How the Canal & River Trust tracks where your boat has been

There is no tracker on your boat. The Trust builds its picture the old way: people walking the towpath, writing down the index numbers painted on hulls.

What a sighting is

A licence compliance officer records that boat number X was at location Y on date Z. Enough of those across a year produce a pattern — overall range, how often you moved, whether you overstayed anywhere.

At renewal, that pattern is what gets assessed against the bona fide navigation requirement.

The gap in it

A sighting record is only as complete as the patrols that produced it. If nobody walks that stretch for three weeks, three weeks of your movement simply is not recorded. A boat that moved twice between visits looks identical to one that never moved at all.

Boaters' organisations have documented cases where incomplete sightings led to enforcement against boats that had in fact been cruising. That is not an accusation of bad faith — it is what happens when a system infers a continuous history from occasional observations.

You cannot see your own record

This is the part that surprises people. The sightings that decide your licence are not published to you. You find out what the Trust thinks you did when it writes to tell you.

The practical response is to keep your own dated record, with positions, as you go — so that if the two accounts disagree, yours exists.