“The engine overheating alarm is on. What should I check first?”
It went straight to your boat’s own Volvo D3 manual: intake-manifold temperature on page 71, fuel and charge-air checks on pages 53 and 55. Then it named the first physical checks any overheating alarm warrants, and said plainly where the manual ran out rather than guessing.
Cited from Shimbiri’s Volvo D3 manual (pp. 53, 55, 71). A real answer from your documents, not invented advice.
Today you juggle four apps that disagree, and a plotter menu everyone hates.
One shows everything and tells you nothing about your trip. One plans the passage, then forgets it. Your plotter turns a single waypoint into a chore. Shimbiri is the one system you live a whole passage through, and the only one that keeps thinking after you leave the dock. The pieces you’d otherwise bolt on (COLREGs, the Captain’s Log, tides and currents) already live inside the Officer, not in four more apps.
This is Shimbiri, running on a real boat, right now.
Every screen here is the live system on the Hanse 575. Not a render.
Every tool here is brilliant at its piece. None of them know you.
Each does its job well. What none of them can do is understand your boat, your position and today’s conditions in real time, and act on it. That’s the Officer, and it runs alongside every one of them.
Officer isn’t here to replace your tools today. It gives the AI the same source information the best products run on, so it can finally understand your boat, your position and today’s conditions. We had to build it: there’s no honest shortcut to making the AI useful on the water. It works alongside the plotter and the weather apps you already trust, and over time it can grow into more of their job.
“Punching a coastal passage into ChatGPT looks clever if you don’t know the technology, and amateurish if you do. The answer comes back brilliant, but it doesn’t know you, your boat, or today’s conditions, and it can’t. Officer is what gives the AI that picture. Then it’s genuinely useful on the water.”
Ben Shipley · Founder
The same crew won PHS Division 1 in the 80th Sydney–Hobart.
Shimbiri was built and proven on this boat, in real conditions. She took the Division 1 win in the ocean classic to Hobart. Not a lab. A racecourse. The Officer that briefed those watches is the same one you run on your own boat.
Shimbiri is your navigator, not your autopilot. She advises, she shows you why (with the freshest data), and you decide. She never sails the boat behind your back.
Every feature traces to a real moment on the water.
The questions sailors actually ask. Answered, with the working shown.
Cat 1, a survey, an EPIRB, a boat licence, an engine alarm: answered from the source, with the citation and the reasoning. The way the crew answers on board, not a black box.
Browse the answers →Built something for the boat? Add it to the system.
Shimbiri is open at the edges. If you can describe what you need, you can build it (a prompt, a wrapper, a whole app), run it on your own boat, and if it’s good, share it with everyone running Shimbiri. AI changed who gets to build software; this is where you do it.
See what people are building →Free software. Metered AI. No subscriptions.
The apps are free. Install what you want, no account. The AI is metered: you pay only for what you use, by the query, not by the month. Want it fitted, set up and supported? The hardware and the hands-on services are quoted to your boat. No contracts, no lock-in.
Meet Shimbiri.
A lifetime in corporate tech, and two feet of boat manuals I could never find the right page in. Four daughters who inspire everything, even the name: Skye, Hudson, Madilyn, Blake. Shimbiri.
It began as a way to solve my own frustrations. It’s grown from a document reader into a crew that links every manual to every sensor to every pattern: one that found a fault in our own autopilot, talked a skipper through a flood, and guided us through the certifications for the Sydney–Hobart.
The point was never the technology. It’s to turn the complexity of a boat into capability: easier to operate, less to worry about, and far more enjoyable to own.
Your whole passage. One system.
Run Shimbiri on your boat →Built by sailors who code. Proven on Shimbiri. Improved every week.