Insurance hours are only as good as the teaching inside them.

Insurance-required hours are the supervised hours your underwriter wants you to complete with a qualified captain aboard before they will cover you running the boat on your own. You are paying for that time either way. The question is what you have in your hands at the end of it, and that comes down almost entirely to whether the person beside you knows how to teach as well as how to captain.

Who this is for

New owners, and owners who just stepped up in size

Your broker has come back with a condition. So many hours with a captain aboard before the policy covers you solo. It is not a judgement on you. Underwriters price the unknown, and you are new on this particular boat. That is all it is.

The condition will get met. What those hours turn into is the part still up to you.

What actually decides the outcome

Captaining and teaching are two different trades

Nearly every captain running insurance hours is good at what they do, and plenty of them are excellent. They will show you how they run a boat, and there is real value in watching someone properly capable put a 60 footer alongside in a crosswind without appearing to think about it.

Getting that ability out of their hands and into yours is a separate skill. It means breaking a manoeuvre into its real parts and handing them over in the right order. It means knowing which moment in that manoeuvre is where the learning actually sits, stopping there, and making that the thing you take home. It means saying less as you get better, rather than reaching for the wheel the moment it gets tight.

And it means understanding that the explanation which makes perfect sense inside the captain's head is not always the one that lands in yours. How a skill gets learned shifts from one owner to the next, shaped by how you take in information, where your confidence already sits, and what makes it click for you. Same manoeuvre, different route into your hands. That route is the thing I spend my time on.

Plenty of people can put a big boat on the dock without thinking. Far fewer can get that ability out of their own hands and into yours.

How it runs

Built around your policy and your worries, not a syllabus

1. We start with your condition in writing. How many hours, what your underwriter counts as a qualified captain, and what they will accept as evidence. The plan gets built around that, not around a generic course.
2. You tell me where the gap actually is. Most owners name two or three things. Docking. Knowing what to do when something goes wrong. Taking the boat somewhere new. Those become the spine of the plan.
3. Everything happens on your boat, in your water. Your slip, your fairway, your anchorages, your traffic. Hours on a school boat in a school marina do not transfer to a Friday afternoon in your own berth.
4. The hours get weighted toward the solo moments. Departure, return, close quarters, anchoring, and what you do when it goes sideways. That is everything you will be doing without me aboard.
5. Sessions get stacked, not spread. Roughly four hour blocks, dates as close together as your diary allows, mornings on flat water so the fundamentals are in before the afternoon wind tests them. A skill repeated while the last attempt is still fresh holds. The same skill spread across a season does not.
6. Every hour logged and signed off in a form your insurer will accept, so the condition clears without a back and forth.
7. We finish on competence, not the clock. The required hours are the floor. If something is not solid when the timer runs out, we keep going.

What you walk away with

The condition cleared, and the ability underneath it

The paperwork is the byproduct. What you keep is the thing you actually wanted when you bought her. The confidence to take her out on your own, with the caution and the planning that keeps that confidence honest. By the end you should need me less, not more.

Once the fundamentals are holding, the plan grows. A night passage. An anchoring deep dive. The things you would not have thought to ask for at the start because you did not yet know they were within reach.

Owner questions