When maritime risk is discussed, the conversation usually centres on incidents. Groundings, collisions, claims and losses naturally attract attention because they are documented, investigated and often costly.
Yet every industry contains another category of event that is far more difficult to see: the near miss. These are situations where conditions begin to develop but corrective action prevents damage from occurring. A vessel may start to move before additional chain is deployed. A deteriorating forecast may prompt a captain to relocate. An anchor watch may identify a developing situation before it becomes an incident. No damage occurs, no claim is filed and no formal investigation follows, yet a risk event has still taken place.
Different Parts of the Industry See Different Things
Professional captains experience near misses directly. They make operational decisions in response to changing weather, crowded anchorages, uncertain holding ground and vessel traffic. In many cases, successful intervention means an event never progresses beyond an operational concern.
From an insurance company perspective, however, visibility often begins much later. Claims records naturally focus on incidents that result in damage, liability or financial loss. Events that are successfully managed before consequences occur rarely enter the claims process. Neither perspective is incomplete; they simply observe different stages of the same risk cycle.
What the Survey Found
Our survey of professional captains puts some concrete numbers to this gap. 58% of captains reported experiencing at least one anchoring near miss, and 68% had experienced anchor drag at least once during a summer season. These are not marginal figures.
When captains were asked about contributing factors, 75% identified weather as a significant element, 60% pointed to poor holding conditions and 20% cited interference from a nearby vessel. These findings suggest that near misses are a routine feature of anchoring operations, not exceptional events.
Importantly, near misses often contain valuable lessons. They can reveal operational pressures, environmental conditions and decision-making challenges before those factors contribute to a more serious outcome.
A Perspective from Pantaenius
The findings do not surprise Michelle Van der Merwe, Superyacht Group Manager of Pantaenius Superyacht. “The figure is not particularly surprising, especially in heavily used Mediterranean cruising areas where seasonal weather patterns such as the Mistral in southern France and Sardinia and Meltemi conditions in Greece, combined with increasingly crowded anchorages, all contribute to heightened anchoring risk.”
At the same time, she notes that near misses remain largely invisible to insurance companies. “Survey data such as this provides valuable insight into an area of risk that is largely invisible to insurers.” The absence of claims does not necessarily indicate the absence of risk events. It may simply mean those events were successfully managed before damage occurred.
Why Near Misses Matter
Many safety-critical industries place significant emphasis on near-miss reporting because it allows organisations to learn before an accident occurs. Aviation is perhaps the best-known example. The superyacht industry faces unique challenges in this regard: near misses are often handled internally, crews change regularly, owner confidentiality is important and there is currently no universal anonymous reporting framework across the sector. As a result, valuable operational knowledge can remain fragmented.
Van der Merwe highlights the role organisations such as CHIRP (Confidential Human Factors Incident Reporting Programme) play in helping address this challenge through anonymised reporting and shared lessons learned.
Looking Beyond Claims
The purpose of examining near misses is not to suggest that anchoring incidents are more common than insurance companies believe, nor to challenge the validity of claims statistics. Rather, it is to recognise that different sources of information reveal different aspects of risk. Claims data provides visibility into consequences. Near misses provide visibility into developing situations. Survey data provides visibility into experiences. Together, they help create a broader understanding of anchoring risk than any one source alone can provide.
Next Article
Even when an incident does occur, another challenge emerges. How do we classify what actually happened, and can an anchoring event sometimes become something else entirely once it enters a reporting system?
About This Series (article 2/6)
This series combined perspectives from professional captains, industry survey data and Pantaenius insurance specialists to explore how anchoring risk is observed, recorded and understood across the superyacht sector. The objective was not to measure risk from a single viewpoint, but to examine how visibility changes depending on where you stand.
