Home / For international owners / Cover in detail
Where do you live while the houseboat is in the yard?
Short answer
On a weekend boat a hull claim is an inconvenience.
On a boat you live on it is also a housing problem,
and the rent for a room ashore runs on while the home sits in a shed at the yard.
Living aboard is ordinary in Britain and in the Netherlands: a widebeam on a residential mooring in London, a converted barge in Amsterdam or Utrecht, a steel motor cruiser on a winter berth in Friesland. When something goes wrong, a failed stern gland, a fire in the galley, a slow sinking at the pontoon, the repair takes weeks. For a weekend sailor those weeks are a lost season. For a liveaboard they are weeks of rent somewhere else, on top of a mooring fee that keeps running.
In the boat wordings we reviewed, loss of use is treated as consequential loss and sits outside the insured damage. That is why wordings written with residential craft in mind sometimes carry a clause of their own for alternative accommodation, usually with a daily figure and a maximum number of days, and why the same clause is simply absent from an ordinary pleasure craft wording. The distinction is not a technicality. Where the clause is missing, the hull damage is settled and the hotel bill belongs to the person who slept there.
If the boat is your home, settle three questions in one conversation, well before anything happens. First, is residential use written down, both in the wording and in the mooring agreement, because a berth let for leisure use rarely permits living aboard. Second, is accommodation dealt with at all while the boat is out of the water, and what does the entitlement depend on. Third, how are your belongings treated, since household contents on board are not the same thing as boat equipment and are often measured against a different limit. A surveyor's report and the mooring agreement answer most of it in an afternoon.
Worth remembering
A boat
is what the claim is about
A home
is what is missing as well
The hull is settled on the damage. The room ashore for the weeks in between is a line of its own, where a wording has one.
Questions
What owners ask us about this
Does an ordinary boat policy deal with loss of use?
As a rule it does not. Loss of use counts as consequential loss and sits outside the insured damage in many wordings. Where accommodation appears at all, it appears as a separate clause drafted for craft that people live on.
What if the houseboat is let out?
Then the question becomes lost rental income, which is a different item again. Check whether the wording separates the owner's own use from letting, because the two are rarely dealt with in the same sentence or measured by the same limit.
Does the mooring agreement matter?
It matters as much as the wording does. A residential mooring, a leisure berth and a winter storage contract carry different permissions, and living aboard is often ruled out in writing on the last two, which also affects where you may stay during a repair.
How long does a repair like this take?
Longer than the damage suggests, because a boat that people live on has to be emptied first and because interior work follows the structural repair. Plan for the yard's queue as well as the work itself when you ask about a daily figure and a maximum number of days.
Related
Not sure whether you qualify?
Whether it is “Where do you live while the houseboat is in the yard?” or another question: send us your residence and the flag your boat flies. You will get a straight answer in one email; including a no, if that is the answer.
Was this useful?
