self-insured anyone?

[Gdavid]

The USCG did a big study after the El Toro II sinking back in the 90's on the Chesapeake.

It was a party fishing boat and nearly killed some 30+ fisherman.

The USCG nearly banned all wooden planked boats as commercial passenger vessels.

One of the findings I believe was there were either no or not enough fasteners pulled on its last survey/certification. It popped a garboard plank in heavy chop.

A friend of mine and his father were both customers onboard the El Toro II when it sunk, they both lived but it was hell on both of them. It was interesting that hear their perspective on the condition of the boat that morning and the conditions they found themselves in.

 

[psneeld]

A friend of mine and his father were both customers onboard the El Toro II when it sunk, they both lived but it was hell on both of them. It was interesting that hear their perspective on the condition of the boat that morning and the conditions they found themselves in.

I am very familiar with the case.

I was operations officer at Cape May USCG Airstation that sent the USCG helo ad my friends through life threatening weather to respond.

There were some miracles and some disasters during the case, but a lot of lessons learned came from it.

Glad they survived.

Did they say who picked them out of the water? USCG boat or USCG or Navy helo?

 

[Delta Riverat]

I have liability only Progressive, they said the boat was too old for the purchase price.

So, I have a half mill liability and I cover the rest.

 

[Gdavid]

I am very familiar with the case.

I was operations officer at Cape May USCG Airstation that sent the USCG helo ad my friends through life threatening weather to respond.

There were some miracles and some disasters during the case, but a lot of lessons learned came from it.

Glad they survived.

Did they say who picked them out of the water? USCG boat or USCG or Navy helo?

I don't recall if they mentioned it. It was interesting to hear them talk about it but not the kind of topic I felt comfortable bringing up. If they were discussing it, I listened carefully but it was still too tender of a topic to pry too hard. I remember hearing about their impression of the boat and crew but they didn't speak much about the time in the water and rescue. Last name is Auman, I'm not sure if the father is still with us. It brought them extremely close.

 

[psneeld]

Emotions usually run high and all over the map when people are rescued...probably the only feeling in common is relief when their feet hit dry land.

Some people are brough together and not sure about the ones who blame others who they thought almost killed them.

 

[Bmarler]

Yes that seems to be the norm now for older planked hulls. I've seen it done a few times. They don't pull very many fasteners. It can discover problems that really need to be fixed.

This made me think back to my winter in the yard plating my steel boat. I had to do ultrasound, that involves getting to bare metal. Sucks when you have to breach your tar epoxy barrier.
Anyway across the lift road from me was a guy with an older wood boat. He spent the winter replacing every plank fastener. He told me the number and it was staggering. He must have got bad news from his fastener survey.

 

[Gdavid]

Emotions usually run high and all over the map when people are rescued...probably the only feeling in common is relief when their feet hit dry land.

Some people are brough together and not sure about the ones who blame others who they thought almost killed them.

Probably survivors guilt mostly, the crew and passengers were split between various time of when they launched the life float. I'm sure it was not a calm scene and it isn't a perfectly clear account for who did what. It is clear apparent to me that the captain failed to provide leadership nor instill confidence in how to proceed.

The captain possibly could have kept the crew dry for longer and reduced exposure, but his poor decision making and leadership up to to this point had eroded any confidence in him.

Only a couple years after the incident, myself and several of our friends began working on Head and Charter fishing boats as mates in Chesapeake Beach, MD, about 50 miles north of where the El Toro sank. For this reason we were especially interested in our friend's horrific experience, he may have shared more with others but I never heard all the details about what happened in the water.

Sorry for the extended topic divergence but for those unfamiliar with these operations, I'll share a few points. The El Toro II was running as a "head boat" where the passengers pay individually and aren't renting out the entire boat. You fend for yourself generally in regard to baiting your hooks and securing a spot to fish.

"Inspected" vessels are subject to additional requirements than uninspected vessels which can only carry 6 passengers or fewer. In addition to recurring CG inspections as the name implies, specific safety features are required of the vessel such as the relative size of freeing ports, seating area, bilge separation, etc. There were older boats grandfathered in which did not meet these requirements. Inspected vessels in inshore waters carry life floats, basically a giant life ring for everyone to hold on to a rope around the perimeter but no where near large enough keep everyone out of the water. There is a net in the middle to hold injured crew. They work in conjunction with life jackets l, keep the crew together and can help you keep your head up but do nothing to keep you dry or warm.

The presence of a life float, held in a self launching cradle is the easiest way to differentiate an inspected vessel from an uninspected vessel among charter fleets (at least for inshore operations).

Head boats are more likely to carry more than one mate, they split tips and frequently make less. They customers generally fend for themselves fishing wise rather than a "charter boat". It is easier for a young mate to get a job on a head boat than a charter boat. My friends all followed this path of head boat to charter boat gigs.

 

[psneeld]

Sorry for further thread divergence, but may be worth something, to somebody, some day.....

Any vessel emergency needs a clear leader, respected for knowledge and experience by all those expecting to be saved through that persons efforts.

Survivors guilt comes later, but during the actual emergency till feet hit dry land.... if there is in-fighting amongst survivors during the incident...most likely the greatest and most diverse emotions surface. If they work as a team, much less so.

A takeaway is.... that "newbies" that do get into trouble often suffer the most from lacking the ability to "lead" when it is most needed. Their knowledge and experience in correcting the emergency and during the survival stages (if it gets there) shows and does not help much in team building when most needed.

So while many "newbies" cruise tens of thousands of miles and gather experience needed, had they been put in the wrong situation ant the wrong time..... maybe their legacy wouldn't be successful you tube channels.

 

[Portage_Bay]

I've been there. My first "big" boat was a woodie built in 1926, I purchased her in 1977. I had no idea what I was doing and apparently neither did the surveyor. He didn't find any significant problems. Before reaching total burn out and selling her I refastened the entire hull, sistered more than half the frames, replaced about 25% of the planks, reefed and re-caulked her, replaced the fore deck beams, replanked the fore deck, built a new transom. I had the guidance and help of some very talentend shipwrights and as time went on progressed to doing all the work myself. When I sold her the hull and decks were sound but the interior was completed gutted and rusted out tanks removed to give access to all the work that had been done. I just didn't have any more time, energy or money to put into that old wreck.

Anyway across the lift road from me was a guy with an older wood boat. He spent the winter replacing every plank fastener. He told me the number and it was staggering. He must have got bad news from his fastener survey.

 

[Hippocampus]

Just curious how about insuring the various forms of wood epoxy? Strip plank, cold molded, tortured ply, stitch and glue etc? Fasteners are used to allow shaping during construction but add little to overall strength once completed. Once sheathed worms or water ingress not the issue as with plank on frame. Same issues with insurance? Always been enamored by the Covey island Lunenburg boats and Pogo. Strength for weight wood beats everything except carbon if done right.

 

[Seevee]

Insurance is having a partner in funding risk. Risk is a measurement of the % chance of you incurring loss. That chance is never 0% so calculate your odds (and an insurance company knows these to the penny and will usually share the information), see what your comfort level is in living with those odds and writing the potentially big check, and act accordingly. If writing a $1m check for damages doesn't affect your lifestyle, you're likely in a good spot to self insure and can invest what you would be paying in premiums. I can't comfortably write that check so I use insurance as a partner in bearing my risk.

Tak

EXACTLY RIGHT! Good post. One must examine their risk vs. benefits when self insuring. However, if one is AVERAGE, they will come out ahead by self insuring over time. And one must factor time into the equation.

And correct, if one can't suffer the loss or write the check, then insurance is the way to go.


I could argue strongly for getting liability only and self insuring the hull, and spend the premium money on training or hazard prevention.

 

[ofer]

Just curious how about insuring the various forms of wood epoxy? Strip plank, cold molded, tortured ply, stitch and glue etc? Fasteners are used to allow shaping during construction but add little to overall strength once completed. Once sheathed worms or water ingress not the issue as with plank on frame. Same issues with insurance? Always been enamored by the Covey island Lunenburg boats and Pogo. Strength for weight wood beats everything except carbon if done right.

good point if i rap the entire hull in epoxy/fiberglass.

is it still a wood boat?

 

[garbler]

Wood hulls take more of a beating on these forums than afloat. There are thousands of very sound well built wood hulls from 125 to 100 years old and still cruising international waters. Let me stretch my legs on this topic if you don’t mind. In New England these boats are being built and to a lesser degree in the PNW but they are using better fasteners, better glues and better techniques and builders have been able to adapt to shortages of domestic timber by using tropicals and cold molding. Most of the bad rap on wooden hulls is made by those who don’t understand good building practices from bad. So that old 60’s Pacemaker or whatever production boat is seen in the yard settling into her blocks and jackstands and looks like she is has a half developed chine from a row of thirty or so broken frames is not typical. This is NOT well built wooden hulls. Those were budget built of marginal materials when new and have been used up for a number of different reasons.

The El Toro was a two step series of inspection negligence. She was getting old and had a very skimpy maintenance and repair record. Just before she went down she was surveyed by a very well respected surveyor who held seats in lots of different committees and was a dean of surveyors to several big underwriters, but he was however not a wood hull expert. Then we have the USCG MSO office ( Marine Safety Office ) who dropped the ball year after year primarily from lack of experience, which is another story, and allowed the El Toro to continue to operate with deferments. So this accident was a three party failure, owner, insurance surveyor and the USCG.

The El Toro was a typical ‘ Deadrise ‘ boat commonly referred to as a Deltaville Deadrise. This type of construction has been around for a long time as is unlike any other design in the the bottom from the chine logs to keel is cross planked of short planks that are landed in a rabbet in the chine log and the rabbet or apron of the keel. The hull topsides are carvel planked usually tight fitted with a seam taper and some times nothing more than one strand of cotton or strip planked which is glued up and edge nailed. Cypress is a preferred planking timber over hard pine which can be long leaf or red or Loblolly pine both of which are strong rot resistant species. The keels and major longitudinal timbers will be hard pine also. Plank fasteners on contract earlier boats are usually clench nailed ( nail driven through frames and bent over or clenched ). Later on headed galvanized nails were used and still clenched. I’ve seen a few boats built with ‘ Anchor-fast ‘ or ringed shank nails but not common. Then again there are quite a few screw fastened Deadrise hulls almost always galvanized ( hot dipped ) . It should be noted that galvy fasteners do quite well in conifer timber as opposed to oak frames with high tannic acid. In all my years I never saw a galvanized cut nail fastened hull. In the early 1900’s there were wrought iron cut nails that were tapered four sides and headed or stamped to spread a wider head but this is rare today. Lunenburg Foundry in Nova Scotia we’re the last to make them. Plain two sided cut nails have a small head that will pull through planking and never used that I know of. Newer cut nails are hardened for concrete.

These Deadrise hulls were economically built using local timber but are considered somewhat unorthodox to builders in other regions who have different methods that generally are proven superior. However they were never built to last forty years plus. They were built as a contract/budget hull and depending complied with USCG to have crash bulkhead and watertight subdivisions. Many were overlayed with heavy mat and fiberglass which nowadays is not acceptable to the USCG but some got through.

Overlaying a wooden planked hull ( not plywood, cold molded or strip planked ) is a major ‘ No No ‘ to underwriters in this country. However in the Baltic if this process is used and documented Lloyds and Bureau Norske will write it. The Vaitses technique of glassing hulls is actually well thought out and I’ve had a couple of companies who insured these boats but you have to fully document every stage.

Wooden hulls running passengers with a COI have in the past twenty years or so been subjected to some incredibly burdensome and costly inspection requirements. This has been driven by some bad press and MSO offices who can’t find or keep good hull inspectors and being pressured from above to go ‘ No Holds Barred ‘ . This essentially forces the owner to remove a ‘ belt of planking ‘. Incredible as it sounds it requires removal of a planking port and starboard usually two to four strakes below the waterline. In so doing the inspector (s) can see the frame faces, fastener penetrations and with some probing a bit more. When I was the principal hull surveyor for the Maine Windjammer fleet this was required every 8-10 years depending on vessel’s record. The entire process is not only destructive but very costly in dollars and time spent tying on the railway.

The inherent problem was the USCG kept people moving from one assignment to the next resulting in no continuity and therefore inconsistent findings and recommendations. Boats that couldn’t pass in Maine could pass in VA Beach or Florida, it’s really kind of nuts. The USCG had hundreds of wooden vessels on their books but only a very few qualified inspectors. Back in the mid 80’s Ken Franke, a retired enterprising ex Commanding Officer, saw a business opportunity and started a wood hull inspection school in San Diego. The old military revolving door. I knew him well as we were fellow surveyors but declined his offer to teach. Anyway USCG hull inspectors had to attend his two week school. When they graduated they were now deemed by the USCG as qualified wood hull inspectors. I hope you can understand what kind of problems this created with operators and others in the business

There are many ways to construct a wooden vessel many of which exceed todays fiberglass vessels in weight to strength ratios. First all you have to understand your typical Taiwanese trawler is fiberglass hull only the decks and superstructure are plywood with various overlays. Decks are planked over 3/8-1/2” plywood of marginal lamination quality. Deckhouses are alway plywood with glass skins with cutouts for windows etc rarely properly bedded so end grain is susceptible to water migration and rot. Don’t kid yourself these are not all fiberglass boats.

A well built wooden vessel uses first rot resistant species and all penetrations, joints and seams are bedded and protected. Hulls planked up with wood species such as old growth Douglas fir, western red cedar, Alaskan yellow cedar such as found in the PNW last for more years than fiberglass to date keeping in mind fiberglass or GRP has only been around generally since the mid to late 60’s. Other builders in New England and South use white oaks, live oaks, mahoganies, long leaf and hard yellow Southern pines, Cypress, black locust, white cedar/juniper, and various tropical all of which offer good rot resistance and tensile strength. Wood properly fit and designed for is an excellent boat building material with proven longevity.

Conventional carvel planked and double sawn frame hulls have withstood the toughest conditions of the rough icy waters of the extreme Northern latitudes. The early sealing vessels, herring boats of the Baltic, North seas and Bering sea are proven even when poorly maintained. Same with the better planked hulls used as yachts and commercially. I worked for years with planked Western purse seiner tuna albacore boats that ran yearly offshore off California and Mexican waters and though they required some caulking and worm damage continued year after year. Older yachts built by good builders lasted much longer

A cold molded hull of layers of 3/8” or thinner strips laid in epoxy and laid down normally at 30° bias over a plug or mold provides a hull skin literally half or less the weight of fiberglass with considerably more strength. Fiberglass loses all of its advantages as a hull size grows due to weight. Therefore sandwich cored hulls are necessary to control weight but this technique has its own problems such as delamination, compression weakness in way of through hull penetrations etc. everything is a trade off.

There are other methods of wood construction that are strong and long lasting but I’m out of time

Rick

 

[psneeld]

Good writeup on wooden boats.

My small 2 points.

While an embarrasing situation for the USCG marine inspectors, pretty heroic rescue by the helo crew who participated in the sinking of the El Torro II.

Good construction but poor maintenance probably does help quite a bit, on my experience keeping wooden boats in their home waters does to. My guess has always been the different woods and materials evolved in areas and moving cold water boats to the tropics and vice versa never seemed to help.....especially without constant vigilance to maintenance. But even well built wooden boats can have bad issues if poorly maintained....that seems to be a universal trait of any boat, heck any land, sea, or air vehicle I have come across.

 

[Seevee]

Rick,
Excellent dissertation on wooden boats. And the point you make about lack of knowledge is well taken.
There's a lot of old wooden boats out there that people buy because they are cheap and they get a lot of boat for less dollars than a newer fiberglass one. And they often don't know much about the wood, and because of lack of money, they are poorly maintained. So they fall apart and sink, no wonder the bad reputation and the reason insurance companies won't insure them.



I'm one that does not want a wood boat. Too many good choices with fiberglass, and I don't know wood.



I enjoy wooden boats at the wooden boat museum.

 

[Shrew]

EXACTLY RIGHT! Good post. One must examine their risk vs. benefits when self insuring. However, if one is AVERAGE, they will come out ahead by self insuring over time. And one must factor time into the equation.

And correct, if one can't suffer the loss or write the check, then insurance is the way to go.


I could argue strongly for getting liability only and self insuring the hull, and spend the premium money on training or hazard prevention.

The problem here is that only covers you when you loose your asset. One could say that I 'self-insure' my bicycle. If I loos my bike, I am solely responsible for the loss and subsequent replacement of that asset.

What is at issue here is liability. You can't simply tell a marina "No worries, I got it, I'm self insured".

For that one would need to put up a bond. This would effectively escrow that money beyond your word that you're good to cover the losses from damage I caused.

If one could escrow $300K, they could afford a liability-only insurance policy, making this a moot point.

 

[garbler]

Good writeup on wooden boats.

My small 2 points.

While an embarrasing situation for the USCG marine inspectors, pretty heroic rescue by the helo crew who participated in the sinking of the El Torro II.

Good construction but poor maintenance probably does help quite a bit, on my experience keeping wooden boats in their home waters does to. My guess has always been the different woods and materials evolved in areas and moving cold water boats to the tropics and vice versa never seemed to help.....especially without constant vigilance to maintenance. But even well built wooden boats can have bad issues if poorly maintained....that seems to be a universal trait of any boat, heck any land, sea, or air vehicle I have come across.

I didn’t mean to bad mouth the USCG as they do so much with so little budget wise. I know of no commercial offshore fishermen that doesn’t think of the helo and rescue boats as almost God like and if I was half flooded and a helo dropped me a couple of pumps or hoisted me off I’d worship them too. The poor USCG has never been fully funded and lives off the scraps from the USN and other branch budgets. They run old vessels much of the time that have been re-powered and refitted way beyond originally calculated service life. When their is a drug smuggling problem they are tasked with the whole ‘interdiction’ plan. When we needed coastal observation and interception patrolling in the Persian Gulf when Iran was attacking oil tankers and our navy FFG’s we mounted one better deck gun and small arms on their cutters and told them to go get em. And ice breakers when Russia is trying to claim Arctic sea routes is just pathetic. However they really need a serious tune-up in their Marine Safety Offices

Rick

 

[garbler]

Seeger I wasn’t trying to hit you guys with a dissertation it’s just that I’ve been in the business so long it’s impossible not to see things the average boater doesn’t. I’m quite familiar with the El Toro construction and related shortcomings so I jumped in. I’m retired and living in Michigan with really nobody around who is very knowledgable on these subjects so I have a couple of pops and just let it spill out. Probably not the best venue but I haven’t found a better one to date.

Rick

 

[psneeld]

I was kind of curious to your thoughts on my theory how some woodies seem to do so poorly in different climates.

The Bahamian woodies seem to thrive in those waters but the northern boats not so much.

Can't say the opposite as I haven't seen the southern boats up north as much, even Southern coasters from the late Civil War era were long gone but up North there are very old woodies still working.

The old Eastern rigged dragger fishing boats had a tough couple of decades in the mid-Atlantic, I personally responded to a few of their sinkings in the 80s and 90s out of Cape May, NJ and read or heard about many more.. The local fishing fleets had less and less every year till I think there was only one active one in Cape May when I retired in 1999.

 

[Creek]

On the subject of self-insuring: I'm not an insurance expert by any means and certainly not an expert on marine insurance. However, I believe one major advantage of acquiring insurance from a carrier versus self-insuring is that the insurance company (at their expense) will vigorously defend liability claims which are specious or exaggerated. It is prohibitively expensive for an individual to litigate claims this way which raises the possibility of your being forced to settle a claim to avoid legal expense.

 

[garbler]

On the subject of self-insuring: I'm not an insurance expert by any means and certainly not an expert on marine insurance. However, I believe one major advantage of acquiring insurance from a carrier versus self-insuring is that the insurance company (at their expense) will vigorously defend liability claims which are specious or exaggerated. It is prohibitively expensive for an individual to litigate claims this way which raises the possibility of your being forced to settle a claim to avoid legal expense.

It’s expensive for insurance companies also so they often choose to settle than litigate. I can’t tell you how many absurd claims I’ve handled that were a slam dunk and the company just paid them on the courtroom steps.

I mentioned this earlier but group insurance is perhaps the best way to manage your coverages and costs. Putting an association together is another problem.

Rick

 

[garbler]

Psneeld: it’s not a theory what your saying it’s a fact.

Generally with most domestic woods regional building practices and staying local makes a lot of sense. It’s quite common to see Northern built boats from New England and the PNW going South and being sold or staying for prolonged periods resulting in various forms of deterioration and related problems. When one considers that all boats both GRP and wood spend roughly half the year laid up and Winterized in New England it’s obvious that year round exposure to sea and sun down South can be a big problem if not prepared for. The fairly common dark painted wooden planked hulls of New England soak up heat in Florida or the Caribbean so seams open up and paint breaks down along these seams.

Northern planked or laid decks are a big problem down South. Even properly constructed laid & caulked decks of fir, white cedar or similar long grain woods will shrink across the grain and unless wetted down morning and evening in hot climates will shrink and open seams. Deck seam compounds like Thiokol/Boatlife, or similar products are flexible to a degree but stiffen up with age like me. Once the compound is no longer bonded to the plank or seam sides it’s of no use. However shrinking planks allow a deck to work which in turn stresses screws, any sub deck bedding compounds and the seams again. You have to understand a deck is a major structural member that keeps the hull sides from flexing excessively and the covering boards or with plywood perimeter hull to deck attachment from moving and leaking. Laid plank decks have tapered seams so that cotton can be driven in hard, very hard forcing one plank against those adjoining planks creating a very stiff transverse structure or panel that doesn’t just keep water out of your bunk but makes a rigid three sided hull. Overlay teak decks with a plywood sub-deck is another matter.

Woods like Doug fir, Atlantic or white cedar, Western Red cedar or Alaskan Yellow are great building species that are available in long wide defect free stock all of which are pretty much rot resistant to fungal rot if old growth. Some of these species are available on the East coast and these are great woods to work with. When I left the West Coast for New England other than Mexican food I missed Doug fir more than anything. But in regions where ice develops and there is current the ice will slice into Western cedars like butter. On the West coast these woods except for non-local white cedar lasts a long long time and icing isn’t prevalent except far North. A band of ice sheathing answers well far North. These same species like to be wet and in hard freeze North country where end grain is exposed such as the butt joints and hood ends at the stem and sternpost will freeze, expand and after several seasons of this the grain structure and the lignin that holds these fibers together deteriorates from freeze/thaw. Every season it gets worse as the deterioration increases exponentially. These are examples of what can happen on vessels that do nicely in the region they were built in but moved too far North or South have problems. Proper regular maintenance generally answers for these problems but that is another issue.

Those builders in the far South, West Coast, and Northern regions know what works and therefore use procedures and joinery techniques that do the job with their local timber and waters. More important of course are local designs that evolve through years of fishing or freight use in local waters with feedback to local builders. No better source on this wide subject than Howard Chapelle. The ‘ Deltaville Deadrise ‘ cross planked hulls have been used for decades commercially on the Chesapeake but it’s pushing the limits of safe service life to go North or far South when they get some years on them.

Fiberglass boats and trawlers can have their own set of problems if moved from semi-tropics or warmer climes.

I recall an early fiberglass Grand Banks that was purchased in Florida. I looked at her in Yarmouth, Maine in February. It was cold and the river was held in ice. While tapping the hull I noticed the area above the keel sounded like I was hitting a rock. Sighting down the hull it looked like this bilge area was pooched or distended. When I got inside I noticed the entire lower bilge void was capped with fiberglass making a nice smooth surface for cleaning etc. During lunch I got to thinking about this and thought what if this void was full of water and froze ? Where would the water come from I didn’t know at the time. When I climbed aboard after lunch I couldn’t see any penetrations in this cap at all. Then while crawling the machinery space I noted this cap stopped about four or five inches forward of the shaft log packing gland. So now I knew set up and mentioned it to the yard foreman as this was a good customer. In the Spring I got a call from the yard saying they agreed and installed a bronze bilge drain fitting. When they drilled the hull with a hole saw the whole world drained out including oil and scum. There was no damage to the hull but this was certainly not a good situation.

The trawler business is a dying form of fishing so with more closures, less maintenance dollars and pushing their range looking for fish there are more and more casualties. Dragging a chained net on the bottom is so destructive and the fact that anymore it yields so much juvenile and bi-catch that the numbers just can’t work.

Rick

 

[Creek]

It’s expensive for insurance companies also so they often choose to settle than litigate. I can’t tell you how many absurd claims I’ve handled that were a slam dunk and the company just paid them on the courtroom steps.

Rick

No disagreement with what you said. However, the lawyers who settle the claim at the courthouse steps engaged in some back and forth just to get to the point of settlement. There aren't many non-lawyers who are in a position to do that.

 

[garbler]

No disagreement with what you said. However, the lawyers who settle the claim at the courthouse steps engaged in some back and forth just to get to the point of settlement. There aren't many non-lawyers who are in a position to do that.

Very true Creek but it’s still a whole lot cheaper than going into court where everybody’s rates triple. I could never really figure why the insurance companies even let it get this far. It’s poker and bluff I’m thinking plus these law firms are on retainer all the time so they throw them a bone.
Rick

 

[BruceK]

A lawyer I dealt with used refer to himself as a "pioneer" or "early settler". A rarity imo.Mediation at an early stage in litigation can help. As can settlement conferences.

But in my experience, it`s a tough but true observation that the only time both parties and their advisers get totally on top of the issues, and all the parties and witnesses are up to speed in a case, is when it`s actually about to be heard by a Court. Thus the "courtroom steps" settlements.
Efficient? No. But seems to be how it works.

 

[Simi 60]

I didn’t mean to bad mouth the USCG as they do so much with so little budget wise.

Had to laugh at that
USCG gets $13 billion in funding

The coastguard over here gets much of its funding with raffle tickets and donations

 

[psneeld]

Had to laugh at that
USCG gets $13 billion in funding

The coastguard over here gets much of its funding with raffle tickets and donations

Your CG may not have the mission load the USCG does.

 

[Seevee]

The problem here is that only covers you when you loose your asset. One could say that I 'self-insure' my bicycle. If I loos my bike, I am solely responsible for the loss and subsequent replacement of that asset.

What is at issue here is liability. You can't simply tell a marina "No worries, I got it, I'm self insured".

For that one would need to put up a bond. This would effectively escrow that money beyond your word that you're good to cover the losses from damage I caused.

If one could escrow $300K, they could afford a liability-only insurance policy, making this a moot point.

I mentioned the liability in my last paragraph.


Also, it's not about affording the insurance premium, it's about whether insurance is a good deal for one.



And one could argue the value of liability also, however the loss could be catastrophic, IF one were found to be negligent.


FWIW, I was not required to provide insurance to any marina on my last loop trip.

 

[psneeld]

Insurance proof is often not requested if not staying for more than a couple days to a couple weeks in my experience too.

Of course that may depend on how you dock and what your boat looks like.

 

[Hippocampus]

We spent quite some time in Lunenburg and was particularly interested in Covey island boats. One example of their Westerman design had some troubles from fresh water ingress but the tract record of their boats is excellent for durability. That includes Farfarer and several of their other boats who have circumnavigated. These boats have seen high lat and tropics without issue. Covey island mostly does strip plank but know of cold molded vessels with the same accomplishments. Not a NA but believe with either technique if done correctly the vessel is dimensionally stable regardless of water temperature, as or more impervious to water ingress than grp and not subject to worm, mold or other biological growth effecting integrity. Service life as good as grp with better strength to weight ratios. My understanding is strength comes from the adhesives not the fasteners. They can be thought of as being required to hold things in place during construction but subsequently once completed not contributing much. “Wooden Boat” published an article about using wood as core. Layup was Going in to out to the best of my memory
Cosmetic veneer for aesthetics as required.
Double diagonals of hard wood
Soft wood core done as strip plank
Double diagonals of hard wood cold molded
Outer layer of fabric.
Fabric to provide abrasion resistance. (Woven glass, aramid, dynel or even cf.
Although inner layers could use resorcinol using epoxy throughout would seem to make more sense to my thinking.
Complex curves could be employed which is sometimes difficult with metal. Maintenance the same or less than metal or grp. Additional insulation not required except for engine noise.
Wonder about the opinions of others about this type of construction.