Not everyone cruising France wants a keelboat and a fortnight. Plenty of us tour the Riviera the fast, light way: a RIB or an open day-boat, out at nine, lunch on the hook in a turquoise cove, back to the berth by sunset. I keep a 6.5 metre RIB on the Var coast for exactly this, and the Cote d'Azur is arguably the best day-boating coastline in Europe. It is also one of the most heavily regulated, and getting the rules wrong is now genuinely expensive. Here is how to do it well.
The coast in a day's range
The glory of the Cote d'Azur for a day-boat is that the scenery is packed tight. You do not need long passages to reach the good stuff.
From a base around Cannes or Antibes, the Iles de Lerins sit barely two nautical miles offshore: Sainte-Marguerite and Saint-Honorat, two wooded islands with anchorages on their sheltered sides and water clear enough to see your anchor at five metres. From the Saint-Tropez side, the calanques and coves of the Massif des Maures and the Cap Camarat run for miles. Further east, Villefranche-sur-Mer has one of the deepest natural bays on the coast and a gorgeous anchorage right under the old town. None of these is more than a short hop, which is exactly what a RIB is for.
A day-boater can comfortably string three or four anchorages into one outing. If you are thinking about the bigger touring picture along this coast, it is worth glancing at how the classic and wooden boats France crowd time their visits, because the autumn classic regattas fill these same bays and ports.
Fuel and range: the number that catches people out
A RIB is thirsty, and fuel discipline is the difference between a great day and a long drift waiting for a tow.
A typical 6 to 7 metre RIB with a 150 to 200 horsepower outboard burns a lot at planing speed, often in the region of 30 to 50 litres an hour flat out, far less if you throttle back to a fast cruise. My rule is simple: never plan a day that uses more than half my tank on the outward leg, because wind and sea can double your consumption on the way home. Marine fuel berths on the Cote d'Azur are common but not everywhere, and in peak August they queue, so I fill up the evening before rather than burning daylight at the pump.
Diesel and petrol at French marina fuel berths track pump prices and are not cheap on the Riviera, so a planning day-boater works out the cost before setting off. The same range thinking that small-boat sailors use applies here, and it overlaps with the practicalities in cruising France in a boat under 8 metres, since most day-boats and RIBs sit comfortably in that under-8-metre bracket for berthing and slipway purposes.
Anchoring rules have changed, and they bite
This is the section to read twice, because the Cote d'Azur has tightened its anchoring rules sharply and the fines are real.
The driver is posidonia, the protected seagrass that carpets much of the seabed here and is vital to the marine ecosystem. Anchors dragging through it destroy meadows that take a century to recover, so France has restricted and in places banned anchoring over posidonia. Along the Provence and Cote d'Azur coast a series of prefectoral orders now prohibit anchoring over seagrass and, for larger vessels, in designated zones entirely. Penalties for damaging posidonia can run to many thousands of euros, and the maritime gendarmerie patrols actively in summer.
For a small day-boat the practical answer is to anchor only on clear sand, which shows up as pale patches against the darker grass in the clear water here, and to use the official apps and charts that map the seagrass zones. Many bays now also lay environmental mooring buoys you can pick up instead of anchoring. As a day-boater you are small enough to slip into a sand patch, but you must look first, every time. The same care that a careful solo skipper brings to single-handed cruising the French coast applies here: do the homework before you drop the hook, because the patrols are watching.
Launching, berthing and the slipway question
Day-boaters and RIB owners need somewhere to launch or keep the boat, and the Riviera makes you choose.
Public slipways exist but are busy and parking a car-and-trailer near the coast in August is a genuine ordeal. Many people keep their RIB on a swinging mooring, a dry-stack rack or a small berth instead. Dry-stack storage, where the boat is forklifted in and out on demand, has spread along this coast and is ideal for a RIB you use often, though it is not cheap in the smart ports. A trailer-sailer or trailable RIB owner should research the ramp situation before arriving, because not every marina welcomes trailer launching in season.
Berthing for a day-boat is the cheap end of an expensive coast. A small boat under 8 metres pays one of the lowest visitor bands, often 40 to 60 euros a night in a Riviera port where a superyacht is quoted thousands, so size genuinely works in your favour here.
Safety kit for an open boat
It is easy to treat a fast day-boat as a beach toy, but the maritime authorities do not, and neither should you. France's Division 240 sets the required safety equipment by distance from a safe haven, and it applies to a RIB exactly as it does to a yacht. Stay within 2 nautical miles of shelter and the list is light. Push beyond 6 nautical miles, which is easy to do on a fast boat chasing a distant cove, and you move into a category that demands far more kit.
What I never leave the berth without, even for a short hop:
- Lifejackets for everyone aboard, worn not stowed, because an open boat throws people out in a way a yacht does not.
- A handheld VHF, because the Riviera coast is covered by the CROSS coastguard and channel 16 is your lifeline if the engine dies offshore. Mobile signal drops behind the headlands.
- A kill cord clipped to the helm, the single most important item on any planing boat, because a driver thrown from the wheel leaves the boat circling under power.
- A means of getting back aboard from the water, a ladder or rope, which an open boat with high tubes badly needs.
The maritime gendarmerie does check, and being stopped offshore without the right kit for your distance from land is an expensive and embarrassing way to end a day.
August: read the weather and the crowds
Two things shape a Riviera summer: the mistral and the masses.
The mistral, the strong cold wind that funnels down the Rhone valley, can reach over 40 knots and kick up a vicious short sea with very little warning at deck level, and it makes open-boat day touring dangerous fast. I never set out on a day with a mistral in the forecast, however blue the sky looks at the dock, because a RIB is a wet, exposed and exhausting place in 35 knots. Check the bulletin every morning.
The crowds are the other reality. In August the popular anchorages off Saint-Tropez and the Lerins fill by mid-morning, the fuel berths queue and the slipways jam. My answer is to start early, be on the water by nine, take lunch in a cove before the day-tripper fleet arrives, and be heading home as everyone else is heading out.
Touring the Riviera by day-boat is the most concentrated, sun-soaked way to enjoy this coast, and a fast, shallow, nimble boat sees more of it in a day than a yacht does in three. Respect the seagrass, watch the wind, fuel up the night before, and the Cote d'Azur will give you the best day-boating of your life.
