captains
Boating Safety: A Major Part of the Freedom Boat Club Agenda

In 2016 alone, Freedom Boat Club members took more than 180,000 boat trips throughout North America. With 15,000 active members from coast to coast who regularly bring friends and family along for their excursions, that’s a lot of people enjoying and experiencing boating!

At Freedom Boat Club, we’re all about making boating access available and affordable. But, an equally important part of our agenda centers on the foundation of boating safety.

Freedom Boat Club provides free and unlimited training and education to help and ensure that our members are safe and feel confident when they go boating. Our safety program and boating training/educational component is very popular with our members. They can sign up for as many free 1:1 training classes as they want … it’s a standard part of every membership package!  

To that end, every Freedom Boat Club member must first participate in an introductory orientation session with our licensed Coast Guard captains prior to making their first reservation.

Unlike some outside classes that only require cursory bookwork, ours is a mix of both classroom and 1:1 sessions on the water. Our captains cover a detailed, prescribed course of instruction.

Following successful review and completion, our members may then reserve boats and sign up for additional training as needed or desired. In addition, some of our club locations may offer intermediate or advanced classes, the latter for offshore access, etc.

At Freedom Boat Club, our focus on boating safety is not a one-time thing. It is an important, ongoing initiative that receives ongoing focus at all levels of the organization.

We’ve created special shirts with safety messaging for our dock staff, to remind members to be safe as they head out for their boating adventures.

We have partnered with the Sea Tow Foundation to designate observers and sober skippers. We have and continue to educate our members who take pledges to be part of this safety effort.

We regularly post themed social memes on our Facebook, Instagram and Twitter platforms to draw awareness to the importance of boating safety.

We produce and share blogs written by our captains featuring  safe boating tips and include them on our website and in our member newsletters.

Our safety program has its own slogan … “BOAT SAFE. HAVE FUN!”

This slogan is an integral part of our messaging and our culture. Whether you join Freedom Boat Club as a newcomer to boating or as a highly experienced skipper, everyone is immersed in the boating education initiative from the outset.  

We hope you will join Freedom Boat Club in raising awareness for boating safety and in practicing safe boating activities, whatever your port of call.