October at the berth: when a gust counts as a storm in the wording

October is the month when most boats are still in the water and almost nobody is on board. The sailing yacht on an annual berth, the motorboat in its box, the trawler alongside a quay: they are all waiting for a lift out that is two or three weeks away. The first autumn depressions arrive in exactly that gap, and with them the question of who pays for a chafed line, a crushed rubbing strake or a boat that fills up overnight.

The first thing to look for in the contract is the definition of storm. A German hull wording usually lists natural forces such as storm, hail, lightning and earthquake as insured events, and then defines storm as a weather related air movement of at least Beaufort force 8, which is 62 kilometres per hour. Wordings from other markets use a different threshold or none at all, so read your own rather than assume the number.

That number is not a detail. A force 7 that blows for two days chafes through a bow line and pushes a yacht onto the piles. It looks like storm damage and it is not storm damage under a clause that starts at force 8. Whether there is a second route to a payment depends on the same wording: some versions also list accident of the vessel, including grounding and collision with fixed objects, and others do not. If yours does not, a force 7 leaves you with nothing to point at.

The second thing to look for is the exclusion of weather influences. Rain, snow, ice, heat, frost and sunlight are commonly excluded, with a narrow exception for damage that follows a storm or another insured natural force. This is the clause behind most refused frost claims in spring. Water that runs through a leaking hatch for four weeks is neither a storm nor a natural force, and the insurer will say so before the surveyor has finished the report.

The third clause is the one almost nobody reads. Several hull wordings refuse payment for damage that occurs while the vessel lies unattended off an open coast for longer than a stated number of hours without any arrangement that it can be moved immediately when danger threatens. The limit is often 24 or 48 hours, and higher tiers of the same wording sometimes drop the clause altogether. Look up the exact hours in your own contract and write them on the first page.

If your wording has that clause, October is the month to do something about it. Somebody near the boat needs a key, a phone number and an actual instruction. A harbour master, a club member, a neighbour on the pontoon: what counts in a dispute is not the friendship but whether moving the boat was genuinely possible and whether you can show it. A short written message with a date and a name is worth more than any promise made on the pontoon.

One duty applies whatever the wording says. Once a warning is out, you are expected to take every reasonable step on your own initiative to prevent or reduce the damage, and most contracts reimburse what that costs, including efforts that turn out to be useless. The mirror image is a reduction of the payment if you saw the warning and did nothing, measured against how serious the failure was. So watch the warning, act, and note the time you acted.