A friend takes your boat out for a weekend. Your brother-in-law brings it round from the yard. In each case somebody other than you is in charge, and most owners have never read the two or three lines of their policy that decide what happens if it goes wrong. Spain is the worked example because its rules are published in full in the Boletín Oficial del Estado.
Spain is one of the countries where third-party liability insurance for pleasure boats is compulsory, under Royal Decree 607/1999. Article 2 applies it to every motor-propelled recreational boat, personal watercraft included, and to boats without an engine longer than six metres. Article 3.1 puts the duty to insure on the owner.
The part that matters here is article 1.1. The policy covers the civil liability of the owner, of “the persons who, duly authorised by the owner, skipper” the boat, and of those who assist them in handling it. The compulsory cover is not tied to you as a person: it follows the boat and extends to whoever you authorise to take it out. If your friend hits a moored yacht on the way into port, the third party’s claim falls under your compulsory policy, within its limits.
Those limits are in article 8 and are still written in pesetas: 20 million per victim for death or injury, 40 million per incident, and 16 million per incident for material damage and the economic loss that follows from it. At the fixed conversion rate of 166.386 pesetas to the euro, that is €120,202, €240,405 and €96,162. For a collision with a modern yacht, the last figure runs out fast. Most owners add voluntary liability cover on top; whether that layer also follows an authorised skipper is a matter for the policy wording, not the law.
Article 7 lists the exclusions, and three of them are the ones an owner lending a boat should read twice. The compulsory policy does not pay for damage to the insured boat itself. It does not cover death or injury of the skipper. And it does not cover injury to passengers who paid for the trip. If your friend runs aground and the keel takes the blow, the compulsory cover owes you nothing: that is hull insurance, which is voluntary, and the hull policy is where the conditions on who may drive live.
Hull and extended liability policies are contracts, and each insurer writes its own. There is no public catalogue of clauses to cite, so we will not pretend there is. What we can give you is the questions whose answers decide everything. Ask them in writing and keep the reply.
One: does the hull cover apply when someone other than the named insured skippers the boat, and must that person hold a specific qualification? Two: is the cover different for a friend, a family member or a professional skipper you pay? Three: does lending the boat without payment count as “hire” or “charter”, which is usually excluded? Four: does the excess change when someone else is at the helm? Five: must you notify the insurer before each loan, and in what form?
Across the Channel the starting point is different. The Royal Yachting Association wrote in June 2025 that having boat insurance “is not always a legal requirement” in the UK, and that many marinas, harbours and inland waterways require third-party liability cover as a minimum. With no compulsory baseline there is no article 1.1 to fall back on: what follows the borrowed boat is what the policy says. The five questions apply unchanged.
At The Seafolk, members open dates on their own boat and spend the Knots they earn aboard another member’s boat. Insurance is the condition the whole idea stands on, so we are precise. There is no policy in force and no signed agreement with any insurer. Our Terms say so in binding text, and no exchange is covered by one. For that reason bareboat exchanges, where you sail another member’s boat yourself, are closed.
Two things are open. Time aboard in port without sailing, with the boat at its berth. And exchanges with a professional skipper, in which the skipper, not the guest, is in charge of the boat. In Spain that skipper is a person authorised by the owner in the sense of article 1.1, so the compulsory liability cover applies; the hull and anything above the legal minimum depend on the owner’s own policy, which is why the five questions are part of opening dates. The day there is a policy, it will be said in the Terms and here at the same time.
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