Do I need an account to book?
Yes. An account is what holds your booking reference, your trip status and your payment record, and it is what lets you leave a review afterwards.
You can browse every trip on the site without signing in. An account is only needed at the point you send a request, and it takes an email address and a password.
Once you have one, your trips, their statuses and their payment records sit in a single place, which matters when you are dealing with a booking from another country in a different time zone.
Your account is also where your captain's contact details appear once a trip is confirmed, where you cancel or change a booking, and where you leave a review afterwards. Everything about the trip lives in one place rather than in a chain of emails. If you would rather not create one just to look, you do not have to — the account only comes into it when you are ready to send a request.