There is a number in every charter contract that people skim past until the moment they hand over a credit card at the base, and then it stops being abstract. The security deposit. On a French bareboat it can be anything from a couple of thousand euros to five thousand or more, and it sits as a hold on your card for the whole week. Understand it before you book and you can manage your exposure cheaply. Ignore it and you either tie up half your credit limit or pay too much for peace of mind.
I have made both mistakes. Here is how the money actually works, and how I now decide what to take.
What the deposit is and what it covers
The security deposit is the charter company's protection against you damaging or losing part of the boat. On a French charter it typically runs between 2,000 and 5,000 euros, scaling with the size and value of the boat. It is normally taken as a pre-authorisation hold on a credit card rather than a charge, so the money is not spent, it is frozen, and you cannot use that headroom for anything else until it is released.
If you return the boat clean, the hold drops off, though it can take a few days to clear depending on your bank. If you damage something, the base assesses the cost and deducts it from the deposit, returning the balance. The deposit is, in effect, your excess, the amount you are personally on the hook for before the boat's own insurance takes over.
That last point matters. The boat carries hull insurance, but it has a large deductible, and your deposit is that deductible. Lose the tender, bend a prop, drag onto rocks, and the boat's policy pays for the big repair while your deposit covers the excess. So the practical question is never whether the boat is insured. It is how much of the excess you are willing to carry yourself.
The damage waiver: buying down the deposit
Almost every French base offers a damage waiver, sometimes called a deposit reduction. You pay a fee at the base, and in return the held deposit shrinks.
The numbers are worth knowing. A waiver usually costs somewhere between 150 and 300 euros for a week. On one Lagoon 42 I priced for the 2026 season, a 250 euro waiver cut the held deposit from a far larger figure to 1,000 euros. So for 250 euros you reduce your worst-case loss by several thousand and free up the credit headroom for the week.
Whether that is good value depends on the boat and your nerve. On a small monohull with a modest deposit I sometimes skip it and carry the risk. On a catamaran, where the deposit is high and a single scuffed hull or damaged davit is an expensive repair, I take the waiver every time. I went through the catamaran-specific costs in chartering a catamaran in France, and the deposit is one of the biggest reasons a cat costs more to charter than a monohull of the same length.
Read the waiver's small print, though. It reduces the deposit; it rarely takes it to zero. And it usually does not cover everything: loss of the tender and outboard, fouled propellers, grounding, and damage from negligence are commonly excluded or only partly covered. The waiver lowers your ceiling, it does not remove it.
The third option: bring your own excess insurance
Here is the trick that frequent charterers use and bases do not advertise. You can buy a standalone charter excess policy from an independent insurer, often for a fraction of the base's waiver fee, that reimburses you for any deposit deductions up to a set limit.
The way it works is simple. You still hand over the full deposit hold at the base. If they deduct for damage at check-out, you claim that amount back from your own insurer afterwards. An annual policy covering multiple charters can cost less than a single base waiver, which makes it a clear win if you charter more than once a year. The catch is cash flow: you must be able to float the full deposit on your card, because the base deals only with you, not your insurer, and you reclaim later.
For a single one-week charter where the base waiver is reasonably priced, the convenience of the base option often wins. For anyone chartering repeatedly, a standalone policy is usually the cheaper route over a season.
How to keep the deposit in your pocket
The cheapest insurance of all is not getting charged. Most of the disputes I have seen come down to two failures: no record of the boat's condition at the start, and no signed clean-return at the end.
Fix the first at check-in. Walk the inventory slowly, photograph every existing scratch and stain with the base hand present, and get the marks written on the inventory before you sign. Fix the second at check-out by getting a signed sheet confirming the boat came back undamaged with no claims against you. Without that paper, a base can in theory raise a claim after you have flown home and quietly hold part of your deposit, and arguing from another country is hard. I laid out the whole handover routine in the charter check-in and check-out process, and the documentation discipline there is what protects the money discussed here.
The other rule: if something breaks mid-charter, phone the base straight away. Reported promptly, normal failures are usually covered. Discovered at check-out, or made worse by a DIY repair, they come out of your deposit.
What is not your deposit's problem
It helps to know where your liability stops. The boat's hull and third-party insurance, carried by the charter company, handles the genuinely large events: a serious grounding that holes the hull, a collision, storm damage at anchor. Your deposit is the excess on those claims, not the whole bill, which is why even a frightening incident rarely costs you more than the deposit ceiling.
Personal liability and your own crew are a different matter and not covered by the boat at all. The deposit protects the boat, not you. A separate travel or personal-accident policy covering the crew, medical repatriation, and trip cancellation is a sensible companion to the charter, and it is cheap relative to the holiday. Check whether your existing annual travel insurance already extends to sailing as skipper or crew, because many policies quietly exclude it or cap it, and a charter skipper assuming standard cover can be unpleasantly surprised after an injury aboard.
It is also worth confirming the charter contract's position on named extra skippers. If a second person on the crew will take the helm and you have declared only one skipper, an incident on their watch can complicate a claim. Declaring co-skippers at booking, with their certificates, costs nothing and closes that gap.
What I do now
Before booking, I find the deposit figure in the contract, not the headline price, because that is the number my card has to carry. If it is high, which it always is on a catamaran, I either take the base waiver for a single trip or, if I am chartering more than once that year, buy a standalone excess policy and float the deposit myself.
Then at the boat I photograph everything, test every system, and refuse to leave at the end without a signed clean-return. Do that and the deposit becomes what it should be: a frozen number that quietly thaws a few days after you get home. The licence and competence side, which the base also checks before any of this, is covered in bareboat charter in France and the licence rules. Sort the paperwork, manage the deposit, and the rest of the charter is just sailing.
