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From: Mary Ann Chapman (no email)
Date: Thu Aug 05 1999 - 16:48:16 EDT
Last year, being brand-new boaters, we took what we could get in a hurry to
close the loan on our boat and just sweated it out all year with our measly
$2,500 of personal property insurance. We talked to the so-called experts,
and the best advice we could get was to rent a room at my sister's house
for $1 a year and get renter's insurance. To me that sounded risky at best
and fraudulent at worst. So during the year we just kept looking around.
At the Fish Expo we met a fellow named Mike Miller with Northern Marine
Insurance in Edmonds, WA. He agreed that that advice was nuts and said
more personal property coverage was no problem. When renewal time came, he
found us four policies to choose from with different prices and options,
and a minimum of $10,000 of personal property. He also taught me more
about boat insurance in a 30-minute monologue than I could have ever
learned on my own in 30 years of owning a boat. I won't go into specific
numbers because our boat is a DeFever 48' and I'm sure our policy is
substantially more than it would be for most of the sailboats represented
on this list. But the policies he found were very little more than the one
we had last year. We actually settled on the most expensive of the lot,
which had $1 million liability and $25,000 personal property standard, with
only a $250 deductible on the personal property. (With a big power boat,
liability is an issue.) The underwriter is Fireman's Fund.
There's also a smaller company here in Seattle that specializes in
liveaboard insurance and has more liberal personal property limits. I
think the name is Accordia, and surely someone around here can supply it.
They advertise in all the free rags. We just wanted to stay with a major
underwriter, and we met Mike, so we went that way. Accordia may be fine too.
You can get what you need, but you won't find it by shopping for bottom
dollar. We also don't shop for bottom dollar on car insurance. John has
been with Amica for over 30 years, and they've never failed to pay
liberally on any claim, messed up a single piece of paperwork, kept us on
hold more than 60 seconds, or been anything but totally pleasant and
cooperative. My view is that you don't necessarily get what you pay for,
but you hardly ever get more than you pay for.
Incidentally, one of the things Mike told me, confirming my suspicions, is
that a covered slip is the most dangerous place you can keep a boat. In
any kind of fire the heat builds up to catastrophic levels, and in the
winter, they cave in from snow. In the Northwest, most people will gladly
pay a premium for a covered slip, and the logic has always evaded me.
There are even liveaboards in covered slips, which to me would seem to
defeat the purpose.
Mary Ann
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