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Does salvage need an official order to be paid?
Short answer
On salvage and wreck removal the dividing line in the wordings we reviewed is not the limit but the trigger. Some wordings require an order from a state or an authority, others answer where the work was unavoidable in seamanlike terms. The sentence before the figure is the one to read.
The figure printed next to salvage and wreck removal looks like the important number, and usually it is not. Some of the wordings we reviewed answer only where a state or a competent authority has ordered the work. Others answer where the owner was obliged to act, or where the measure was unavoidable in seamanlike terms. Both styles can carry the same limit, so comparing figures alone compares nothing at all. The clause that decides whether the figure is ever reached sits in the sentence before it, and it is often a single qualifying phrase that a summary leaves out.
The practical case rarely looks official. A boat sinks on her own berth and the marina demands removal under the berthing contract, not by any formal notice. A boat goes down on an anchorage where no authority has jurisdiction to order anything. A yacht is driven ashore on a passage and the harbour master simply wants her off the beach by the weekend. In the United Kingdom recovered wreck material is reported to the Receiver of Wreck, which is a reporting duty and not an order to lift. In each of those cases the lift is unavoidable, no notice exists, and none is going to arrive.
Two habits make this readable long before it matters. First, read the trigger and the limit as one sentence and write down which words have to be true: ordered by an authority, required by law, or necessary to avert further loss. Second, look for the duty to avert and minimise loss, which most hull wordings impose on the owner, and ask how costs incurred under that duty are treated, because a lift the owner was obliged to arrange and a lift an authority ordered are not always the same item. Before a wide cruising range is agreed, ask the broker to confirm both answers in writing. We say it openly: our hull cover currently pays salvage and wreck removal only where an authority has ordered it. Salvage to avert a covered loss is paid as the cost of reducing it.
Worth remembering
Some wordings
answer only on an official order
Others
answer where the lift was unavoidable
The limit is the easy half. The sentence that says when it applies is the half that decides, and it only matters once the boat is already down.
Questions
What owners ask us about this
What counts as an official order?
A formal notice or direction from a competent public body requiring the boat or the wreck to be removed. A demand from the marina or the berth operator arising out of the berthing contract is a contractual obligation, not an order.
And if no authority has jurisdiction?
On the high seas, or on an unregulated anchorage, no order can be issued at all. That is the gap worth reading in any wording before a wide cruising range is agreed, because the lift still has to be paid for.
Does the duty to minimise loss help here?
It can. Most hull wordings oblige the owner to avert or reduce further damage, and costs reasonably incurred under that duty are often treated apart from the salvage clause. Ask how the two interact.
Related
Not sure whether you qualify?
Whether it is “Does salvage need an official order to be paid?” 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.
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