It's 30 seconds. Bad storm, I can hold my breath and hope for the best, for 30 seconds. An oil tanker is large so the waves and wind have more to push on, and it's staying there longer than 30 seconds. That's the part you keep missing, you're there for only 30 seconds. There's tons of ships that go threw storms just fine. Also you get 50 skip days, so if you know there's a bad tropical storm somewhere and you don't want to risk it, just skip it. But even if there's a hurricane going over Florida, statistically you're just going to end up in the Pacific ocean somewhere since that's the largest body of water. The pacific is ~30% of the earths surface. It's got more surface area than Mars.