Boat Insurance {Or Silencing Your Inner Worry Wart}

Yes, I admit it, I can be a bit of a worry wart at times. I used to worry about pretty mundane things – like if my jeans made my bum look big or if I had enough change for the bus. Now that I live on a boat I worry about the really important stuff – like a lightening strike, getting smashed to smithereens in a hurricane and an alligator climbing into the cockpit of my boat and refusing to leave until I give him all of my chocolate. {Did anyone else just have a flashback to Elvis from Miami Vice?}

Lately, I’ve also been worrying about insurance for our boat and what kind of coverage we should get when our current policy expires in April.

When we bought our boat last year, we took out full insurance, which is known as hull coverage in nautical speak. We were under time pressures to get insurance in place before the sale closed, so I didn’t do much research on boat insurance in general or get a lot of quotes. I basically let my inner worry wart take over and got full coverage through a broker which had been recommended by fellow cruisers (IMIS). After transferring a relatively large sum of money into an escrow account, all I could think about was who was going to pay if we sunk our new-to-us boat the following week. My inner worry wart shouted out, Get insurance! As much of it as you can! So we did.

When we had our last boat in New Zealand, we only had liability insurance. I was totally fine with that as she was an older boat that wasn’t worth all that much money and we planned on selling her on in a couple of years anyway. If she sank, she sank. So be it, I told my inner worry wart. My inner worry wart shrugged her shoulders and went on to worry about more important things – like the fact that there was a distinct lack of paychecks coming into our bank account and the shortage of storage on our boat for adequate supplies of cookies and wine.

This time around, I’m beginning to think taking a liability only approach to insurance may be the way to go for two reasons: (1) our boat isn’t worth all that much in the grand scheme of things and (2) we’re cheapskates.

Our boat, Tickety Boo, is a 1987 Moody 346, a British blue water cruiser more commonly found in Europe. Moody 346s are older boats and are priced accordingly. So, when I started doing calculations on the the percentage of our insurance costs vs. what we would get back for the agreed hull value if Tickety Boo sank, it wasn’t all that encouraging. I was beginning to think that maybe it was worth the gamble to go without hull coverage. Strangely, my inner wart agreed. In fact, she was the one that reminded me that we still don’t have regular paychecks coming into our bank account, so maybe we should limit how much money goes out of our account.

When I told Scott I thought we should just get liability insurance this time around, he sounded surprised given my worry wart tendencies. He was all for it. After all, he might have opted not to get health insurance (you can read more about that here), so not getting full hull coverage for Tickety Boo seemed like a no brainer to him. {By the way, we did get health insurance. We could probably buy a lot of sailboats for what it would cost us to get a serious illness in the States if we were uninsured. Sad but true.}

So, for all of you boaters reading this (and let’s be honest, it probably only is boatie types that are still reading a post on boat insurance by this point), tell me what you know about liability insurance. What should I look for in a policy (like coverage amounts for fuel spill liability in the States)? Any recommendations on who I should get quotes from? And, have any of you decided to just go with liability only and why?

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