Unfortunately, there is the risk of losing a lot of pots so it is a good idea to be insured so that if you do lose all of your pots you may still be able to continue the game. To try and make money even faster, you could choose not to be insured but if the weather is bad and you lose pots you may find you can't pay your bills at the end of the week.
You should plough a lot of your profits back into the pots and only keep just enough cash to pay your bills. Don't worry too much about not leaving enough - if you don't have enough cash to pay your bills the computer will sell some of your pots to raise the money for you.
Using this method you often end up with a lot of pots. You can use this to your advantage by selling some of them after very bad weather as they will fetch a high price - probably much more than you paid for them.
Most of the time you should place a large proportion of your pots inshore where they are relatively safe. This means you don't make as much money, but you won't need to buy replacement pots as often.
These two methods are the extremes of the game and you will probably find that a compromise of the two is most effective. Experiment with different tactics and see which ones work and which don't. The computer players all have different temperaments - Player 1 is the most cautious and Player 4 is the most extrovert. To see which tactics do best try watching all the computer players playing against each other and use the graphs to view their progress.