OffWatch
Your time, your port, your people.
A private network for maritime professionals — built for the time between watches.
OffWatch helps seafarers, offshore crew, and anyone who spends long stretches away from home build genuine friendships and real-world connections during time off watch.
Our mobile application is currently in development.
The concept
Built around life at sea, not adapted from it
Life at sea and offshore comes with a specific kind of isolation: long rotations, limited connectivity, and colleagues who become your only social world for months at a time. OffWatch starts from that reality, rather than treating it as an edge case of a general-purpose social app.
Privacy-first
Built with data minimisation in mind from the outset — collecting what a genuinely useful product needs, and no more.
Real-world connections
Designed to support relationships that continue beyond the screen, not to maximise time spent inside the app.
Built for seafarers
Shaped around the rhythms of shipboard and offshore life — rotations, crew changes, and time off watch.
How it works
Three systems, one purpose: helping you meet real people, in the right place
A live map, built for the maritime world
OffWatch's map shows other maritime professionals near you, styled specifically for the app rather than a generic map skin — a custom navy-and-gold cartography, not the default look of the mapping engine underneath.
Positions are always privacy-reduced before they reach the map: OffWatch never shows another person's exact coordinates, only an approximate area — enough to know someone is nearby, not enough to pinpoint them.
- Custom-styled map, matching the app's own navy and gold identity
- Positions are approximated, never exact — by design, not by omission
- Nothing is shown until you've consented to location-based discovery
Discovery that only activates near real maritime places
OffWatch isn't a global directory — discovery is designed to switch on automatically, and only near maritime locations the app recognises: ports, marinas, and offshore installations. There's nothing to set up and no "go visible" button; it's built to simply work once you're in a place like that, and to explain clearly why it isn't active anywhere else.
When someone already in your network comes within range, OffWatch is designed to notify you — so you know when your people are nearby, whether that's a familiar face from a previous rotation or a new connection making port at the same time.
- Activates near ports, marinas, and offshore installations — not just anywhere
- Automatic — no manual check-in, no visibility toggle to remember
- Notified the moment a connection enters range
Security and trust, built in from the start
Meeting people through an app carries real trust questions, especially in an industry built on reputation. OffWatch is being designed with identity verification, reporting and moderation tools, and granular privacy controls — including a stealth mode that removes you from discovery entirely — as core parts of the product, not an afterthought.
Access to your location is always consent-based and can be withdrawn at any time. Nothing about how OffWatch works depends on collecting more than it needs.
- Identity verification for genuine, accountable profiles
- Reporting, moderation, and blocking, always available
- Consent-based location sharing, revocable at any time
About this site
This site is the public web presence of Offwatch Social Ltd, the company building OffWatch. Read more about the company on the About page, or get in touch via the Contact page.