Insurance

If you have a boat that’s less than 30 years old, a known model, you aren’t a liveaboard, and are costal cruising, insurance is pretty simple. Even with one or two of those conditions not met, it’s not too hard to find insurance if you call around. Otherwise it’s one of the more frustrating things about sailing, and totally out of your control. In our situation as liveaboards with a custom boat, it is very hard to find companies that will insure. Most marinas also require liability insurance up to $500,000, so it’s not something you can easily ignore. And if you think liability only insurance will make the process easier, most insurers don’t seem to loosen any of the requirements. We’ve tried many things over the years, but found luck with specialty insurers.

Regular Insurers

By “regular insurers” we mean common names like Progressive or BoatUS/ Geico. The rules for what they allow change constantly, and you may be dropped randomly because their policies have changed at a corporate level. Still, this is the best place to start if you need simple insurance, and finding out the criteria normally amounts to giving the representative all the details and hearing back from the computer system. None seem to have representatives that specialize in boats. On the positive side, many of these insurers don’t even ask for a survey (crazy). They also often offer “agreed upon hull value” instead of simple liability insurance.

For our experience, we initially started with Progressive who gave our custom boat full coverage immediately. A few days later we got an automated call saying they couldn’t provide that, and canceled our coverage completely. We called back, heard it was a mistake, and that our coverage would be resumed. Got another call a few days later that it was canceled again. For the third time we asked for liability only, and then had no issues holding the insurance. When it came time for renewal, we were now full time liveaboards and no longer eligible.

We called a dozen other insurance companies, but most didn’t accept liveaboards. The few that did, wouldn’t accept our custom boat. If you are a liveaboard with a normal boat that’s less than 30 years old, try BoatUS/ Geico first. As of 2025 we’ve heard they are providing insurance.

Specialty Insurers

If your situation is unique, it’s easiest to reach out to specialty insurers which are used to working with boat owners. Most apparently are underwritten by “Markel”, but there are other underwriters that they can choose from as well. We thought this would be extremely expensive, but reached out to a local boat insurer with a recent survey. They offered us full coverage at the same price as liability only from Progressive. We had to call a few of these “specialty insurers” till we found one that would work with us, so you might need to try a few times.

Another option that we weren’t able to use but are interested in, is Red Shield. We were just short of the experience cutoff at the time, but if we ever have problems with our current insurer, we will try them out and report back.