I share my less than satisfactory experiences becoming a certified powerboat handling instructor.

I got my OUPV or “six pack” Captains License from the USCG back in 2023. It required me to take a 7-day class, pass four tests, and document 360 days under way on the water. (A day, in case you’re wondering, is at least 4 hours; two 3-hour days does not equal one day and one 9-hour day does not equal two days.)

I think the experience requirement is excellent, although 360 days is quite a bit of time. If you’ve spent 360 days under way on a boat and have been given any responsibilities other than tossing lines to someone on a dock, you probably have what it takes to captain a boat. Or at least that’s the logic behind the requirement.

As a USCG-licensed boat captain, I can do two things that someone without the license can’t legally do:

• I can take up to 6 paying passengers on my boat, thus earning a little income should I decide I want to offer fishing charters or tours.
• I can provide boat training to paying students.

In other words, I can use my skills, knowledge, and boat to make a little money. My fourth career? (Or fifth? I’m loosing count.) Maybe.

First Gigs

I did my first two training gigs in May 2024 when I was in the Annapolis area on the Great Loop.

The first student was a brand new boater who had purchased a 2015 Ranger Tug R-29 that he planned to take solo on the Great Loop starting in June. He was so new to boating that he was afraid to drive the boat out of its slip — and it was facing out! We worked together for three days and he got better every day. While I would not have signed him off to take my boat out on a charter, he was definitely on his way to becoming a good enough skipper to do the Loop. (His departure was delayed for a while, but he did get started. I’m not sure if he finished; I think some mechanical problems may have stalled him along the way.)

The other students were a couple who bought a newer Ranger Tug R-29. Their experience was in pontoon (or patio, as I call them) boats. This was a big step up. I spent a day with them. The husband was fine but the wife was full of fears that she did not hesitate to vocalize. She had no interest in getting behind the wheel, and that was okay with me. They only had me for a day and time was limited. I was able to get them up to speed on Ranger Tug systems and practice maneuvers that they already knew from previous experience.

Fast Forward to September 2024

I finished the Loop in August 2024 and had the boat back in the Seattle area by September. I had minimal experience cruising in the San Juan Islands and when I saw a two-week flotilla up to Desolation Sound offered by San Juan Yachting (SJY), I called to see if I could join in on my own boat. That’s how I wound up cruising with five larger boats as far up the Inside Passage as the Octopus Islands and back.

I was cruising solo, as I usually do. (While it’s nice to have company on board, it’s hard to find someone willing to split the costs and sleep in the midship berth, affectionally referred to as the Cave.) Every time I followed the other boats into a marina to tie up, the wife of the flotilla leader team would hurry over to my boat to help me tie up. In most cases, this was totally unnecessary; I dock without assistance all the time. Sometimes, by the time she got to my boat, I was already tied up. I think this impressed the flotilla leader because one day, as I was shutting down the engine and chartplotters, he came to my window and asked if I’d ever considered teaching people how to drive boats.

And that’s what started my longer term relationship with SJY.

A Little More about SJY

I need to say right up front that SJY is an excellent organization, extremely professional and focused on providing its charter and training clients the absolute best service they can. Simply said, if you want to charter a boat in the San Juan Islands, look at what SJY has to offer first. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. (And that’s not just because my boat is part of their fleet.)

As for training, they offer an excellent “Learn ‘n’ Cruise” course which puts you on a boat with two or more other people for a learning cruise in the San Juan Islands. This, I discovered, was what I would teach. (I actually taught two classes this spring — one single engine class for three people and one twin engine class for four people. All the students had a great time and I know they learned a lot.)

In all, I was really looking forward to the prospect of being an instructor for SJY. But first I had to get certified.

The Certification Process

SJY is the powerboat arm of San Juan Sailing (SJS), which has been around for a very long time. Some time ago, the powers that be at SJS decided that their training classes needed to be able to reward students with certifications. To do that, they had to get involved with an organization that had a certification process. They chose American Sailing (AS), which, like SJS, focused on sailing and sailing education. They would certify instructors and then the instructors who taught for SJS using AS materials could certify students.

When it came to the powerboat side of things, AS had a powerboat arm called the Recreational Powerboating Association (RPBA). As you might imagine, SJY chose that organization to certify its powerboat instructors and provide the materials for instructors to certify students.

To be certified as an instructor for single and twin engine powerboats, I had to attend two days of classes, each of which included some time on board a boat honing skills and practicing teaching each other how to handle the boat in close quarters. Fortunately, classes were coming up in October (this was still 2024) so I signed up. That’s when I got my first surprise: I had to foot the bill for the classes, which were $800+. Ouch. This was on top of the nearly 400-mile round trip drive from my home to Bellingham. I considered myself lucky that SJY allowed me to sleep on one of the charter boats for the two nights I was there or I would have been stuck with a $300 hotel bill, too.

I have no complaints about the classes. There were four students (if I recall) and we all had varying levels of experience. (My experience was mostly in small trawlers; I had zero twin engine time.) The material consisted of a boat handling book I already had (and can highly recommend) and a thin, black and white, spiral bound Student Underway Guide that discussed and illustrated maneuvers.

Classroom time was minimal, we all took and passed the written tests. We spent the afternoons on the boats, a single engine American Tug — the same one I’d been sleeping on — and a twin engine Grand Banks (if I recall correctly). I did fine on the instructor scoring criteria with the exception of not properly giving everyone on board a task while I was teaching the “student.” (I honestly didn’t know that was something I had to do. Oops.)

I went home the day after the second class. Some weeks later, I received three certificates in the mail:

• Classroom Powerboat Instructor
• CQPH Single Inboard Powerboat Instructor
• CQPH Twin Inboard Powerboat Instructor

I have no idea what CQPH stands for.

The certificates were white with gold foil trim and a gold embossed seal that had a blue ribbon. Very fancy. I punched holes in them and put them in my training binder. (You didn’t think I’d hang them on the wall, did you?)

As far as I — and SJY — was concerned, I would be ready to start teaching for the 2025 season.

Oh, and maybe you caught the fact that I was officially certified to teach twin-engine inboard power boats when I had less than 90 minutes of total time at the helm of one? That’s certification, for you. Pay the fee, take the class, pass the test, and you’re certified, no matter how much (or little) real life experience you have.

Changes in 2025

As I mentioned earlier, I taught two classes early in the 2025 season. The single engine class, given in a 47 foot LOA (that’s length overall) trawler, was tough given the windy weather and the fact that the largest boat I’d ever driven for any length of time was mine, with an LOA of just 32 feet. But we did well and I know my three students had a blast. The twin engine class went more smoothly — at least I thought it did. The boat was certainly easier to drive and the weather was better, too.

My first group of students and I, on this big single-engine boat, got along well, had fun learning, and still text to each other about new boating things in our lives. Building new friendships is a perk of teaching.

But sometime around then SJY contacted all the instructors to let them know that RPBA had reorganized into a brand new organization called American Boating (AB) that was still part of the AS organization. As part of the rebranding, they had developed textbooks that our students would have to buy (and so we’d have to buy and have on hand; mine cost $35) and needed to re-issue the certificates.

Alarm bells immediately went off in my head. Was I going to have to cough up another $800? But my fears were unfounded. Because we’d just gotten certificated, all we had to do was study the new material and take an online test for each certificate we needed to update.

I went online as instructed and saw just one option. I went through the video and took the test. I passed. I got a certificate for Power Boating Instructor. It was a much simpler affair on light blue cardstock with black and blue printing and a red and blue logo. No gold foil or ribbon.

The Confusion

Throughout the season, there was a lot of confusion at SJY. They kept referring to certification levels (by number) that I needed to have to teach intermediate and advanced classes. But I didn’t have the certificates and I didn’t see any way to get them.

Apparently, there was a glitch in AB’s system. I don’t know if it was just for me or for everyone — frankly, the whole organization (AB, not SJY) was in disarray, promising things that were never delivered. Finally, just last month, I got a new link and there were the two other tests. After coughing up another $50 for a fatter, advanced textbook full of photos, I took the test.

That’s when I discovered just how bad the book was. You see, it was an open-book test — or at least I assume it was since no one told me otherwise — and I made use of the absolutely horrific index to make sure I had the right answers to the questions. What I learned along the way is that the book was poorly organized, repetitious, and lacked the boat handling details we’d had in the Bob Sweet book. Sure, it was a pretty book with lots of photos of (mostly) Beneteau boats, but as a learning tool it was horrible.

I don’t make these judgements lightly. If you’ve been reading this blog long enough, you know that I wrote computer how-to books for a living for more than 20 years. I know how to organize information logically, presenting it in the order in which readers need to know it. It was obvious to me that the book was written by someone who had either never written a book or knew nothing about outlining, writing to an outline, and then editing a final book. This mess never would have gotten past any of my editors. They would have torn it apart and made me start from scratch. Honestly, until I communicated with two different people who claim to have worked on it, I thought it had been written by an AI. It is that bad.

To give you an idea of just how poorly written/organized the book was, I got a 94% and a 96% on open book tests. I should have gotten 100% on both of them. I have no idea which questions I got wrong, but one of them may have been the one about stowing food in a top-loading refrigerator. I have never been on a powerboat with a top-loading refrigerator — that’s a sailboat thing. This is content they must have pulled right out of their sailing textbook/test. And frankly, should I be wasting time teaching students how to stow their provisions? Isn’t it more important to teach them — and let them get practice — pulling the boat into a slip with a crosswind? Yet I don’t recall any questions about actual boating handling.

The Money Grab

About two weeks after taking the tests, I got a hard envelope in the mail from AB. Inside was a letter confirming I have all three certificates:

• Power Boating Instructor
• Intermediate Power Boating Instructor
• Advanced Power Boating Instructor

But the envelope only had the Advanced Power Boating Instructor certificate in it. The Intermediate Instructor certificate was missing.

The letter also referred to an instructor logbook that I’d never received. It included two plastic stickers that I assume I was supposed to stick into the logbook.

I emailed AB, telling them about the missing certificate and logbook.

I got a pretty quick response from the director of the organization. He told me that he’d get someone to look into the certificate. He also said I could get the logbook online and provided a link.

The link did not go to a printable PDF. It went to a $29 + tax + shipping softcover book. A book that I will not buy. (Hell, do you know how much my instructor briefcase already weighs?)

The next day, I got an email from someone at AS. She told me that they only send out the highest level certificate a person earns. If I want a copy of a certificate they hadn’t sent, I could order one from the website. That would cost me $22 including tax and shipping.

So yeah: they expected me to pay $22 for a piece of paper that they could easily have put into the envelope they sent with the Advanced certificate.

It was pretty clear to me that AB was going full money grab on its instructors and members.

Oh yes, I forgot to mention that. I could become an AB member for $59 per year. As a member, I’d get:

• Savings on Courses & Certifications
  Members receive 25% off all American Boating courses, online classes, and certifications, so you can continue building your skills at a discounted rate.
• Online Access to Your Training Records
  Members can access their certification records 24/7 on our member portal. This is important when chartering or creating a boating resume.
• Exclusive Discounts on Gear and Apparel
  Enjoy significant savings on top-quality boating gear, apparel, and equipment from our trusted partners.
• Earlybird registration to live events
  Participate in webinars, special live seminars, and meet-ups, designed to connect you with other boating enthusiasts and industry experts.

In other words, I could spend $59 to save money when I spent more money on AB stuff. No thanks.

Oh, and I forgot to mention one very important thing: even though I’m an AB-certified instructor, I cannot certify my own students. I have to go through a training organization like SJY to do certifications. So these certificates have absolutely no value to me unless I want to train for a company that requires AB certification. Ain’t that a kick in the pants?

Me and My Big Fat Mouth

Of course, I couldn’t let this go. I was especially angry about the damn certificate. In my mind, it had cost me $800 and a 400-mile round trip drive, $35 for one book and $49 for the other, and the equivalent of four full days of my time (which is the most valuable thing I have these days). And now they wanted to squeeze another $22 out of me to get what I’d earned.

Screw that.

So I wrote to them about my dissatisfaction with the certificate situation and the books. I got a response from the director who seemed offended about the books, claiming “other people praise them” and telling me that he had been part of the team to write them. (Other people have lower standards than I do; I’m not impressed by stock photos sent by Beneteau, who may even have sponsored the books.) He asked me if I still want to teach their curriculum. I spent 45 minutes writing a detailed reply but — and this should impress you as much as it impresses me — I didn’t send it. Instead, I told him that he probably didn’t want to hear what I had to say and asked politely for my missing certificate to be mailed to me.

In the morning, I got an email message from the instructor who had taught the certification classes last year. He’s also an SJY instructor — a nice guy who really knows his stuff. He asked how things were going with my certificate update. I filled him in briefly on the missing certificate and my dissatisfaction with the books.

He wrote back to say that he was also involved in writing the books. That’s when I realized that AB had asked him to get more info from me.

So I gave him everything I’d written in the unsent message. I cc’d the director of training at SJY. I was getting it all off my chest publicly and, frankly, didn’t give a shit what came of it.

After sending that message, I emailed the director of training at SJY to explain myself and tell her that I probably wasn’t going to make myself available to teach in 2026. I also said that if I got her in hot water with AS or AB, she could tell them she fired me. I’m hoping she just leaves it at that.

My Future as a Boating Instructor

So I probably won’t teach any more for SJY. But I’ve already interviewed with another organization that doesn’t require certification and they can’t wait for me to start training for them — and possibly even acting as Captain on charter cruises — in the spring. And I have another instructor interview lined up on Monday.

Besides all that, I’ve done three training gigs on my own over the past three months. One was a 2-week boat delivery/training gig in Florida, one was a two-day “try my Ranger Tug” gig in Bellingham, and the other was a 5-day solo operations in a Ranger Tug training gig in Bellingham. Those three gigs paid more than the two I did for SJY. They were also a lot less stressful, since I didn’t have to teach arcane facts just because they would appear on a certification test. (I’m wondering if the refrigerator question is on the new tests.)

I jokingly refer to boat training as my fourth (or fifth) career. It’ll never be that. It’s just something I do to have fun on the water and share what I know with other boaters, while making a few bucks on the side. The requirements of teaching for certification take all the fun out of that.