Certified safe boater!
Jan. 3rd, 2026 01:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nosrednaydujMassachusetts passed a boater safety law last year which requires operators of a power boat to have a safety certificate. If you're old, this doesn't actually take effect until 2028, but if you are young, it takes effect now. There are a bunch of young people whom I have taught to drive the boat so that when they are visiting, we can go waterskiing with just me and a couple of young people. So now I have to get them to take the class and get their safety certificate. I will pay for the class. But it takes time! Something that most young people are short on.
Even though I'm not required to do it yet, I took the class and have earned my safety certificate so that I would know what it was like. Strangely, you can do in-person classes offered by the state for free (at inconvenient times in inconvenient locations), or you can do self-paced online classes for money. Even though the online class does not involve a real instructor but is just videos and reading text and little game-like things showing things like right-of-way rules. Then you have to take a multiple-choice test and pass with 80%. 60 questions; I only missed one, though I did guess on a few of them. It's the typical situation where two of the answers are obviously completely bogus, one of the answers is right, and the other answer is plausible.
It's not a lot of money, $45 for the one I took. There's a different one that's more expensive and in theory takes less time; maybe one of my young people will take that one and they can tell me how it differs.
The class didn't actually suck. The videos were okay, and you can run them at double speed. They had a set of actors who were going around in boats showing different things like parts of boats and navigation buoys and potential hazards and docking techniques and different kinds of lifejackets, and it was the same people in all the videos so you kind of got to know them. I did it in several different sessions; I didn't really keep track of the amount of time, but it was probably 10 hours.
It's a little annoying because there's only one type of boat license and so the class covers things about boating in the ocean that you'll never need if you are only dorking around on a small lake. I had a leg up because I have boated in the ocean and I did learn those things before we headed off to Bermuda, by reading parts of the Annapolis book of Seamanship. Though that was now 30 years ago.
Even though I'm not required to do it yet, I took the class and have earned my safety certificate so that I would know what it was like. Strangely, you can do in-person classes offered by the state for free (at inconvenient times in inconvenient locations), or you can do self-paced online classes for money. Even though the online class does not involve a real instructor but is just videos and reading text and little game-like things showing things like right-of-way rules. Then you have to take a multiple-choice test and pass with 80%. 60 questions; I only missed one, though I did guess on a few of them. It's the typical situation where two of the answers are obviously completely bogus, one of the answers is right, and the other answer is plausible.
It's not a lot of money, $45 for the one I took. There's a different one that's more expensive and in theory takes less time; maybe one of my young people will take that one and they can tell me how it differs.
The class didn't actually suck. The videos were okay, and you can run them at double speed. They had a set of actors who were going around in boats showing different things like parts of boats and navigation buoys and potential hazards and docking techniques and different kinds of lifejackets, and it was the same people in all the videos so you kind of got to know them. I did it in several different sessions; I didn't really keep track of the amount of time, but it was probably 10 hours.
It's a little annoying because there's only one type of boat license and so the class covers things about boating in the ocean that you'll never need if you are only dorking around on a small lake. I had a leg up because I have boated in the ocean and I did learn those things before we headed off to Bermuda, by reading parts of the Annapolis book of Seamanship. Though that was now 30 years ago.
