Which hurricane holes do insurers accept?

Is there a list of approved hurricane holes?

No, and the term itself is the first thing to get straight. A hurricane hole is a naturally sheltered creek, bay or mangrove basin protected on most sides, which makes it a seamanship category rather than an insurance one. No insurer designates them, and there is no list. We hold the London Marine Insurance Services Ltd policy wording, and it names no bay, no yard and no island as accepted or refused. What gets assessed is your plan, per enquiry, and the answer is recorded on your own Confirmation of Cover and Schedule rather than in a public register.

A list would only tell you where other people's boats were allowed to sit. A plan tells you what your boat has to be able to do.

So the question that matters is what your plan can demonstrate about the hole you picked. Underwriters test three things, and one document fixes your limits.

Cruisers weigh the same candidates every season: Grenada, Trinidad, the ABC islands, Puerto Rico, the British Virgin Islands. Naming them is geography, not endorsement. We are not telling you any of them is accepted, because no such statement exists to make.

Written for an owner keeping a boat in the Caribbean through a hurricane season. This guide explains how a destination condition works. It is not financial advice, and it is not a quote. Premium effects are case-specific and this page does not estimate them.

What does a hurricane plan have to be, before you have cover at all?

Agreed in advance, in writing, and signed. The Hurricane Plan Clause in the wording we hold puts it plainly.

It is a condition precedent to liability under this Policy that a signed and dated Hurricane Plan is to be agreed by underwriters prior to cover being granted for Named Windstorm coverage.

Condition precedent is a term of art, and it bites harder than it looks. Not a discount for good behaviour. Not paperwork you can produce later. If the plan was never agreed, the named-windstorm cover was never granted in the first place. After the storm there is nothing to argue about, because the thing you would be arguing about did not attach.

What triggers it is naming, not geography. The wording defines a named windstorm by reference to storms named by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. So the trigger is a published list, not a wind speed and not a latitude. The National Hurricane Center draws Atlantic names from six rotating lists recycled every six years. Elsewhere in the market the same peril is called a named storm deductible.

First-hand

Owners ask us which bay will be accepted, and that is not the question underwriters answer. We built the plan generator because the plan is what gets agreed, and we send it in with the submission.

Our named-windstorm deductible guide covers the clause itself in depth. This page tests destinations against it.

Can you reach the hurricane hole inside the warning window?

Can the destination take your boat's length and displacement?

Yes or no, and the public record is far worse at answering it than owners expect. Lift tonnage is not maximum length overall, and displacement is the number that actually decides whether a yard can take you.

We built a dataset of Caribbean storm refuges and haul-out yards to see how answerable this is. It is not very. Of 240 rows, 21 carry a verified travel-lift tonnage, 11 carry a verified berth capacity, 6 carry a verified maximum length, and none carries a verified maximum displacement. Last verified 31 August 2026.

Coverage rates for each capacity attribute across 240 storm refuges and haul-out yards

Attribute	Rows with a verified value	Coverage
Travel-lift tonnage	21 of 240	8.8%
Berth or hardstanding capacity	11 of 240	4.6%
Maximum length overall	6 of 240	2.5%
Maximum displacement	0 of 240	0%
Tie-down method, strap or pin	19 of 240	7.9%
Mast-removal policy	4 of 240	1.7%
Recorded as satisfying a plan	0 of 240	0%

Inside the box that matters for this question, 46 of the refuges sit across 14 countries. That is a count of places, not of confirmed capacity, and the table above is why we say it that way.

The maintained 23-yard comparison table at Caribbean Compass carries lift tonnage, tie-downs and mast policy for the Eastern Caribbean, and it is the best public source we found. Read it for tonnage. Then ring the yard and ask what it will take at your displacement, because that is the number nobody publishes.

The standard forum answer to this question is Cartagena. Cartagena is in Colombia, which puts it inside a clause you want to read before you sail south. The clause covering Cuba, Colombia, Venezuela and Haiti doubles all deductibles in those waters, excludes confiscation, excludes piracy, and excludes theft unless the vessel is moored in a commercial marina previously agreed in writing by underwriters. Cover is placeable there on those modified terms. It is not unavailable. Three of the 46 holes inside the box are in Cuba or Haiti. We cover what sailing south to Cartagena does to your terms in full separately.

Place counts derived from the noForeignLand community map, read 31 August 2026, with yard attributes second-sourced per row.

Who will be there, and are they authorised to act?

Somebody ashore, named in the plan, with access and authority. Not you, if you will be in another hemisphere in September, and not the crew, because nobody is aboard.

NOAA's hurricane preparedness guidelines for marinas are blunt about it, and their procedures are noted as accepted by FEMA. The owner may not be available when a storm threatens. So an alternate caretaker should be named, or the marina should be contractually authorised to carry out the owner's plan. And the line that settles the question owners keep asking: no one should stay aboard during a hurricane.

That rules out the most popular informal plan on the dock. It is also the gap in plans that otherwise read well: the destination is sound, the ground tackle is right, and there is nobody within 2,000 miles who can legally move the boat or cut a line.

Once your boat is in the yard's custody, a different set of clauses takes over. We will cover those on their own.

Is the space booked, or only chosen?

Booked, with a haul-out contract, or it is not a destination. A plan names the exact facility, and exact means a named place that has agreed to take you on stated terms.

Southern yards fill months ahead of the season, and a plan naming a full yard is a plan that cannot be executed. That is why our boat hurricane plan generator asks whether the space is contracted, as a straight yes or no. Terms differ too. The Caribbean Compass table shows contractor and liveaboard policies varying yard by yard, so booked means booked on conditions you have read.

Shortlisting the candidates is a different job. A directory of refuges and yards is the instrument to shortlist candidate refuges, and it sits outside this guide.

Is a yard's own "insurance approved" your underwriter's agreement?

No. The party being paid to store your boat is not the party that pays your claim, and only one of them can agree your plan.

The phrase circulates widely. A community cruising blog reports that most yards have insurance approved hurricane cradles, and Google's own AI Overview has repeated "insurance-approved hurricane cradles and tie-downs" back to searchers as guidance. Neither names an insurer. Neither can, because no insurer issued the approval being described.

Under the wording we hold, the plan must be agreed by underwriters before cover is granted. A yard cannot grant that on your behalf, in advance or afterwards. Its cradles may well be excellent, and that is a question about engineering. The one you need answered is a question about consent.

One broker in this market states that its clients who suffered hurricane total losses were, almost without exception, in a hurricane hole when the damage occurred. That is one firm's claim experience, not a statistic, and we cite it as such. It is still a useful corrective to the idea that a sheltered bay is a safe one.

Our own dataset says the same thing. Across all 240 rows, not one is recorded as satisfying a plan, because nobody, ourselves included, can source that answer place by place.

Does a safer hurricane hole reduce your deductible?

No. Named-windstorm cover runs with a signed hurricane plan agreed by underwriters in advance, and the deductible for that peril is 10% of the hull value shown on your Schedule. It is a percentage of an agreed number on a document, so it is the same figure whether the boat rode out the season in a mangrove creek or on stands in a yard.

What the destination does change matters more: the probability that you claim at all, and whether cover exists in the first place. Those are the levers. The deductible is not one of them.

The same 10% that runs with the signed plan also applies to a total loss, including actual, constructive and compromised total loss. Our named-windstorm deductible guide works that through with the arithmetic.

First-hand

When an owner asks whether a better anchorage buys them a smaller deductible, we go to the clause rather than to what the market says about it, and the clause ties the figure to the value on the Schedule, not to the place.

Percentage-of-value storm deductibles are a recognised regulatory concept, but the ranges published elsewhere are US property figures, not marine facility terms. A legal publisher gives 2%, 5% or 10% pinned to the Gulf Coast. An agency gives 5% to 10% for Florida. None of them mentions total loss.

Is there a latitude insurers use, and is it your navigational limit?

What changed after Hurricane Beryl, and what did not?

The mechanism did not change. The conversation did.

A widely read 2026 Caribbean cruising guide reports that some insurance companies that used to allow storage in Grenada may no longer, after Hurricane Beryl crossed the island in July 2024. Read that claim carefully. No insurer is named, no source is given, no date is attached, and it is written as a possibility, not a fact. We repeat it here to describe it, not to endorse it.

What we can state is narrower. Nothing changed on the facility we place through. No destination was added to a list or removed from one, because there is no list. Acceptance still runs through the same signed plan agreed in advance that it did before July 2024.

Beryl did demonstrate one thing to carry with you. Boats that were ashore, chocked and strapped were still lost. Being secured is not the same as being safe, which is why the test is what your plan can demonstrate, not where the boat is standing.