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Old 10-06-2012, 02:06 PM   #18
Marin
Scraping Paint
 
City: -
Join Date: Oct 2007
Posts: 13,745
The insurance companies our broker has put us with for our yacht policy--- including Lloyds for awhile-- have all required periodic surveys. Usually about every five years. The surveyors we use do what they call an insurance survey. They check the stuff they know is important to the insurance companies but it's not anywhere near as comprehensive or time-consuming as a full or pre-purchase survey. So it costs about half as much.

The yard we use has a very low rate for pulling a boat, letting it hang in the slings for a bit, and putting it back in. So we make arrangements with the surveyor and the yard to have the boat at the Travelift at a certain time, they pull it, the surveyor does the out-of-water portion of the survey and the boat goes back in the water. The surveyor does the rest of the survey at our slip, either that same day or later in the week.

So other than the time involved it's a pretty painless and inexpensive proposition.

If in the course of his survey the surveyor finds something that he feels should be dealt with but is not such that it affects the integrity or safety of the boat, he notes it down for us but he doesn't put it on the survey report that goes to the insurance company. This has proven very helpful to us in the past.

I'm not sure the comparison with home insurance is valid. Homes don't float, they don't sit in a hostile environment that is doing its best to corrode, rust, delaminate, and rot it and everything in it away, they are not driven around by people with varying degrees of competence, they are unlikely to hit a rock or reef or go around, they don't run out of fuel and drift into something with the current, and other houses are unlikely to run into them.

From the insurance company's point of view, I would want any vessel I was insuring checked out at some interval. Boats can deteriorate fast with neglect, and problems have a way of cropping up in a hurry. I would be somewhat suspicious of an insurance company that didn't require periodic surveys. If they are that unconcerned about the condition of what they are insuring, one could wonder how good that insurance actually is. Like those third-party extended warranties on cars that cover everything except what will actually go wrong, the time to find out that your insurance company is less than cooperative is not when you suddenly need the insurance.
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