Hello NOWS network,
We hope you are all well, keeping healthy, and have been able to enjoy time on the water.
As you may know, American National Standards for boating safety need to be reviewed and updated at least every five years in order to ensure they remain current and relevant. As a result, work has been underway to review the four National On-Water Skills Standards. Led by ABYC (The American Boat & Yacht Council), it has been an open and nationwide process of gathering input to update the standards. Members of the NOWS SME Team have been directly involved in the work.
We are delighted to let you know that the POWER standard is the first to complete this process. The revised standard was officially published on December 31, 2021. Most of the changes made were designed to clarify language used to define and describe the skills, as well as to improve the standard’s formatting and ease of use. Skills that were duplicates, appearing in more than one section of the document, were removed. You will also notice changes were made to its overall structure in order to make it more complete and consistent with ABYC’s many other national standards.
