About CaptainsGround

Why we built it

USCG captain's-exam prep has always been a choice between $600–900 in-person courses and generic question-bank apps that copy NMC questions without explanation or source. Neither serves a working captain who wants to understand the rules, not just memorise them. CaptainsGround is the alternative we wished existed — every drill question links to its rule in 33 CFR, COLREGs, or Bowditch, and every lesson cites its source inline.

Where the content comes from

The corpus is built from public-domain federal sources: 33 CFR (Navigation and Navigable Waters), 46 CFR (Shipping), the international COLREGs, the Inland Navigation Rules, NGA Bowditch's American Practical Navigator, and the USCG Boatswain's Mate / Coxswain's Mate manuals. We ingest the official text, embed it for fast retrieval, then generate lessons and drill questions that cite back to the chunk they tested. A separate validator model rejects any question whose citation doesn't resolve or whose stated answer contradicts the source.

See the /sources page for live counts of every source we have indexed.

Free during early access

Year 1 is fully free — no Stripe, no tiers, no upsells. Early users will be grandfathered into favourable terms when paid tiers arrive. We're not optimising for revenue right now; we're optimising for whether mariners actually pass their exam after using the product.

Contact

Found a wrong answer? Want a missing topic? Email us — we re-run corrections through the same generator + validator pipeline that produced the original question.