Your engines have been talking for years. Now you can hear them.
VesselX plugs into the diagnostic port on every boat in your fleet and streams what the ECU already knows — RPM, exhaust and coolant temperature, oil pressure, boost, fuel burn and fault codes — over LTE into Parasail Pro. No wiring. No new sensors. No clipboard.
Simulated instrument panel showing the parameters VesselX reads from a Volvo Penta D6. Figures are modelled for illustration, not a live vessel.
Coolant says the engine is fine. It is the last to know.
Coolant temperature is regulated by the thermostat, so it sits at more or less the same number across a wide range of engine loads. Put an over-propped boat or a heavy load on a turbocharged diesel and exhaust gas temperature climbs immediately, while the coolant gauge on the helm never moves.
The chart is one run leaving the harbour with a fouled bottom and a full boat. Load rises, EGT tracks it within seconds, and coolant holds flat inside its normal band the whole time.
By the time coolant moves, you have already been cooking the engine for twenty minutes. VesselX alerts on the line that moved first.
Six messages cover the whole engine.
Every parameter below is already on the bus — the ECU broadcasts it whether anything is listening or not. VesselX decodes these six standard J1939 parameter groups, which is enough to run live telemetry, health monitoring and hour tracking without touching a proprietary message set.
| PGN | Parameter group | What you get | Why it earns its place |
|---|---|---|---|
| 61444 | Electronic Engine Controller 1 | Engine speed, actual and requested torque | The base signal. Broadcast every 10 ms, so playback is smooth rather than stepped. |
| 65262 | Engine Temperature 1 | Coolant temperature, fuel temperature | Your overheat alarm — the cooling system's own view, not a load indicator. |
| 65263 | Engine Fluid Level / Pressure | Oil pressure, oil level, coolant pressure | A pressure drop at steady RPM is the earliest mechanical warning you will get. |
| 65270 | Inlet / Exhaust Conditions | Exhaust gas temperature, boost pressure | Moves first under load. This is the parameter that catches an over-propped boat. |
| 65271 | Fuel Economy | Instantaneous fuel rate, throttle position | Fuel burned per trip, per captain, per boat — measured rather than estimated. |
| 65226 | Active Diagnostic Trouble Codes | Active faults as SPN and failure mode | The fault reaches the office the moment the ECU raises it, not at haul-out. |
Engine hours arrive on 65253, and percent load, commanded speed and aftertreatment groups are decoded too where an engine publishes them. Volvo Penta D-series and Cummins QSC 8.3 are both supported by the same decoder.
Plug it in. That is the install.
VesselX connects to the diagnostic port your engine already has. No wires are cut, nothing is spliced, and nothing is programmed into the ECU. Any captain can fit one between trips.
Find the diagnostic port
Volvo Penta D-series presents a 6-pin Deutsch behind the helm or at the engine. Cummins QSC 8.3 usually presents a 9-pin. Both speak J1939 at 250 kbps.
Plug the gateway in
The matching harness clicks straight onto the port. It draws its own power from the same connector, so there is no wiring to run, no fuse to add, and no drain on the start battery when the boat is shut down.
One connector. No tools beyond your hands.
Attach it to the boat
Open Parasail Pro, pick the boat, attach the device. It appears on the live map and starts logging engine data within a minute. Nothing else to configure.
Move it or remove it
Unplugging returns the boat to exactly how it was. Shift a unit to another hull for a season, or pull it before a sale, and reattach it in the app in seconds.
Every boat, every engine, one view.
The office sees the whole fleet at once — what is running, what is working too hard, and what needs a mechanic before it becomes a cancelled trip. The fleet below is an example layout with illustrative figures.
| Vessel | Status | RPM | EGT | Coolant | Fuel | Hours |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ocean Pro | Under way | 2,710 | 548 °C | 86 °C | 51.4 L/h | 1,284.6 |
| Nalu | EGT high | 3,120 | 664 °C | 89 °C | 63.8 L/h | 2,041.2 |
| Big Kahuna | Idling | 720 | 198 °C | 78 °C | 4.1 L/h | 3,510.9 |
| Maka Kai | Shut down | — | — | — | — | 877.4 |
Route playback
Scrub any boat's day on the map with distance, speed and heading at every point.
ShippedTracked with or without hardware
Boats without a gateway are still tracked by the captain's phone and appear on the same map, the same way.
ShippedDistance leaderboards
Captains and companies ranked by distance run and average speed over any period you choose.
ShippedLive engine instruments
RPM, EGT, coolant, oil pressure and boost on one panel for any boat in the fleet.
Releasing nextFault codes the day they happen
Active diagnostic codes decoded to SPN and failure mode, pushed to the office instead of waiting for someone to mention a warning light.
Releasing nextGeofencing
Alerts when a boat leaves its operating area or enters water it should not be in.
On the roadmapNobody logs a flight without seeing the weather.
Engine data is one half of knowing your boats are safe. The other half is the weather, and Parasail Pro pulls live National Weather Service alerts and the current forecast straight into the app. Before a captain can complete any log, they have to acknowledge what is active — so the decision is made on current conditions, and the acknowledgement is on the record.
It is a small piece of friction in exactly the right place. The crew sees the advisory at the moment they are deciding whether to fly, not in an email nobody opened, and the operator has a defensible record that they did.
Weather is the one decision on a parasail boat that cannot be caught up on later.
Winds 25 to 30 kt, seas 8 to 12 ft
In effect until 6:00 PM HST. Conditions hazardous to small craft. Mariners should consider remaining in port or seeking safe harbour.
VesselX runs inside the app your crews already use.
Parasail Pro is the operations app built exclusively for the parasail industry — daily logs, vessel inspections, weather acknowledgements and an industry feed. After years of paper logs on a wet boat, and of bending generic software that was never built for parasailing, it was made for this industry and nothing else. Telemetry lands right next to all of it.
Customizable daily logs
Start from templates built for parasail operations, or build log forms that match exactly how your company runs.
Digital vessel inspections
Pre-trip and post-trip checks completed in seconds, timestamped and attributed to the crew member who signed off.
Industry feed
Regulatory changes, safety advisories and operational best practice from the USCG, FAA, NWS and fellow operators, in one place.
Print and email logs
Generate a clean report for your own records or for a regulator, without rebuilding it from scratch every time.
Multi-user permissions
Owners add captains, crew and managers, each with the access their role needs and nothing beyond it.
Company-only access
Only verified businesses can create an account, and only active employees can be added — which is what keeps the network trustworthy.
Put VesselX on your fleet.
Tell us what you run — how many hulls, which engines, where you operate — and we will put together the hardware list and the install. Parasail Pro is company-based, so your business creates the account and then adds its captains, crew and managers.