Shoal
A marine life log for scuba divers
Shoal can answer that — and every other question your paper logbook can't. How many wreck dives you've done. What you saw on that trip. Everywhere in the world you've been diving. All of it saved as plain files you own.
The dive behind it
Tap the sighting and you get the whole dive around it. Dive #66, the M2 submarine off Portland — the conger in the hangar door, the lobsters in the plating, everything else down there at thirty metres. Depth, conditions, who you were with, and room to write it up.
Marine, Overview and Journal are tabs in the app — shown here in full, and each sitting where it sits in the real tab strip.
Conger eelConger conger
LC
Common lobsterHomarus gammarus
LC
Curled octopusEledone cirrhosa
LC
Plumose anemoneMetridium senile
Dead man's fingersAlcyonium digitatum
Thirty metres of green turned the shot line into a rope through nothing — and then the hull came out of the gloom all at once, the aircraft hangar door still open after ninety years. A conger thick as my thigh sat inside it, jaw open, entirely unbothered by us. Lobsters in every gap in the plating, a curled octopus tucked in under the gun mount, plumose anemones so dense the steel reads as soft. Thirty minutes wasn't enough. It never is on her.
The trip around it
All five from those three days in Dorset, grouped under one trip — from a shore entry at Chesil Cove to the wreck out in the bay. The map pins every site and colours it by dive type, so the shape of a trip reads at a glance.
Tap any dive to expand details
Wrasse working the boulders, right in the shallows.
Another octopus tucked under the ledges at twelve metres.
The conger owns the hangar door, and knows it.
One creature, one dive, one trip — every direction joins back up.
Where it runs
Two ways, depending on what you dive with. There's no app store in either case — you install it straight from your browser, or download it.
Recommended
Install it from Chrome or Edge in a few taps — this is the one to use in the field. Your dives sync straight to your own Google Drive folder, and the app updates itself quietly in the background. Pair a Bluetooth dive computer and pull your dives straight in.
A real desktop app — download it, no browser needed. The same Bluetooth dive-computer sync as Android, and a bigger screen for writing up a trip afterwards. Shoal tells you in-app when a new version's ready.
Download for Mac ↓On iPhone it runs and logs dives offline, but backup is still manual — you'd need to export your dives yourself from Settings. Proper sync, like Android's, is being built.
Actively built
Shoal ships something most weeks. Here's the recent run — scroll for more.
| Date | What changed |
|---|---|
| Colour-coded map pinsEvery dive site on the map now carries its dive type as colour, with a legend and tap-through to the dive. | |
| Colourblind-friendly dive typesAn optional pattern channel alongside colour, so a dive type is never colour-only. | |
| App-wide dark modeFollows your phone's setting, or pick it yourself. | |
| Screen-reader labels throughoutEvery form control in the app now has a name assistive tech can announce. | |
| Auto-match footage to divesPoint at a folder of video and Shoal works out which dive each clip belongs to, from its own capture time. | |
| Bulk dive renumberingRenumber a whole run of dives at once, instead of one at a time. | |
| Bluetooth sync on the Mac appPair a Shearwater or Suunto from the desktop app, not just the browser. | |
| Dive planning with real tidesMoon-phase tide calendar, wind and sea forecast, and a surface-interval calculator. |
Early days
Shoal is young, and it's made by one person — a diver who outgrew his paper logbook and wanted to know where he'd seen things. There's no support desk and no ticket queue: questions, ideas, and confusions come straight to me, and I answer all of them.
