Let me tell you, there’s nothing pleasurable at all about getting a Pleasure Craft Operator card (which is just a fancy title for “Recreational Boat Operator” card). I think they stuck the word “pleasure” in there only to dupe people into coughing up the $49.00 to take their excruciatingly boring online test.

I feel awful for having to subject our friend Dan, our house guest for the night, to this bogus formality. We’re like: “Hey Dan! Welcome to our home. Want a beer? Want a coffee? Want to help us get our Pleasure Craft Operator card?! It only takes an hour, maybe four!?

Thankfully, Dan was a good sport about it all, and had no qualms sitting with us past midnight, absorbed in exciting things like boat hull designs, nautical charts, and how to properly care for a floatation device.

Unlike other online tests, we couldn’t skip through our study chapters like we had hoped. Each section was timed accordingly, forcing us to sit there and listen to the most painfully annoying moderator voice take us through the entire course.

In the end, we scored 94% on our final exam, which consisted of 50 multiple choice questions, taken from 5 different online study chapters, which took us just over 3 hours to fully read. (We may have looked up a couple answers on the internet.)

Now that that rigamarole is through, we’ll be looking forward to this upcoming summer. (One of our 2013 to-do’s is to learn how to sail.)

*Mucho thanks to Dan.