The Rules of the Road
Two rulebooks and the demarcation line between them, the look-out and safe-speed duties, constant bearing and decreasing range, what a proper avoiding action looks like, overtaking and head-on and crossing, the two stages of the stand-on vessel's duty and the turn it must not make, the Rule 18 hierarchy with all five exceptions that undercut "sail beats power", narrow channels and traffic schemes, the light arcs drawn from their own numbers, the sound signals, fog, and the buoyage.
Open the rules guideThe Boat and the Boater
Every federal carriage threshold on one axis and why they do not line up, life jackets under two labelling systems at the same time, the April 2022 rule that expired a lot of perfectly good-looking fire extinguishers, the engine cut-off switch law almost nobody has heard of, ventilation and fuelling, registration and capacity plates, alcohol and accident reporting, the three phases of cold water immersion and why the popular rule about them is disputed, carbon monoxide, and what the 2024 Coast Guard casualty data actually says.
Open the equipment guideThe Quizzes
In the order the guides cover them. Each one stands on its own — start wherever the subject interests you.
Steering and Sailing
Two rulebooks and where the line between them is drawn, look-out and safe speed, constant bearing and decreasing range, the three encounters, the two stages of the stand-on vessel’s duty, and every exception that eats into "sail beats power".
Lights, Shapes and Signals
The light arcs and where their numbers come from, what each kind of vessel shows under way and at anchor, the day shapes, the whistle signals and the two things one short blast means, the fog signals, and reading the buoyage.
Equipment, Law and Emergencies
What you must carry and at what length, life jackets under two labelling systems at once, the 2022 extinguisher rule, cut-off switches and ventilation, alcohol and accident reporting, cold water and carbon monoxide, and the casualty data.
Each quiz expands one part of a reference guide into six themes, and each set runs to the length its material justifies rather than to a round number. Options are reshuffled every time you start, and every set was checked against all the others so no question is asked twice. One deliberate constraint runs through all of them: answer length carries no signal in either direction. Across all 169 questions the correct answer is the longest option 26 percent of the time and the shortest about as often, which is what chance would give you. Guarding only against the longest answer is how you end up with a set where picking the shortest wins instead.
There is no public question pool for boating safety. NASBLA publishes the objectives an approved course must cover; the actual test banks are private and the exams are administered under state supervision. Nothing here is an approved course and none of it earns a certificate any state will recognise. What it can do is find your gaps before you sit the real thing. On the 2024 Coast Guard numbers, 69 percent of boating deaths involved an operator who had never taken a safety course — so take the state one. The questions here are written from federal rule text and are marked with the rule they come from; where the answer comes from the NASBLA objectives rather than from law, the explanation says so.