Your club sends you an ID and a four-digit PIN. They are checked against the club's
records, not against this phone, so they work on any phone you pick up.
Your club's email has two links. Open the first one and add BoatMover to your home screen
when the phone offers. On an iPhone this is required for alerts to reach you later.
Open the second link. It goes straight to sign-in — there is nothing to choose.
Type the club code, your ID and your PIN. All three are in the same email.
The club code is the one nobody expects, because no other app asks for one.
Opened the app on its own instead? If you reach a screen offering to
Build your club or Join your club, you have come in
through the front door rather than your invite. Press Join your club
— never Build your club, which is for the one person setting the club up. Going back to
the second link in your email avoids the question entirely.
ID and PIN not accepted? Ask your admin to re-send the invite. It
usually means your entry has not reached the club's records yet, which is nothing you can fix from
your phone.
Forgot your ID or PIN? On the sign-in page, open
Forgot your ID or PIN? and type the email your club has for you. It shows your
ID. Your PIN is with your club admin — ask them. An email alone never signs you in.
Going out
Your club already told the app who you are, so there is nothing about yourself to
type. Three things must be known before it will let you start: your weight, your age
and a GPS fix. The first two normally come from your club's records and are already there;
if a line beside the button says Needs weight, age and GPS — naming
whichever of the three is still missing — that is what is holding you up. Picking a boat
is not required — the app will let you row without one, though the session is tied to a hull
only if you choose it.
Check your weight is right. It comes from your club's records and is locked —
you cannot edit it here and you do not need to. It is the only figure about you on the screen:
your age and sex are held but not shown, because there is nothing you can do about them here.
Choose your Boat class.
Pick the hull under Boat name/number, from your club's fleet. Only boats of the
class you chose are offered.
In a crew boat, choose Your seat. It is how your coach sees one dot for
the boat instead of four for the phones in it.
Pair a heart-rate strap if you have one. Without it the row is logged but cannot set a score.
Press Test warning sounds and listen. If you hear nothing you will hear
nothing on the water either.
Press Check GPS and wait for it to go green.
Press Mount & row, mount the phone and push off. The phone is now
ready: recording starts by itself, silently, as soon as you are moving on the water your
club drew — nothing to press in the boat. Start now starts it at once if you
need to.
Not on the water within 10 minutes of pressing Mount & row?
The phone closes the session and files nothing. A boat that stops moving for 20 minutes during a row
ends its session by itself, and what you rowed is saved. If your club has not drawn its rowable water,
Mount & row starts recording straight away.
Is your weight wrong? It is not something to fix on the water —
tell your admin and they change it once, in the club's records, for every phone you ever use. It is
shown here so you can catch a wrong one, not so you can type one.
An Age box you can type in means your club has not
filled it. Age appears on this card only when the club's record for you is blank, and it
disappears again once it has a value — because without an age there is no maximum heart rate
to measure 80% against, and therefore no score at all.
In a boat with a cox, you type nothing about them. The app starts from the
standard 55 kg cox. If your cox is a club member rowing with the app on the same hull
(seat Cox), their own weight from the club's records replaces the standard
automatically while you row — so pick the hull, or the app cannot tell who is in your boat.
The summary says which one your score used.
The screen while you row
Four numbers at a glance, chosen by you. Everything is one tap away because reading
takes longer than looking.
Tap any tile to change what it shows: split, rate, heart rate, distance, trip, time, tilt.
Tap the map button to slide the map away and make the numbers bigger.
Tap the fullscreen button to lose the address bar.
The leg tag reads Leg 1 · out until you have gone 150 m out
and 60 m back, then it turns over. It never turns back.
Calling for help
One gesture, on the biggest target on the screen, that works with cold wet hands and
without reading anything. It reaches your coach and the boats nearest you.
Press and hold the block of numbers for about 1.5 seconds. Anywhere on it.
Let go before that and nothing is sent — the screen says so.
The screen turns red and tells you whether the call got out.
To cancel a false alarm, hold the cancel button for about a second. A single tap will
not do it.
If it says it could not reach anybody, it keeps trying for five
minutes and tells you plainly. Get attention another way as well — wave an oar.
Your finger can slide. On a wet screen the hold still counts even if your
finger moves off the panel.
If you capsize
If you are in the water you may not be able to press anything. The most reliable
thing on this page is the hold-to-call button — if you can reach the phone, use it. What
follows is the backup for when you cannot.
Your phone reports where it is every 15 seconds. If that stops while you are marked
afloat, your coach is told and your last position is on their map.
If the phone also went over hard first, your coach is told much sooner — a boat
that rolled past 70° and then went quiet is not a patchy signal.
Nothing is sent just because the phone tipped over. Answering a call, or putting it in a
pocket, tells nobody anything.
Why the phone no longer raises the alarm by itself. It used to, on tilt
alone, and it was wrong twice over: it fired whenever anybody took the phone off the mount to
answer a call, and in a real capsize the phone is underwater, where no signal gets out anyway. An
alarm that cries wolf is worse than none, because the coach stops looking. Silence is the honest
signal — it cannot be faked by an angle, and it still works when the phone has gone.
Stay with the boat. It floats and it is what people can see.
When somebody else calls
You are minutes closer than anyone on the bank, so you are told — but only if
you are near enough to be of use, and only as loudly as the distance warrants.
How loud depends on how serious it is, not only on how far away you are. A call for help,
a phone that has gone silent, or anything still open after three minutes is serious. Anything
else — a flip the app detected that is fresh, or one the coach has already answered — is
not.
Something serious, within about 1.2 km: you get a tone and a buzz. That is roughly
five minutes of rowing — close enough that turning round is a rescue rather than a gesture.
Anything else, within about 500 m: a quiet line on screen and no sound. Close enough
that you may row past it.
Further off than that, nothing — you cannot help and the alarm would only be noise. The
exception is a casualty nobody else is near, or one whose position is unknown: then distance stops
applying and you are told anyway.
It stops when their coach stands it down.
The sound falls. A high note dropping to a lower one, three times, then
twice again each minute until it is stood down. Nothing else in BoatMover falls — every other
sound it makes rises or stays level — so a falling pair tells you what it is without looking
at the phone. It is deliberately nothing like the race start, which is a single high pip.
Finishing
Ending a row is the one thing you cannot undo by accident, so it takes two presses.
Press the round red key at the top right of the telemetry screen.
It turns white and says TAP AGAIN TO END.
Press it again within four seconds. Your row is computed and filed.
If you wait, it goes back to normal and nothing happens.
Your score
A BoatMover Score is your speed with the things that are not you taken out —
boat class, your weight, the distance, the stream. It only counts a piece that was a real effort.
A piece must be at least 500 m, at least 1 minute, at 80% of your maximum
heart rate or above — and it must hold that 80%, not merely touch it. Once you get
there, no more than 30 seconds below it (or with the strap not reading) or the piece does not
count.
Below that it is still logged. Most rowing is meant to be below that line.
If the app says This does not look like a rowing piece, it means
the measurement could not have come from a boat — a speed no crew has ever rowed, a track
outside your club's water, a heart rate no human produces. It almost never means somebody
cheated. It means the phone was in a car, or the strap was on a clubmate, or the session was
left running on the drive home. The row stays in your log; it just does not score.
If it says Worth a check on a piece that did score, your
time was faster than the world's best for the boat class you chose. Nine times in ten the class was
set wrong on the start screen — picking a single while you were in a quad skips the handicap
and flatters the number. Worth fixing before it stands.
Row out and back and the app measures the stream from your own two legs, instead of
guessing at it.
Your score never goes down. Every piece is a fresh attempt at your own record.
Racing
A race is an agreed distance, not a finish line — two boats on a river are
never on the same line, and each boat's own odometer stops its own clock.
Press the flag button on the map to challenge a nearby boat.
Pick the distance. Both boats row the same distance from GO.
Choose how it starts — the choice is yours, not your coach's.Together sends both boats at once and takes the handicap off the
result. Staggered holds the faster boat at the line after the gun and
releases it later, so the wait is the handicap and whoever crosses first has won.
In a staggered start your phone counts you down quietly while you are held. That countdown is
your own race starting, not the other boat's.
The trophy button shows your racing record.
Leaving the app
Closing the app should stop it using your battery. That part always works, whether or
not your phone lets the window close.
Press EXIT at the top left.
GPS, the screen lock and background updates stop straight away.
If you are mid-row it asks once, and the second press finishes and files the row properly.
If you have a call for help open it will not let you leave.