Who we are
SailStarter teaches sailing fundamentals through short lessons and quizzes. These terms are the agreement between you and SailStarter. They cover the marketing site at sailstarter.com and the learning app at sailstarter.com/app, and using either one means you accept them.
SailStarter is operated by Ihor Tykhonenko. Our business address is 91-1037 Cleveland Ave, Riverview, NB E1B 0T9.
Questions about these terms go to one email address: tikhonenkoigor@gmail.com. A person reads it.
What SailStarter is
SailStarter is a beginner sailing course: short lessons on the fundamentals, each one ending in a quiz. It teaches the knowledge layer — the vocabulary, the orientation, the way a boat behaves — so that time on a real boat is spent sailing rather than decoding words. Lessons are still being written, and the course grows as they ship.
The course is free. There is nothing to buy on SailStarter, there is no subscription, and we do not ask for payment details. If that ever changes, we will say so on this page before it does.
The marketing site — the blog, the curriculum, and the “Ready to crew?” diagnostic — is open to everyone, no account needed. Lessons need an account, because your progress is saved against it so that it follows you between devices.
No certification, no affiliation
Nothing you do on SailStarter certifies you to do anything
SailStarter is not a certifying body, not an accrediting body, and not a sailing school. SailStarter is not affiliated with, endorsed by, approved by, accredited by, or connected in any way to any sailing authority, national federation, maritime agency, or certification scheme, anywhere in the world.
Completing a lesson, passing a quiz, finishing the entire course, or collecting any mile, streak, flag, or rank in the app confers no qualification, no license, no certificate, and no endorsement of any kind. Nothing you do on SailStarter counts towards a certification course, a charter company’s requirements, an insurer’s requirements, or any legal requirement to be aboard or in charge of a vessel.
Where sailing or chartering requires a license, certificate, or ticket, SailStarter cannot issue it and cannot count towards it. What SailStarter can do is help you arrive at a certifying body’s course better prepared. It is not a substitute for that course.
Crew ranks, signal flags, nautical miles, and streaks are game mechanics. They describe how far you have moved through our own course and nothing else, and they are not an assessment of your competence on a boat.
Do not present a SailStarter lesson, score, or rank to anyone as a qualification — not to a skipper, a charter company, an employer, or an insurer. It is not one.
Safety and your own judgment
SailStarter teaches fundamentals for learning purposes. The course is self-study material, not hands-on instruction: it is not a substitute for time on the water with a qualified instructor, and reading about a boat is not the same as handling one.
What you do on the water is your decision and your responsibility. If you are crewing, the skipper of that boat is in charge, and you should treat their instructions as final.
Rules, licensing, and equipment requirements vary by country and by region within a country, and they change. Our lessons label region-specific facts as region-specific rather than presenting them as universal, because something that is correct in one place can be wrong or unlawful in another. Before you go out, check what applies on the water you are sailing on, with the authority responsible for it.
We write carefully and we correct what we get wrong, but we cannot promise that every sentence in the course is right for your boat, your water, and your day. Sailing carries real risk. Learning the fundamentals ashore is a good way to arrive ready to pay attention; it is not a guarantee of anything once you are aboard.
Your account
You must be at least 16 to create a SailStarter account. That is our own rule, and it is the same rule our privacy policy states. SailStarter is not directed at children.
Signing in works by magic link: you give us an email address, we email you a one-time link, and you follow it. There is no password. Anyone who can read that inbox can sign in as you, so use an address only you can reach and do not forward a sign-in link to anybody.
An account is for one person. Keep yours to yourself, and do not sign in to an account that is not yours.
Progress is saved against the account that earned it. There is no feature for moving progress to another account, and none for merging two accounts.
Acceptable use
The short version: use SailStarter to learn, and leave it working for everyone else. Specifically, do not:
- republish, sell, or redistribute our lessons, quizzes, illustrations, or diagrams — see What we own;
- run automated tools against the service to create accounts, submit quiz answers, or pull the course down faster than a person could read it — search-engine and answer-engine crawlers are welcome, on the terms below;
- try to reach any part of the service, the database, or another person’s account that is not yours to reach;
- attack, overload, or otherwise interfere with the service or its users;
- share your account with someone else, or sign in to an account that is not yours;
- use a display name that impersonates somebody, or that is abusive, hateful, or obscene;
- claim or imply that SailStarter has certified, qualified, endorsed, or trained you;
- break the law of the place you are in while using SailStarter.
If you find a security problem, email us at the address above rather than exploring it further. We would much rather hear from you.
Ending your account
You can stop using SailStarter whenever you like. There is nothing to cancel and no refund to arrange, because the course costs nothing.
To have your account deleted, email us and ask. That removes your sign-in record and everything linked to it; if you also gave us an address for course updates, say so in the same message, because that list is a separate record and deleting an account does not reach it. The steps and the full list of what deletion removes are in the privacy policy. There is no delete button in the app yet, so we do it by hand when you ask.
We can suspend or close an account that is being used in the ways listed under Acceptable use. If we close your account, we will email the address on it and say why. If you think that is a mistake, reply to that email and tell us.
The record of lessons, quizzes, miles, and streaks lives with the account it was earned on. If the account goes, the record goes with it.
What we own
The lessons, the quiz questions and their explanations, the illustrations and diagrams, the writing on this site, and the SailStarter name and logo are our own work, and we own them. The facts of sailing belong to nobody; the way we explain them, draw them, and put them in order is ours, and copyright protects it.
You are welcome to read the lessons, take the quizzes, keep your own notes, and quote a short passage with credit and a link back to the page it came from. Search engines and answer engines are welcome to read us and quote us the same way — our robots.txt allows every crawler, deliberately.
Ask us first for anything beyond that: republishing a lesson or an article in full, using our material to teach or to build something of your own, or selling any of it. The answer is not automatically no.
The open-source software and typefaces SailStarter is built with stay under their own licenses, which we follow.
Your data
What we collect, who else handles it, and how to have it deleted are set out in the privacy policy, which is part of these terms.
In short: we hold your email address, the record of what you have done in the course, and the settings you choose in the app, and our host records ordinary web-server access logs including your IP address. No analytics tool of any kind runs on either site, and SailStarter sets no cookies at all — no tracking cookies, no advertising cookies, none. Where this summary and the privacy policy differ, the privacy policy is the accurate one.
Availability of the service
SailStarter is free, and it is provided as it is. We do not promise that the site and the app will always be available, that they will be free of faults, or that any particular lesson, feature, or reward will still be there next month.
The course changes. We add lessons, rewrite them when we find something wrong or out of date, and sometimes remove things. A correction can go live without notice: when something in the course turns out to be wrong, we would rather fix it that day than wait.
Some of what the marketing site describes is still being built. As of the date at the top of this page, the iOS and Android apps are in development, and signing in with a social account is not available yet.
We may stop offering SailStarter, or any part of it. If we ever shut the service down, we will email the address on your account first, so that you have the chance to ask us for a copy of what we hold.
Changes to these terms
When these terms change we update the date at the top of this page. If the change matters — a new restriction on how you can use SailStarter, a charge for something that is free today, or a change to what happens to your account — we will say what changed rather than quietly swapping the text.
Using SailStarter after a change means you accept the updated terms. If you would rather not accept them, stop using SailStarter and ask us to delete your account.