Phone, laptop, glasses: are personal effects on board insured?

The boat is insured, but what about everything lying around on board? The phone that slips into the water as you come alongside, the laptop that disappears when someone breaks into the cabin, the sunglasses, the foul weather gear and the camera. Many owners assume that hull cover pays for anything that happens to be on the boat. In fact most policy wordings draw a firm line between equipment that belongs to the boat and personal effects that are simply along for the trip.

Equipment means sails, rigging, navigation electronics, safety gear and the boat's fixed inventory. Personal effects are clothing, towels, glasses, mobile phones and laptops. Where a wording includes them at all, it usually caps them at a fixed amount per claim and pays only for certain events, such as an accident to the boat, storm, fire or theft. A phone that simply goes over the side is a loss of loose items, and many wordings exclude that outright.

So check three things. First, whether the hull wording includes personal effects at all, and up to what sum per claim. Second, whether your home contents policy has away from home cover that follows your belongings when you travel, including on a boat. Third, what the wording expressly leaves out: cash, jewellery, watches, furs, works of art and musical instruments appear in hardly any boat policy. Expensive cameras and binoculars that stay on board are better declared as equipment, with receipts, so they are part of the sum insured rather than an afterthought.

Worth remembering

Anything valuable that stays on board belongs on the equipment list.