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

There is no tracker on your boat. The Trust builds its picture from sightings: licensing rangers record the index numbers of boats they pass and enter them on a tablet, and mooring rangers and volunteers add more. The Trust says it aims to cover the whole network at least every 14 days.

What a sighting is

A ranger 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. Even at one sighting every fortnight, everything between two sightings goes unrecorded. 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.

Seeing your own record

You can see the sightings recorded against your boat in your web licensing account. Because licences are issued monthly, the most recent 28 days are not shown. It is worth checking them against your own memory and records well before renewal, rather than first finding out what the Trust thinks when it writes to you.

The practical response is to keep your own dated record, with positions, as you go — so that the gaps between sightings, and the latest month, are covered, and if the two accounts disagree, yours exists.