The rules of the boat.

That is the test. Not literary polish. Not word count. Not whether the boat was impressive or the passage was long.

A wince usually means one of three things: it did not really happen that way, it was written to impress rather than to tell, or it is unkind to somebody who cannot answer back. Everything else is fair game.

What actually makes a story good here is specifics. The name of the boat. What the wind was doing at four in the afternoon. The thing you got wrong and only admitted later. The detail nobody would think to invent.

There is no minimum length. Most stories land between 600 and 1,500 words, and a finished 500 beats a padded 2,000 every time.

Most sailors have the story and not the writing habit. That is what the crew is for. Tell it to us, in a voice note, a rough draft, or a conversation, and we will help shape it into prose. It publishes under your byline, it stays your story, and you approve it before anybody else sees it.

Our editing promise, in both directions: light copy edits happen without asking, meaning spelling, punctuation, headings, and the obvious slips. Anything that changes what your story says comes back to you first.

A first season on a borrowed Sunfish sits next to a night crossing, and that is deliberate. Contrast is the point. A site with nothing but heroic passages is a magazine; a site where a nervous first docking runs beside a Mackinac race is a community.

If you have been sailing for forty years, the most useful thing you can do here is be generous to somebody in their first season. That is not a suggestion about tone, it is the reason the place works.

• Argue with the seamanship, never with the sailor.
• You should have known better is not feedback. It is just a door closing.
• If somebody got something wrong on the water and wrote about it honestly, they have already done the hard part.
• Corrections are welcome and useful. Deliver them the way you would to somebody standing in front of you.

We do not remove a story because a reader disagrees with how the boat was handled. Sailors have argued about reefing since there were reefs to shake out, and that is half the pleasure of the dock. Argue in the comments like an adult.

Everything published here is a verifiably human account of something that actually happened to the person whose name is on it. That is the product. There is nothing else being sold.

Using AI to help you write your own true story is fine. Fix the grammar with it. Tighten a rambling paragraph. Transcribe your voice notes. Ask it for a way into the opening line when you are stuck. Drafting help is drafting help, and it is no different from handing the thing to your sister who teaches English.

Wholesale AI fiction is not welcome, and neither is AI imagery. A story generated by a model and posted as your experience is not your story. Neither is a passage that never happened, a boat you never sailed, or a photograph of a sunset that does not exist.

Why we are strict about this: the entire value of this place is that it is true. Photographs of real boats on real water, written up by the people who were aboard, are the only reason anybody will trust this site in five years. Fabricated stories get removed, and posting them repeatedly closes the account.

Photographs are half of what makes a sailing story worth reading, and they are also where the legal trouble lives. The rule is short: post your own, or post with permission and credit.

• You took it, or the person who took it said yes and is credited by name. Crediting the photographer is a submission field, not an afterthought.
• Never post a photograph you found online. Not from a search result, not from another sailing site, not from a stock library. Photo licensing companies scan the web for this automatically and their demands start in the hundreds of dollars and run into the thousands, per image.
• Get the nod from your crew before you publish the picture of them being seasick. Legally optional, decent behavior, and it keeps people willing to sail with you.
• No AI-generated or AI-altered imagery in the story archive. Ever. Cropping, straightening, and normal exposure work are not what this means.

The rights you keep and the license you give us when you post a photograph are set out in section 4 of the Terms of Service. In short: you keep the photograph, and the license ends when you delete it.

• Anything that is not yours: copied text, somebody else's photographs, articles republished from elsewhere.
• Harassment, threats, slurs, and pile-ons. Going after a person instead of an argument.
• Private information: home addresses, phone numbers, slip numbers, anybody's details but your own.
• Impersonation, invented bylines, and second accounts used to agree with yourself.
• Spam and promotion: affiliate dumps, link drops, and stories written to move a product.
• Sexual content, and graphic material posted for shock.
• Instructions that would get somebody hurt, presented as fact.
• Anything unlawful.
• Fabricated stories, including anything generated wholesale by a model and posted as your own experience.

What does not get removed

• An unpopular opinion about anchors, rigs, brands, or the right time to reef.
• A story where the sailor comes off badly. Those are usually the best ones.
• A negative gear review that is honest, specific, and about the gear.
• A story a reader disagrees with. Disagreement is not a report.

Gear reviews are welcome and are labeled as reviews. A review is honest, specific, and says plainly whether the thing worked. A review written to sell something is an advertisement, and it goes.

One person reads this site. We call the role the harbormaster. It is not a team, and it is not a machine deciding what stays up.

• Reviews run in batches. Expect a few days on a first story, not a few minutes. If it has been longer than a week, hail us and ask.
• Your first story is read before it publishes. Once you have published one, later stories go up and get read shortly after, so you are not waiting on us forever.
• Every removal is written down: what came down, when, and why. That record exists so decisions can be checked later, including by you. Ask what happened to your own content and you will get a straight answer.
• There is a report button on stories and on comments. Reports go into a queue that a person works through. Nothing is auto-deleted because somebody clicked a button.
• You can block a commenter from your own stories. Blocks are surfaced to the harbormaster, because somebody collecting blocks from several different authors is a pattern worth seeing early.
• Appeals are read by a human. Reply to the notice you received, or hail the crew, and say what you think we got wrong.

We can decline, edit, delay, unpublish, or remove anything at our discretion, as section 8 of the Terms sets out. Reviewing what members write does not make us the author of it, and we are under no obligation to catch everything. What we do promise is that when something is reported, a person looks at it and writes down what they decided.

You must be at least 13 years old to hold an account or submit anything. There are no exceptions, and if we learn that an account holder is under 13 we close the account and delete the data.

Junior sailors still have the best stories on the lake. A parent or guardian may hold the account and submit a young sailor's story, published with the young sailor's byline. That is the only route, and it is a welcome one.

• A story or comment that breaks these Guidelines: use the report button. It is the fastest path and it lands in the queue with the context attached.
• Somebody posted your copyrighted work: the formal takedown procedure is section 9 of the Terms, and the designated agent details are on the Contact page.
• Anything else, including a mistake we made: hail the crew from the Contact page.

Tell us early. Almost everything is fixable in the first week and most of it is fixable after that, but it is a great deal easier when we hear about it from you instead of finding out later.