CFA Vessel Insurance Discussions

CFA board of director met today via webinar to discuss issue with marine insurance for our charter fleets gulf wide. As many of you know or have experienced that the availability of insurance companies willing to write marine coverage is getting harder all the time. With that has also come with increased rates each year and seems to be getting worse every time another disaster and storm hits the gulf coast. Insurance is all about risk management and making profit as insurers of personal property and businesses like ours. As claims increase and their balance sheets diminish then they must evaluate who is worth covering and at what expense. Therefore many underwriters have actually quit insuring boats across the board and charter boats in particular. Those that still do must increase their rates or decrease their coverages to make it work. So in our discussions we have come up with a couple of ideas, one is to encourage our charter fleets across the gulf of Mexico to try and take a very proactive approach to keeping their vessels out of harms way. We are going to include on our Face Book page and Our Joincfa.org web site some basic storm preparation protocols and templates for storm management plans to give to your insurance providers. You can go there and copy and paste these for your use and then customize them to suit your individual needs or location. Secondly we are going to reach out to agencies and their underwriters to start a discussion on ways to help us be better prepared , establish minimum standards needed to survive weather events and work to reduce cost as we reduce claims at the same time. Any feed back , recommendations or comments are encouraged please contact:

 Capt Gary Jarvis

 Executive Director CFA

 Cell 850-259-5482