43:6.28N 009:12.585W
Insurance is a feature of all of our lives, whether it be for our car, house, holiday or pet, and of course a boat is no different. Interestingly there is no legal requirement to insure your boat in the UK, but our experience abroad so far, is that all countries and marinas want to see proof of insurance before allowing you to stay. There are two aspects of insurance that you need to consider carefully: the boat and the crew. 

For the crew, it is just like taking out travel insurance as you would for your holidays; but this is a specialist area. A lot of travel policies will cover sailing inside national territorial waters but are unlikely to cover you "offshore" on the high seas. They will also factor in that most countries will charge for search and rescue in their waters, unlike the RNLI in the UK which is free to use if you’re unfortunate enough to need them. The time spent ‘away' is a significant factor. Even annual multi-trip policies will put a limit of say 30 or 40 days on any single trip. Not much use if you are going to be away for nine months! And as I discovered recently, personal insurance can be very "ageist". One company increases its premium by 50% for anybody over 65 - quite a blow to the purse. Add to this that you are going to the Caribbean, which by the way, insurance companies treat as the USA, and your personal cover quickly becomes more than four figures. 

Insurance for the boat can vary significantly depending on its age, size, the equipment fitted (and how old the kit is), together with where you are going to be sailing. Pottering around the Solent comes much cheaper than say crossing the Atlantic or operating in the Caribbean during hurricane season (which by the way is almost uninsurable!). It is such a specialist area, you are invariably dealing with a very few companies that will take this sort of cover on. As a result, your options for competitiveness in the market are limited. You are therefore reliant on a small number of companies responding in a timely manner. We nearly came unstuck recently when we were literally hours away from being uninsured due to the slow response of one company. However, as with all things in life, it pays to shop around. At the last minute, our personal insurance broker came up trumps and managed to provide equivalent cover for £1600 a year less than quoted by the existing broker! Not an insignificant sum – just about pays for a new windlass gearbox and motor! (see previous posts).

Our recent experience of all this shows, that if you wish four people to be away for nine months, and you include two Atlantic crossings with a prolonged stay in the Caribbean, be prepared to part with a large sum of your well-earned cash. Ouch!

Nigel

Editors note: of all the weather and mechanical issues we’ve sailed through in the last few weeks, insurance is the issue that nearly initiated a sense of humour failure on more than one occasion!