration and insurance countdowns.
An incident file that keeps its own notes, status, crew, any tow and a briefing someone signs, plus the report you write afterwards.
Accounts, divisions, permissions, API keys and the station's own settings.
Everything that needs a decision sits in one red card at the top. When nothing is owed, it disappears.
Every boat logged on with your station, live: departure, destination, ETA, persons on board, fuel, registration and owner phone.
Overdue vessels and open reports collect into one red card with a count. A status pill in the header turns from green to red the moment something needs a person.
Boats without a BoatMe account log on over the radio as they always have. The details are remembered, so the same vessel pre-fills next time and nobody reads out their registration twice.
A trip goes overdue at ETA plus 30 minutes. The owner and your duty crew are alerted until it is resolved, and the owner can update the ETA themselves.
Out of radio range and running late? Extend the ETA or close the log-off on their behalf. The overdue clock resets and the owner is told.
Mark an owner as contacted and the vessel drops out of the red card, with a time stamp and an undo if it was a mistake.
When an owner shares their position, duty crew track the boat on the board in real time.
Declare a distress, watch it take over the top of the board, acknowledge, then stand the crew down. Every step is logged with who did it and when.
Trip register, in-transit, boats still out at end of day, member vs non-member, and station statistics — printable and signed off.
A chart on the board showing the boats you have on the water and every pair under tow with its track. A pair that has run out of time turns red. It draws itself, nobody pins anything.
Log the pair once: rescue vessel, the boat being brought in, who is aboard, where you are taking it and when you promised to be there. Each position you log re-calculates the ETA, and a tow is late the moment that clock passes, with no grace period, because it has already gone wrong once. A pair with no position for 25 minutes is flagged as gone quiet, and a tow that slips more than ten minutes says so on its own card rather than looking calm.
Log a team down with each diver's ticket, planned depth and minutes, then watch the expected surface time. Fifteen minutes past it and the team joins the red card with a count in the header. The board will not clear until somebody confirms everyone is up: all surfaced, or not all up, and it stays open.
When a boater who is not a member logs on, the station can offer them membership there and then. Join, not now, or don't ask again is remembered for a year, your own members and volunteers are never asked, and the station sees how many boaters were prompted and how many joined.
Crews do not sit by a phone. A page goes out as a text from a number the station owns, and volunteers can reply to it.
Call out a watch or fill a seat that is short, straight from the roster. Only volunteers who have opted in are texted, and every message is logged whether it sent or not.
The station gets a dedicated number, so a page looks like it came from the station and a crew member can save it as a contact. New stations are connected within 48 hours of switching the capability on.
A volunteer who texts back reaches the station's console, matched to the message they are answering and to who they are. Duty officers read them in one panel and mark each one dealt with. A reply of STOP opts that volunteer out, in our register, immediately.
A vessel overdue can be escalated to its emergency contact, and the owner texted on the number on their record, once, so nobody is told twice.
Every default message (callout, unfilled shift, shift reminder, overdue owner, next of kin, overdue divers) is editable, with the variables insertable as chips, a live preview and a character count against the limit. Reset to the station default whenever you want.
Set what the station is willing to spend, watch the month's spend, and read the log. Texting can be switched off on its own without disturbing anything else.
Most of your members never sign in. They are captured at the shed, imported from the old system or paid in cash, and the register has to stay usable either way.
Server-side search across name, email, phone, member number and call sign, with filters, paging and sorting that hold up at thousands of records.
Bring the old spreadsheet across in one pass, then fill the gaps by hand as members wander in.
Tick a group and set their status, tier or expiry in one go — the annual catch-up takes minutes, not an evening.
Print real cards from the register: station logo, member number, call sign, tier and valid-to date.
Merge a letter per member onto the station letterhead with their address, tier, fee and renewal date.
The same member imported twice? Fold one record into the other and the payments, boats and notes come with it.
Reminders at 30, 14, 7 and 1 day, one after expiry, then a grace period before a member is marked lapsed. Nobody is ever deleted.
A join page prefilled with your tiers, paid straight into your own Stripe account.
Membership money never touches BoatMe. It lands in the station's own Stripe account and BoatMe takes no fee, no cut and no margin on it.
Volunteering is the part most stations still run on paper. This is the part we built hardest.
A card per volunteer with contact, emergency contact, photo, joined date and hours — imported by CSV or captured one at a time.
Who holds what, with expiry warnings before it lapses. Skipper tickets cover the WA Recreational Skipper's Ticket and other states' general boat licences.
Publish shifts, take responses, keep an eye on who is available. The guardrails stop a crew being rostered onto a seat they are not ticketed for.
Admin decides. Coordinators and operations can be given scheduling rights, and taken off, whenever you choose.
Volunteers say which days they can be called on; approved shifts add up to hours without anyone keeping a diary.
Mark a shift as a watch, a drill, training or maintenance. Close it out and each confirmed crew member's hours are logged once, with sea time counted separately: the figure the station has to be able to show.
An iCalendar link puts the station's published watches into Outlook, Google or a phone calendar. Revoke it whenever you like.
One page for any period: active and applicant counts, police checks outstanding, inductions done, hours split by watch, training, callout and admin, tickets current, expiring and expired, who has no ticket, shift attendance and no-shows, and who has told you when they are available.
The whole record on one card (contact, emergency contact, address, joining date, application stage and tickets with expiry) for the person who walks in rather than arrives as a spreadsheet.
Police checks, inductions and government-issued tickets stay in DFES Connect. We link you there instead of pretending to hold them.
Station hulls are station property, so their history belongs to the station.
Each rescue vessel with its call sign, motor, registration and insurance dates counting down before they bite.
Log service, open a defect against a vessel and close it when it is fixed, with the hour meter to back it up.
Send a hull job out for quotes, compare them side by side and keep the paperwork on the vessel.
Open an incident, add notes as it develops, move it through its statuses, and assign the vessel and crew while it is live.
The SOPs, forms and checklists everyone asks for, on a shelf the whole station can read and only admin can change.
Post-incident report built from the record itself: the facts, one ordered timeline of every status move, crew boarding and returning, notes, any tow, the duty officer's debrief, and the vessel's own history with your station. It prints as a branded document with the station logo, and leaves a block for the DFES or VMR WA report number and signature. CSV for your own records.
Any member of the station can report a fault against a vessel or an asset. Triage, parts, labour and closing are for maintenance. Safety-critical faults sort to the top, and the history keeps ninety days.
Computers, radios, phones, the network, cameras and software licences, with serial numbers, who has them and when warranties and licences fall due. IT faults run through the same job list as everything else.
Every capability has its own switch: distress, tows, dives, text paging, the join prompt, membership payments, the member and volunteer registers, the roster, fleet, weather, donations and the rest. Turn one off and it leaves the menu for everyone, and the writes are refused, not just hidden. Membership payments can be switched off without touching the member register.
The jobs that used to be a spreadsheet, a filing cabinet and somebody's memory.
Volunteer Marine Rescue, Coast Guard, SES marine units and independent rescue services. Send us your details and we'll add you to the national directory owners see before every trip, and set your station up with the tools above.
Apply for a Free AccountOr fill in the submission form on our home page. Nothing goes live until we verify it with you.
The boat owner at the centre — and every corner of the boating community plugged in.
Free for not-for-profit rescue organisations. Membership fees go to your own account.
Get ListedNo tiers inside a station. If a station uses it, it is included, and there is no per-member or per-call charge.
Every boat logged on, where it is, when it is due and what it looks like. Worst first, so the thing that needs attention is at the top.
FreeCrew take a log on in seconds, with vessel details and contacts that are already on file, and the station confirms the boat home.
FreeA boat past its ETA or gone quiet appears on the board with how long, so nobody has to remember what the radio said an hour ago.
FreeA declared distress turns the board red and opens an incident, with the position, the vessel and who is aboard.
FreeStatus transitions, crew seats, notes and the history of who did what, so the report is written as the job happens rather than afterwards.
FreeTows with the vessel, the station asset, the ETA and the outcome.
FreeDivers logged on with a position pin and a headcount that includes everyone aboard. A boat dive without a headcount is refused, and a dive with no pin is flagged rather than blocked.
FreeThe roster, every ticket and licence with its expiry, and a warning when a ticket lapses on someone who is rostered on.
FreeText paging to the crew with replies recorded against the page, so the station knows who is responding.
FreeMembership register, member numbers, fees and renewals, paid into the station's own Stripe account. BoatMe takes no fee and never holds the money.
FreeA member number and call sign follow the member and their vessel, so a member of one station is recognised at another.
FreeEvery station vessel with its hull file, defects and service history, and a maintenance board the workshop actually uses.
FreeOpen, overdue, safety critical and awaiting parts, triaged for the workshop, with the job history behind each asset.
FreePolicies, procedures, training material and forms, kept where the crew can find them without asking the office.
FreeOne card that counts what is actually urgent: overdue vessels, unconfirmed log offs, open rescue reports, divers past their time, tows past ETA and lapsed volunteer tickets.
FreeAdmin, operations, maintenance, IT and volunteers each see the part of the station they are there for.
FreeFeature switches per station, hide the station phone and email if you prefer, and add your Facebook page.
FreeYour station listed in the national sea rescue directory at no cost, so owners can find you before they leave the ramp.
FreeMarine warnings for your area, posted by the station now and fed from the Bureau of Meteorology once the national feed is granted.
Free