Achievements & Fathoms
Badges, Fathoms points, and your community rank — how Zeil celebrates your time on the water.
Zeil keeps a quiet record of your sailing life at each club and celebrates it with badges and Fathoms points. Open Achievements in the sidebar — on a phone, it's the Achievements row on your Profile page — to see your rank, your badge collection, and how close you are to whatever's next.
Everything here is earned automatically from things you already do — completing sails, writing debrief notes, earning credentials, finishing courses. There's nothing to sign up for and nothing to maintain.
Recognition, not clearance
Your rank carries the note "Community rank — reflects participation, not certification", and that's exactly what it means: badges and Fathoms never affect what you're allowed to do. Skipper eligibility is decided by your club's real certifications & endorsements — no badge changes that in either direction.
Badges
Badges cover the different sides of club life, plus milestones the whole club earns together:
| Category | What it recognizes |
|---|---|
| Skippering | Taking the helm — your first command, a growing logbook, boats across different classes, the crewmates you've sailed with. |
| Crewing | Time aboard as crew — your first cast off, new boat classes, sailing under different skippers, coming off the standby list. |
| Progression | Credentials — your first endorsement and certification, completing a course, and becoming eligible to skipper a boat. |
| Stewardship | Care for the club — debrief notes and gear flags that help the next crew out. |
| Club admin | For admins — well-rounded club stewardship, a steady drumbeat of announcements, and guiding new members to their first certification. |
| Whole club | Milestones everyone earns together — total completed sails, hours on the water, and a growing roster. |
Some badges are earned once; others have Bronze, Silver, and Gold levels with rising thresholds. Select any badge — earned or not — to see exactly how it's earned, each level's threshold, your live progress (say, 6 / 10), and the Fathoms it awards. Use the filters above the grid to browse one category at a time.
Fathoms and your rank
Fathoms measure how deep your experience runs, not how fast you got there. You earn a flat amount for each completed sail (as skipper or crew), each debrief note, each endorsement, certification, and completed course — plus a bonus for every badge level you unlock. Deliberately flat: a one-hour harbor sail counts the same as a six-hour passage, and nothing is ever scored on speed, distance, or conditions.
Your Fathoms total sets your community rank, a ladder of nine honorific titles: Deckhand, Able Seaman, Bosun's Mate, Quartermaster, Navigator, First Mate, Sailing Master, Wayfinder, and Old Salt. The bar at the top of the page shows your current title and how many Fathoms remain to the next one. Ranks never decay — once earned, a title is yours.
Your history counts
Badges are derived from your club's actual records, so if your club joined Zeil with years of history — or switched achievements on later — everything that history already earns is awarded, and nothing is ever awarded twice.
For sailing that happened before the club was on Zeil at all, an admin can grant a badge manually; those show granted by an admin in the badge's detail.
Club milestones
The Whole club badges belong to everyone: total completed sails, cumulative hours on the water, and the size of the active roster. When the club crosses a milestone, every active member hears about it — these are never compared with other clubs.
Staying in the loop
A new badge appears in your in-app notifications right away, and new badges are also rolled into the daily digest email under the Badges & milestones preference — see Notifications to tune that.
Designed to stay friendly
A few things you won't find, on purpose: no leaderboards ranking you against other members, and no streaks — a quiet month never sets you back or resets progress. Badges never expire, and safety reporting (like flagging a gear issue) is recognized once, never turned into a score.