Insurance, the damage waiver and what is not covered

Three separate things, often confused

1. 01The yacht's insurance. Hull and third-party liability, held by the owner, and a condition of the Thai charter licence. It protects the yacht and third parties, not you.
2. 02Your deposit or damage waiver. On bareboat, a security deposit you get back if nothing breaks, reducible by paying a daily waiver.
3. 03Your travel and medical insurance. Yours to arrange, and the one people get wrong.

The deposit and the waiver

A bareboat operator holds a security deposit, commonly two to five thousand dollars on a charter catamaran, against damage. A yacht damage waiver at roughly eighty to one hundred and seventy dollars a day reduces or removes that exposure. Over a week that is several hundred dollars to convert an uncertain liability into a known cost, and most charterers take it.

Read what the waiver excludes. Groundings, dinghy and outboard loss, and damage while under way at night are common carve-outs, and the last two are the ones that actually happen.

The two gaps in your own policy

• Distance from shore. Many travel policies cover sailing only within a set distance of the coast, often twelve nautical miles. A Similan itinerary is fifty-eight miles offshore and a Mergui charter crosses an international border. Check the wording rather than the summary page.
• Diving depth and certification. Policies commonly cover recreational diving to eighteen or thirty metres with a qualified guide. The west-side Similan sites and the Koh Haa caves go deeper than that, and cave and overhead environments are excluded outright by many insurers.

Both of these are cheap to fix in advance and expensive to discover afterwards. A specialist watersports or expedition rider usually costs less than one night of the charter.

The safety equipment question worth asking

On a crewed yacht this is the crew's job and asking is unusual. On bareboat it is yours: liferaft service date, EPIRB registration and battery date, flare expiry, and whether the tender has its own means of calling for help. A well-run fleet answers instantly. If the answers are vague, that is information about the fleet.