Leaving Your Boat Unattended: What Your Policy Requires
Leaving your boat unattended is not governed by a time limit in the policy.
On the London-market yacht wording we work from, and on a current US retail yacht policy, the word "unattended" does not appear at all. What decides a claim is where the boat is, what you declared, and what evidence there is.
Zero
occurrences of "unattended" in 12,842 words of the wording we hold
Warranty 25
the lay-up clause, and it bites only if your Schedule names a period
Evidence
what theft cover afloat turns on, rather than how long you were away
21,731
anchorages on the noForeignLand community map, against 4,860 marinas
Insuring a yacht of your own?
Tell us the boat, its value and where it cruises. We come back with Lloyd's-market terms, usually inside 24 hours.
"Unattended" is not a defined term
"Unattended" is not a defined term in either yacht policy read for this guide. What decides a claim on an empty boat is three things the wording does name: where the boat is, whether a lay-up period is specified on your Schedule, and whether there is evidence that a loss happened. Your Schedule is the document that settles all three.
Key takeaways
- Across 12,842 words of the London Marine yacht wording and its clause and endorsement schedule, the stem "atten" returns zero. There is no unattended-vessel exclusion, no anchoring warranty and no general reasonable-care condition.
- A current US retail yacht policy sample, 8,045 words, returns zero occurrences of "unattended", "reasonable care" and "due diligence" as well. What it carries instead is a Lay-Up Warranty, a Navigational Warranty and a Private Pleasure Use Warranty, each tied to the declarations page.
- Afloat, the theft condition turns on evidence rather than on time. Cover excludes theft or mysterious disappearance of equipment unless the whole vessel goes too, or there is evidence of forcible entry or removal.
- Ashore, it turns on the place. Theft cover is restricted to the entire vessel, from a locked building or from a storage place approved by underwriters in writing, and that restriction can be bought back by endorsement.
- A lay-up period bites only if one is specified on your Schedule, under General Conditions and Warranties 25. That is why flying home for three weeks in July is a different question from laying the boat up for the winter.
- Your Schedule is the document that decides on both wordings. It carries the lay-up dates, the navigational limits and the sums insured, and every question on this page resolves to it rather than to a general rule.
- Of 118,937 places on the noForeignLand community map, 4,860 are marinas, 2,256 are mooring-buoy fields and 21,731 are anchorages, so most boats are left in the least formal places of the three.
Does your policy say how long you can leave your boat?
No, and on the two yacht wordings read for this guide the word is not there at all. We searched both London Marine documents, 12,842 words together, with deliberately short stems after confirming the text extracted cleanly. "atten" returns zero. "care" returns zero. "anch" returns a single hit, and that hit is the word "branch".
The endorsement schedule lists co-insureds, Croatia, the four-country terms, towing, racing, the hurricane plan, survey and photograph requirements, single-handed sailing and theft ashore, and nothing at all about leaving the boat.
If you are laying the boat up for the season, stop here. That is a different question with a different clause behind it, and laying up and winter cover answers it properly. Lay-up is a declared status with dates on your Schedule. Flying home mid-season is not lay-up, and the two get confused constantly.
What does the wording ask instead?
Three conditions, and not one of them is a clock. Afloat it asks for evidence, ashore it asks for an approved place, and separately it asks whether you declared a lay-up period at all.
| When nobody is aboard | What the condition turns on | What the wording says | Where it sits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Afloat, gear or personal property missing | Evidence, not time | Theft and mysterious disappearance of equipment excluded unless the whole vessel is stolen too, or there is evidence of forcible entry or removal | Hull section theft provisions, plus the Theft Coverage Warranty |
| Stored on land | The place, agreed in advance | Theft restricted to the entire vessel, from a locked building or a storage place approved by us in writing | Hull section theft provisions |
| Stored on land, on a trailer | The place and the lock | Locked building or enclosure, a ball lock if attached to a vehicle, and cover contingent on evidence of forcible entry into the storage area and destruction of the ball lock | Hull section theft provisions |
| A lay-up period is on your Schedule | Declared dates | The vessel "will not be navigated or used in any manner whatsoever including as a residence whether permanent or temporary" for that period | General Conditions and Warranties 25 |
| Where the boat is kept has changed | Disclosure | Null and void for non-disclosure or misrepresentation of a fact material to acceptance or premium | General Conditions and Warranties 11 |
Theft means the abstraction or removal of the insured property. No theft coverage applies unless there is visible evidence of actual force and violence or forcible entry and/or removal made by tools, explosives, electricity, chemicals or other acceptable evidence. Mysterious disappearance is not theft and is not covered.
The wording says that while the vessel is afloat, cover for theft excludes theft or mysterious disappearance of any of the vessel's equipment or any personal property on board, unless that happens together with theft of the entire vessel or there is evidence of forcible entry or removal.
In practice that means an outboard or a chartplotter that is simply gone when you get back, with nothing broken and nothing forced, is not a theft claim. Being away for two hours or two months does not change that. Whether anything was forced does.
Ashore, the question becomes where. Theft cover is restricted to the entire vessel, including its equipment, from a locked building or from any other storage place underwriters have approved in writing beforehand. On a trailer it tightens again, down to the ball lock. That restriction is not permanent. A theft extension for a vessel stored on land restates theft cover as if the vessel were afloat.
The third condition is the one people import from the winter. General Conditions and Warranties 25 only operates if a lay-up period is specified on your Schedule. Warranty 11 sits next to it. That one voids the contract for non-disclosure of a fact material to acceptance or premium, and it rests on the duty of disclosure the Marine Insurance Act 1906 put into statute. Between the two, where the boat is kept is a rated, declared field, not a policed one. The quote questionnaire asks for the main mooring, the storage location, the home port, the lay-up dates, whether the boat is ashore or afloat, and what anti-theft precautions are fitted. That is the mechanism owners are hunting for when they go looking for an unattended clause.
This is general information and not financial advice. Your own Schedule and wording govern.
Owners ring us expecting to be pointed at the clause that says how many days they can be away. We open the wording we hold and read them what is actually there, which is a condition about evidence, a condition about place, and no clock at all. It is not the answer they came for, and it is the one that survives a claim.
What changes with where you leave it: marina, buoy or anchor?
The place changes more than the absence does. Of 118,937 places recorded on the noForeignLand community map on 20 September 2026, 4,860 are marinas, 2,256 are mooring-buoy fields and 21,731 are anchorages, so the large majority of the places cruisers actually leave boats are the least formal ones.
In a marina berth, the base wording does not change because you walked away. Two endorsements do make the marina itself the condition, though. The Croatia clause excludes theft cover, for property on board and for the vessel itself, absolutely, unless the insured vessel is moored within a commercial marina agreed in writing by underwriters. The Cuba, Colombia, Venezuela and Haiti clause carries the same term at its fourth item, alongside doubled deductibles and carve-outs for confiscation and piracy. Those waters are placeable on modified terms rather than shut. A berthing agreement, separately, is not an insurance policy on your boat, so read the two documents against each other instead of assuming they agree.
The four-country terms get repeated across the market as a straight exclusion, and that is not what the clause we hold says. It puts those waters on modified terms and makes an agreed commercial marina the condition for theft cover, so we publish it the way it is written and let an owner plan a season around the real wording instead of around a rumour.
On a mooring buoy, the tackle is somebody else's and whose failure it was becomes a separate argument. That question has its own guide, who pays when a mooring buoy fails.
At anchor, the wording asks nothing extra of you. The international collision regulations, and at least one national maritime authority, take a harder line.
What should you do before you fly home?
Everything below comes off the Schedule and the questionnaire, not off general best practice, because an invented checklist item is worse than none.
- Check whether a lay-up period is on your Schedule at all. Warranty 25 only bites if one is specified, and owners who assume they have one, or assume they do not, get caught both ways.
- Know your navigational limits. Cover runs to the waters shown on the Schedule, so where the boat sits while you are away has to be inside them, not just where you sailed it.
- Tell the desk if where the boat is kept has changed. The questionnaire asks for the main mooring, the storage location, the home base and the home port. Warranty 11 turns a material change into a disclosure question, which is the honest answer to whether a change of berth has to be reported.
- Photograph the boat and its gear before you go. The theft conditions turn on evidence, and evidence is far easier to produce than to reconstruct after the fact.
- Ask about the land-storage theft extension if the boat is going ashore. Discovering the locked-building restriction after a loss is too late.
- Keep the fire-extinguishing equipment current. Warranty 9 runs whether or not anyone is aboard: the equipment must be adequate for the area protected, properly installed and maintained, with tanks weighed once a year and recharged as needed.
One more, and it is the one owners forget because it predates the trip. Warranty 17 requires the surveyor's recommendations to be complied with, and survey requirements sets out the timetable. An open recommendation does not wait for you to come back.
No clause on this wording requires a nominated person to look in on the boat, and no clause sets an inspection interval. We are not going to invent one, because a number like "every fourteen days" repeated without a source is exactly how a rule that does not exist gets into circulation. What a regular check buys you is somebody who can say when the damage was not yet there, which is exactly what the theft conditions need.
This is general information and not financial advice. Your own Schedule and wording govern.
What actually bites if something happens while you are away?
Not a care clause, because there is not one. Owners assume a reasonable-care condition governs how they leave the boat, and the stem "care" returns zero across both London Marine documents and zero across the US yacht policy sample too. The standing exclusions are set out in full in what yacht insurance does not cover.
It is warranted by you that the scheduled vessel is seaworthy at the inception of this agreement and will be maintained in a seaworthy condition and appropriately crewed. Any violation of this warranty will void this policy from inception.
Those are the clause's own words. How a breach of warranty actually operates is a question of law rather than of drafting. The wording is expressly subject to English law and practice, and the Marine Insurance Act 1906 is only the starting point for it. We quote the clause and stop there.
The second is Duty 1: "You must immediately take all reasonable steps to minimise the loss and to prevent further loss or damage." Read the first word. That duty starts when a loss has happened. It is not a standard of care for how you left the boat, and anyone who presents it as one has turned a post-loss obligation into a condition that is not in the contract.
The third is Duty 2, written notice of the occurrence including location and circumstances, which is measurably harder to give accurately when you were two thousand miles away. That is the practical argument for the photographs. Duty 6 adds that you must not admit liability or assume obligation without written consent, and the settlement sequence that follows from it is set out on mooring damage and your deductible.
A condition that is not met does not produce an automatic refusal. It produces a live argument at claim time. That is worse than it sounds, not better, because the argument arrives when you are furthest from the boat and least able to produce evidence.
This is general information and not financial advice. Your own Schedule and wording govern.
Is an anchor watch ever a policy condition?
Not on the wording we hold. No clause requires a watch, and the search that returns zero for "unattended" returns nothing for a watch condition either. The rules outside the policy are a different matter.
The scholarly position in the Journal of Navigation is that a vessel at anchor is still at sea, and that an effective and proper watch must continue to be kept at all times, to verify position, to veer chain and to detect a dragging anchor. A national maritime authority puts it harder still. In a notice published on 17 May 2022, the Préfecture maritime de la Méditerranée states that when a boat lies to its own anchor, a permanent presence aboard remains obligatory to deal with the unexpected, as provided by the international collision regulations. That is one maritime authority stating the rule it enforces in its own waters, on the authority of the collision regulations. It is not a worldwide prohibition.
So the two layers disagree, and the disagreement is the answer: our wording imposes no watch condition at all, while the Préfecture maritime de la Méditerranée held on 17 May 2022 that a boat on its own anchor must keep somebody aboard.
Against both of those, an owner posting in a 2012 cruisersforum thread reported asking their own insurer and being told they were not required to maintain a watch on an anchored boat, though they must still show an adequate anchor light and would be expected to check the boat periodically. That is one owner, one conversation and one insurer, and it is not market practice.
An anchor watch is not a policy requirement on this wording. The anchor light is a legal requirement, and the watch is what keeps you out of the fault argument altogether. Under 33 CFR 83.30, a vessel of less than 50 metres at anchor may exhibit a single all-round white light where it can best be seen. A drag alarm does the same job as a watch and is not a substitute for the lights.
This is general information and not financial advice. Your own Schedule and wording govern.
Why do owners keep quoting a rule nobody can find?
Because the rule is real, and it lives in a different kind of policy. The same question has been asked in the same places for eighteen years, in 2005, in 2007 and again in 2023, and the 2005 forum thread still ranks second in the United States for it today. In that thread an owner quoted the clause from their own policy: no claim shall be allowed in respect of loss or damage to the vessel while left moored or anchored unattended otherwise than in a marina or sheltered anchorage. The thread then ran for pages, because nobody, including a broker answering one of the owners, could say what "unattended" or "sheltered" actually meant.
The clause quoted in that thread comes from the Speedboat Clauses, and clauses of that family belong to small-craft wordings. That is why an owner who goes looking for the same sentence in a yacht policy cannot find it, and why the answers circulating are irreconcilable. In the threads we read, owners quote a day, a few hours, and never, for what they believe is one rule. Answers that cannot all be right are the finding, not the answer, and no number lifted from a forum post belongs in anybody's summary of their own cover.
The concept does travel. A 2019 thread has another owner quoting their own policy's exclusion for a boat stranded, sunk, swamped or breaking adrift while unattended except on a recognised mooring, and Italian marine-insurance commentary describes an equivalent carve-out for an unprotected anchorage. Neither is a wording we hold, and neither concept appears in either of the two yacht policies read for this guide. The lay-up warranty, by contrast, has been a blank on the face of a yacht policy for generations. The American Institute Yacht Form 77P of May 1947 carries the line "Warranted that the said Yacht shall be laid up and out of commission from ___ at noon, until ___ at noon", with a return premium for each fifteen consecutive laid-up days.
The document that decides what you may do with your boat while you are away is your own Schedule, and the time to read it is before you book the flight.
This is general information and not financial advice. Your own Schedule and wording govern.
Frequently asked questions
1.How long can I leave my boat unattended?
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No period is stated in either yacht wording read for this guide. What is stated is a lay-up warranty tied to declared dates, and theft conditions tied to place and to evidence. Your Schedule decides, so ask the question before you go and not after.
2.Does my policy need someone to check the boat while I am away?
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No clause on this wording requires a nominated person, and none sets an inspection interval. A regular check is still worth arranging, because it produces the evidence the theft conditions turn on. Treat any interval you read online as somebody else's policy, not as yours.
3.My outboard vanished off the transom while I was away. Is that a theft claim?
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Not on this wording, unless the whole vessel went too or there is evidence of forcible entry or removal. The Theft Coverage Warranty says plainly that mysterious disappearance is not theft and is not covered. This is the single most common surprise for owners who leave a boat afloat.
4.Is leaving the boat on a marina berth safer for my cover than a buoy or anchor?
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On the base wording, attendance is not the variable and place is. The Croatia clause and the Cuba, Colombia, Venezuela and Haiti clause both make a commercial marina agreed in writing the condition for theft cover. Remember that a berth contract is not an insurance policy on your boat.
5.Is an anchor watch required by my policy?
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Not on the wording we hold, because there is no watch condition in it. The collision regulations and at least one national maritime authority take a considerably harder line about a boat lying to its own anchor. The anchor light, unlike the watch, is a legal requirement.
6.If I move the boat to a different marina while I am away, do I have to tell anyone?
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Probably yes, and this is the disclosure question rather than the attendance question. The quote questionnaire asks for the main mooring, storage location and home port, which makes where the boat is kept a rated fact, and General Conditions and Warranties 11 voids the contract for non-disclosure of a fact material to acceptance or premium. Tell the desk and have it noted.
7.Does a boat ashore for the winter need the same theft cover as one afloat?
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No, and this is where the wording changes most. Ashore, theft cover narrows to the entire vessel taken from a locked building or a storage place approved in writing beforehand, which is a materially different promise from the one that applies afloat. Ask about the land-storage theft extension before the boat is hauled, not after.
Sources and how we verified this
- Policy clauses: the London Marine Insurance Services yacht policy wording, clause set and endorsements held at this desk, cited by clause name so you can find the same words in your own document. The absence finding comes from single-word stem searches across both documents, 12,842 words, with extraction health confirmed before the zero counts were trusted.
- Market comparison: a current US retail yacht policy sample, 8,045 words, read 20 September 2026, and the American Institute Yacht Form 77P of May 1947. Competitor insurers are named and never linked.
- Statute: Marine Insurance Act 1906, linked inline to legislation.gov.uk, for the statutory background to warranties and the duty of disclosure only.
- Anchor lights: 33 CFR 83.30, read from the eCFR text. The collision regulations themselves via the International Maritime Organization.
- The watch obligation: Zhang and Zhao, The Obligations of an Anchored Vessel to Avoid Collision at Sea, Journal of Navigation 66(3), 2013; and the Préfecture maritime de la Méditerranée notice of 17 May 2022.
- Owner accounts: YBW forum threads of September 2005 and March 2019, and a 2012 cruisersforum thread. Each is reported as an owner quoting their own document or relaying one conversation, never as a market rule.
- Place counts derived from the noForeignLand community map, 20 September 2026.
World Yacht Insurance is a yacht-insurance introducer arranging hull and liability cover up to $5M for sail and motor yachts worldwide, including the Caribbean, placed in the London market through London Marine Insurance Services Ltd, a Lloyd's-accredited broker.
We are not an insurer and we carry no risk. We hold the policy wording this guide quotes, which is why every condition above is cited by clause name rather than described in general terms. The full chain, and who pays a claim, is set out on how it works.
Tell us where the boat will be while you are away
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