Cruises, flights, and days at sea

How no-country days behave

• Flights — the photo scan drops shots taken above 5,000 m, so photos out the window don’t create visits to countries you overflew. GPS tracking generally has nothing to log mid-flight; the crossing day itself counts in departure and arrival countries, as most rules expect.
• At sea — when the phone gets a location more than 25 km from any coast, the day is recorded as International Waters, shown with a ship glyph instead of a flag. It appears in History and the calendar like any other place, matches no counter’s region, and is left out of your “countries visited” total — so it counts as time outside every country, which is what days-away and absence rules want. Bounded also sends a notification, Now in international waters, when you leave territorial waters.
• No signal at all — offshore with no location fix, no day is written; those days show as gaps. Fill them with International Waters from the gap-fill sheet if you want an explicit record, or leave them empty — either way no counter counts them anywhere.
• Near the coast — within 25 km of shore the day resolves to the coastal country, so a phone in reach of shore towers may still record it. Port calls count as visits (that’s right — you docked); spurious coastal days are worth correcting — pick International Waters in the trip editor or the correction sheet.

Cruising the Schengen area

The classic cruiser question: do sea days count against the 90/180 budget? Broadly, days genuinely outside member-state territory don’t consume Schengen days, while port days do — but the counting for multi-stop itineraries has real nuance (territorial waters, same-day ports). In Bounded this falls out naturally: International Waters days match no Schengen counter, port calls record as visits. Practical approach: let port calls record as visits, make sure open-sea days read as International Waters (or stay empty), and correct any day the automatic record attributes wrongly. For the rule itself, see the Rulebook — and for a high-stakes count, confirm your itinerary’s treatment with the operator or an advisor.

Practical setup for a long voyage

• Take a geotagged photo at each port — it gives every landfall photographic evidence even where GPS was off.
• After the trip, review the calendar once: fill days that should count, check that sea days read as International Waters, fix any coastal misattribution.
• Special territories exist (Svalbard is administered by Norway but outside Schengen) — where a distinction like that matters to your count, adjust those days manually and tell us; region handling improves from exactly these reports.