A surf log for people who don't take it that seriously

There are already a lot of surf apps. Some of them grade your turns. Some of them push you to surf more days than last month, like the wave was a Peloton class. Some quietly upload your sessions to a feed nobody asked for.

Swellbook isn’t trying to be any of those.

It’s a logbook. The kind you’d keep in a notebook in the glovebox, if your handwriting was better and your notebook didn’t get wet. You open the app after a session, drop in where you were, what board you rode, a couple of photos, and how it felt. That’s it. Over a season it adds up to something worth scrolling back through.

What it doesn’t do

A short list, because the negatives matter:

• No streak shaming. Streaks exist — they’re fun to watch tick up — but skipping a week of flat days is not a moral failing. The app won’t nag you to paddle out when there’s nothing to paddle out for.
• No score. Your sessions don’t add up to a number that ranks you against strangers. There are no strangers — there’s no server.
• No coaching. Swellbook doesn’t grade your turns, suggest drills, or tell you to “work on your bottom turn.” If you want a coach, get a coach.
• No social feed. Nothing you log goes anywhere. Your sessions, photos, and notes live on your phone and only your phone.
• No subscription. Free, no IAPs, no premium tier dangled behind the features that should already be there.

If “no” feels like a lot, that’s because most surf apps say yes to everything by default and you have to switch the noise off one toggle at a time. Swellbook starts at quiet.

What it does do

The map is the centre of it. Tap to drop a new break. Tap an existing pin to log a session there. Filter to your home stretch of coast or that one trip where you slept in a van for two weeks. Spots stay where you left them, and your map fills in over the years like a logbook you can actually see.

Each session takes about thirty seconds to log if you want it to. Date, spot, board, conditions, a couple of photos pulled from your library, a note if something happened. The form is short on purpose — anything you skip just stays empty. A session with one photo and the word “fun” is still a session worth keeping.

Your quiver lives next to it. Boards, fins, wetsuits — whatever you actually use. The app keeps a count of how many days each board has logged, which is sometimes funny and sometimes data you didn’t know you wanted.

There’s a wishlist. Spots you haven’t paddled out at yet, boards you’ve been side-eyeing on the internet. When you log a matching session, the wishlist quietly checks itself off.

And there’s Camper Mode, off by default, for people whose surf trips happen out of a van. Toggle it on and every spot grows a second layer: parking, camping, fresh water, toilets, distance to the line-up. Built for the people who plan their year around where they can wake up. Off if you don’t.

Why local-only

Every byte of your data lives on your device, in SwiftData. Nothing is uploaded. There is no account to sign into, no password to forget, no “we’re updating our terms of service” email. If you delete the app, the data is gone with it. If you want to move to a new phone, there’s a one-tap export and import.

The reason is plain: a surf log is a personal thing. Sessions are full of context — the friend who paddled out with you, the bad coffee on the way home, the swell that got better than the forecast said. That stuff doesn’t belong on someone else’s server. It belongs on yours.

Who it’s for

People who go surfing, like remembering the trips, and don’t need the app to be more than that. People who’d write it down in a notebook if they were the notebook type. People who have one or two boards they actually ride and a season they want to keep.

If you’re chasing pro performance metrics, Swellbook isn’t the app. There are good apps for that — go find them. But if your version of “the year I had” is a handful of trips, a few home-break sessions that stuck, and the one swell in October that was suddenly really good — that’s the year Swellbook is for.

The app is on the App Store. Free, iOS 17+. If you’ve had even a single day worth remembering, that’s the one to start with.