Boating season brings a wave of new and returning owners onto the water, many of them carrying policies they have never closely read. The most common mistake among them, according to Amanda Conely (pictured), an insurance broker at Mitch Insurance, is treating a boat policy as a version of auto insurance – an assumption that can leave them paying for a sunken vessel out of their own pocket.
Conely said the gap usually surfaces only at claim time, when an owner discovers that the marine-specific coverages they assumed were standard were never on the policy at all. "The biggest shock for most owners is realizing that a boat policy is not just a car policy for the water," she said. "They don't realize that standard home extensions or cheap policies completely exclude really critical marine-specific coverages, like wreckage removal." Treating a boat policy as a cheap add-on, she said, is the fastest way to be left stranded when a claim comes in.
Wreckage removal is the example she returns to, because the cost lands entirely on the owner when the coverage is missing. If a boat sinks in a marina or a navigable waterway, removing it is not optional. "The authorities or the marina owners will mandate that it gets removed," Conely said. "Salvage cranes, commercial divers – they're incredibly expensive. Without that specific coverage on your policy, that bill would come directly out of your pocket."
The root of the problem, she said, is that owners treat insuring a boat as a box already ticked the moment the vessel is named on a policy. "I think people just say, my boat is insured," Conely said, and assume coverage follows automatically. She said the same reflex shows up again and again on the front lines: owners picture boat insurance as a version of auto insurance, a single product that simply switches on the moment the boat is listed. The reality is that how the boat is insured matters as much as whether it is.
That distinction – between adding a boat to a home policy and buying a dedicated marine policy – is where owners get caught. The two are not interchangeable, Conely said, even though they are often treated that way.
Home policies tend to carry capped limits on certain items and narrower wordings, and a coverage like wreckage removal may not be included at all. A dedicated marine policy, by contrast, is written far more broadly for the risks specific to being on the water, and its wordings are built around the way losses actually happen on the water rather than adapted from a property policy.
Conely said the fix is not necessarily buying the most expensive policy available. It is knowing what a policy actually does and does not cover before a claim forces the question. "I don't think it's always necessarily about having the more comprehensive coverage," she said. "I think it's having a better understanding of what your policy covers." The goal, in other words, is not to insure against everything, but to know exactly where the line sits.
Checking for the specific coverage is something an owner can do directly, she said. Wreckage removal, where it exists, is usually spelled out in the policy wording, often in a dedicated section. "They would need to look for that specific wording on their policy," Conely said. "If you don't see it yourself, it's something that you could ask your broker specifically." An owner who cannot find the language, she said, should treat that as a prompt to ask rather than an answer in itself.
The wording matters because a policy that simply lists the boat may do nothing more than that. A bare listing, Conely said, should be read as covering the vessel itself and not much more. Liability limits typically carry over from the underlying policy, but beyond that, none of the marine-specific protections an owner might assume are bundled in actually come with it.
For Conely, the takeaway is not that every owner needs maximum coverage, but that every owner should understand the trade-off they are making. An owner who knowingly declines a coverage has made a decision; one who assumes it is there has not. That awareness, she said, is the whole point – being clear-eyed about what sits with the owner and what sits with the insurer, and being comfortable with where that line falls.
"There's no wrong way to insure," Conely said. "It's the risk that you're willing to take on yourself versus the risk that you want to put on the insurance company."
