RYA: My Certificates

[Mark-1]

I recently applied for an ICC so it made sense to join the RYA for a year.

They have a section called "My Certificates" which seems pretty useful. You can upload your tatty 35 year old VHF license, or whatever, and they store it for you in electronic form with a facility to have the RYA independently send quals to any email address at the click of a button. I can't say I ever carried my VHF license anyway, but even so, it might help one day.

I've also stored my PB2/Safety Boat qual which is handy if I want to borrow a safety boat at another club or if somewhere is short of safety boat or whatever.

Active membership is required to add quals, but they remain stored after membership lapses, which is good.

So far so good. Genuinely useful.

It also stores my ICC. But it doesn't list the categories. After a bit of digging around I can't see anywhere at all where ICC categories are stored, so even I can't see what ICC categories I have. An ICC doesn't mean much without the Cevni/Sail/Power/Coastal bits to say what it actually qualifies you for.

Am I missing a place where ICC categories can be viewed? Or are we just waiting for the developer to add the categories to the Web interface?

 

[mjcp]

"Costal" ICC?

The other three types I understand - but what's costal? isn't the salty vs inland covered by the CEVNI endorsement?


And yup, this does seem a limitation. They recently (2025) revamped their membership site, as a longish time member, I have a mix of modern (electronic record) and legacy (paper only) certs. Post upgrade, I could not login, nor reset credentials etc. I had to raise a support ticket, they said "re-register" and it will work.. It has, but as you say, no cert details, just numbers, dates and type, no detail.


The "share" option is nice - but pointless - if you test it out by sending to your self, all you get as the recipient is the one liners for each heading below. Good luck trying to explain to the Greek port police that you have an ICC and need to share it by email and when it arrives, it has no photo etc!

M




Qualification Name:


Certificate Number:


Qualified Date:


Expiry Date:

 

[Mark-1]

and in in

"Costal" ICC?

The other three types I understand - but what's costal? isn't the salty vs inland covered by the CEVNI endorsement?

There are three categories of 'craft' (sail, power, pwc) and two categories of 'location'. inland and coastal.

As you say, inland is covered by the CEVNI and Coastal is covered by ICC-4B or a variety of alternatives.

ICC-3 has a Matrix explaining it all:
https://assetbank-eu-west-1.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/rya-assets_87113cb4549df15cff38e2cd071931c5/8a8/ICC-3-notes-boating-competence.pdf?response-content-disposition=inline; filename="8a8/ICC-3-notes-boating-competence.pdf"; filename*=UTF-8''8a8%2FICC%2D3%2Dnotes%2Dboating%2Dcompetence%2Epdf&response-content-type=application/pdf&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Date=20260417T074224Z&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Credential=AKIATJ7XNAYVAWNFIK7R/20260417/eu-west-1/s3/aws4_request&X-Amz-Expires=604800&X-Amz-Signature=bd1eb41993930d080c848d7cf946ef4b6699ee98e9274e35fc80111ec31e22a6

ICC-4b:
https://assetbank-eu-west-1.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/rya-assets_87113cb4549df15cff38e2cd071931c5/964/ICC-4c-coastal-assessment-syllabus-certificate.pdf?response-content-disposition=inline; filename="964/ICC-4c-coastal-assessment-syllabus-certificate.pdf"; filename*=UTF-8''964%2FICC%2D4c%2Dcoastal%2Dassessment%2Dsyllabus%2Dcertificate%2Epdf&response-content-type=application/pdf&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Date=20260417T074640Z&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Credential=AKIATJ7XNAYVAWNFIK7R/20260417/eu-west-1/s3/aws4_request&X-Amz-Expires=604800&X-Amz-Signature=9a0c26fd86b087b151f6bfb463a7eb59786fb58936a8e493e7a3501a3fa4be96

Sorry about the length of the links.

As for "costal"... Don't tempt me!

 

[Mark-1]

The "share" option is nice - but pointless - if you test it out by sending to your self, all you get as the recipient is the one liners for each heading below.

Yeah, if it were to be a replacement for all certificates it would need a fair bit of extra work, but an E-Mail from the RYA is a lot harder to fake than, say a Safety Boat Qual. And if I was ever required to present my VHF license (which I don't carry) I'd much rather be able to generate an e-mail than have nothing. At least I'd be seen to be trying to produce something and personally I think I'd pass the sniff test. I wouldn't regard it as totally pointless.

As for the storage, I think that's useful. There will be plenty of YBWers with old certificates from long before anyone kept a record of these things. Once lost it could be kind of handy to have evidence the qual existed at one point at least and someone at the RYA had checked it. Slightly more credible than "I passed in 1962, can't remember where, please issue me a replacement."

Perhaps "Genuinely useful." was overstating the case. Not sure I can quantify how useful it is, but it's not zero. Certainly I thought it was useful enough to invest the 20 minutes it took to do it, but like you I was a bit surprised at how sparse the shared information is, I was expecting a photo/copy of the actual certificate to be shared.

I'd love to know if there's really a list of issued VHF licences from back in the day on paper files somewhere or if they just re-issue those on trust.

Good luck trying to explain to the Greek port police that you have an ICC and need to share it by email and when it arrives, it has no photo etc!

Well yes, I think we've established the whole mechanism is totally pointless for ICC's because it doesn't tell anyone including the holder which categories it covers.