Hi all,
I recently watched a YT video from The Wandering Hillbilly. Many of you are familiar with him and his grounding incident back in February or March of this year. He was roundly eviscerated here for tying up to an unauthorized ball in a Northerly swell condition. I know there are strong opinions on the whole episode but don't want to re-hash that.
In his most recent video, he explains that due to insurance issues and salvage claims, he's walking away from the boat - giving his boat to the salvor and ending up with nothing.
The primary issue seems to be that his insurance company denied his claim - or maybe even cancelled his policy - it's hard to tell. Therefore, he had to battle the salvor himself and contest their 1) assessed value of the boat and 2) their claim of a payment of 30% of that value.
He has said that a video about the insurance issue is coming so maybe this will all be explained but I'm curious how this could happen.
Could they be denying his claim by saying he was negligent? Would they get down into the details of whether he should have taken that particular ball and/or whether he should have moored there in those conditions? If so, how is that worded in a policy? Is there some kind of "good seamanship" component of the policy that they can say was violated
He also said that while salvors typically charge between 10 and 20% of the value of the salvaged boat, these guys were claiming 30%. Additionally, their own surveyor assessed the boat at $1.9M whereas his surveyor put it at closer to $500k. What little I know about salvage is that everything is tilted massively towards them. I'm sure there are arguments to support this as well as against.
To current boat owners - are you concerned about this kind of risk?
Again, I don't want to have this turn into bashing this particular guy - I'd like to just talk about the circumstances and considerations for a boat owner in general with regard to insurance and salvage. Pretend that this is a hypothetical question if that helps.
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