You're safest on the water when you and your boat are seaworthy

BoatU.S. provides marine insurance coverage to 250,000 American powerboaters and sailors, which makes its collection of claims reports one of the world's largest archives of boating accidents. For more than 20 years, as writer and editor of BoatU.S.'s quarterly publication Seaworthy, Bob Adriance has sifted and analyzed this rich trove to discover and highlight the profound lessons it contains.

Here is the ultimate boater's guide to preventing, responding to, and surviving accidents under power or sail, including hurricane damage, lightning strikes, collisions, fires, groundings, sinkings, crew overboard, dismastings, and more.

Experience may be the best teacher, but the lessons are a lot less painful when the experience is someone else's. Here is a unique opportunity to use other skippers' misfortunes to make your own boat and seamanship safer.

A boaters' guide as important and practical as any I've read. And if you can ignore the occasional frisson of guilty pleasure, one that's as engrossing to read as The Perfect Storm.-Tony Gibbs, yachting writer, editor, and novelist

Hair-raising disasters, hard facts, and helpful advice; Seaworthy is a compendium of no-nonsense information on avoiding problems that only a marine insurer could provide. Invaluable for the boater, builder, designer, and surveyor.-Dave Gerr, director, Westlawn Institute of Tecnology; author of The Nature of Boats and The Elements of Boat Strength