Everyone knows Florida's insurance story. Almost everyone has it wrong.The familiar version goes like this: insurance companies are the villains, homeowners are the victims, and fixing the villains fixes the problem. It is a satisfying story. It is also the reason the crisis keeps coming back. Don Brown spent four decades in Florida's insurance market and eight years in the Legislature writing the laws that govern it. He has sat on both sides of the table, and he opens this book with a 1936 obituary, because the story starts further back than most people think. Below Deck is about the engine room. The part of the ship nobody photographs, where the actual work happens and the actual failures begin. Rate suppression, reinsurance, assignment of benefits, catastrophe modeling, and the slow migration of risk from people who priced it to people who didn't know they were carrying it. This is a memoir and an argument at the same time. It names what went wrong, why the usual fixes don't hold, and what a durable market would require of everyone involved, including the people who don't want to hear it. The problem is real. The tools exist. The time is now.