Why the network is closed by design
Every captain reading this has been inside a fishing group on social media — or a forum, or a discord, or a buddy thread of fifty members that used to be ten. There is a pattern. The first year is gold. Experienced captains trade real intel because the group is small and everyone has skin in the game. By the second year, it's diluted. By the third year, the signal is gone and the group is people arguing about wire leader.
The Co-Captains network is designed not to do that. The mechanism is simple: you cannot sign up. You can only be nominated. And the captains with the authority to nominate are captains who have earned it — by logging real trips, not by showing up and asking to join.
How nomination slots are earned
Slots are earned by submitting @Dock reports after your trips. The more you contribute, the more captains you can bring aboard — because the captains who contribute are the captains whose judgment the network trusts.
Submit your first three @Dock reports and you earn two nomination slots. This is the starter allocation. You're expected to use it when the right captain comes to mind — not to hoard it, and not to burn both slots on the first two friends you think of.
After the opening three, every subsequent ten @Dock reports adds one nomination slot. So a captain with thirteen reports total has three slots earned. Twenty-three reports, four. And so on. The pace is set by how much you fish and log — it's the same behavior that makes the fleet intel good in the first place.
There is no limit on nominations a captain can earn over time. A captain who has fished and logged for three seasons with the network has earned real standing, and the network treats him that way.
How to nominate a captain
From your Dashboard, click Nominate a Captain. The form is short: the captain's name, their email, and a brief note on why you're nominating them — what their water is, what kind of fishing they do, why they'd be a fit for this network specifically.
Sedna sends the nominee an email invitation to the network. The invite explains what the Co-Captains network is and how to enroll, and it lets the nominee complete vessel profile, home port, target species, and experience level before first use.
Note: today the invitation comes from Sedna in a standard format — the referring captain's name is not yet called out in the email body. Tell the captain directly that you nominated them so they know the invite is coming and that it's from you; that context lands the invite harder than any marketing send. Surfacing the referring captain inside the invite itself is on the roadmap.
The nominee completes the enrollment flow — vessel profile, home port, target species, experience level. Once they're in, they have full access to the portal the same way you do. Their first @Desk briefing is waiting when they want it.
Who to nominate (and who not to)
The captains who matter most to nominate are not the ones who would sign up for anything — they are the ones who would never sign up for anything. Captains who have been fishing their water for twenty years and don't join forums because forums are noise. The kind of captain whose intel would actually make the fleet signal better. The kind who, if he joined, you'd want to read his reports.
Rough filter: if you'd trust this captain's word on the water, nominate him. If you wouldn't, don't. A nomination is a statement — you are putting your name on this captain's participation. If his reports turn out to be noise, that weighs on you a little too. That's by design.
Charter captains are specifically welcome. Owner-operators are welcome. Captains running a custom twenty-two or a sixty-foot sport-fisher are equally welcome — the network is not calibrated to boat size, it's calibrated to signal. The only practical filter is: does this captain log what he catches, or does he tell fish stories at the dock? The first type makes the network better. The second type doesn't.
The charter-captain side of the network is a quiet asset.
Charter captains in the network share the same fleet intel feed as the rec captains — but they also share, implicitly, a different kind of information. When a charter captain you nominated starts logging his Wednesday trips to the Fingers or the Chicken Canyon, his data lands in the network the same as anyone else's. Your briefings tighten because a captain who runs those grounds five days a week is now logging them. His tighten because you are.
The practical upside: the rec captain who nominates three charter captains from his home waters has effectively bought himself a permanent intel channel. The charter captain who nominates three other charters has built a small, high-signal working group inside a larger network. It compounds.
Pick the charter captains you nominate the same way you'd pick a lease partner: people whose judgment you'd stake your own trip on.
Why the loop matters to you specifically
A network that never adds captains gets smaller as boats get sold and captains get out. A network that adds everyone gets worse. This model is the middle path: slow, vouched-for growth by captains who have earned standing through use.
The @Dock report earns you the slot. The slot lets you nominate a captain whose reports will, in turn, make your next briefing better. It is the one place in the portal where the work you do for your own fishing directly produces a better network for everyone, including you.