The tender is the most underused boat in most fleets. People treat it as a wet taxi to the pontoon and back, when it is actually the thing that turns an anchorage from a parking spot into a place. The best days of my cruising life have happened in the dinghy, not the yacht: rowing into a creek the big boat could never reach, sailing a little dipping-lug tender round the anchorage with a child on the helm, beaching on a sandbar that dries at low water and walking on sand nobody else can get to.
This is about getting more out of the small boat. How to choose it, what it can do, and how to keep everyone safe doing it.
Choose the tender for what you actually want to do
A tender is always a compromise between three jobs: ferrying people and shopping, exploring, and stowing aboard the mother ship. The honest question is which of the three matters most to you, because no single dinghy wins all three.
- A rigid or RIB tender with an outboard is the workhorse. It planes, it carries a fortnight's provisioning, it punches through chop, and on the Cote d'Azur it is the standard. The downside is stowage; you tow it or you have davits.
- An inflatable rolls up and lives in a locker, which suits a smaller boat, but it rows like a wet mattress and hates a head sea.
- A nesting or sailing dinghy, a proper little hull that rows and sails, is the explorer's choice. It is more boat to stow, but it gives you a second sailing boat at every anchorage, which is a gift to anyone with children or a restless streak.
I have ended up, after years of inflatables, with a small sailing tender, and it has changed how we cruise. A dinghy that sails means the anchorage is never boring.
Exploring under oar and outboard
The real point of the tender is reaching what the yacht cannot. The deep-keeled cruising boat is anchored out in three or four metres; the dinghy draws a few inches and opens up everything inshore of that.
In Brittany and on the Atlantic coast, the huge tidal range is your friend here. At low water, sand and rock flats are exposed that you can land on, walk, and forage; I have written separately about foreshore foraging and the dinghy is how you reach the good ground. Time your trip with the tide: go in on a falling tide and you risk being left high, go in near low and ride the flood back out. A grounded dinghy on a falling spring tide is a long, muddy wait.
Rivers and creeks are the other reward. The dinghy will take you miles up an estuary the yacht stops at, past oyster beds and up to villages with a pontoon and a bar. Take the oars even if you have an outboard, because creeks are shallow, props foul on weed, and rowing the last stretch is half the pleasure. An outboard of 4 to 6 horsepower is plenty for a family tender; bigger just burns more fuel and is heavier to lift off the transom.
Beaches that face a road are crowded; beaches that face only the sea are yours. The dinghy lets you land on the best landing beaches reachable only from the water. Come in slow, watch for swimmers in the yellow-buoyed zones (boats are banned inside them), and drag the dinghy well up the sand with an anchor set, because a rising tide will float and steal an unsecured tender quietly while you are up the beach.
Sailing the tender: the cheapest fun afloat
If your dinghy sails, use it. A small sailing tender is the best toy in the anchorage and a genuinely useful skill-builder. My children learned to sail in the tender, going round and round the anchored yacht in a force two, with me watching from the cockpit with a coffee. There is no lower-stakes way to put a child on a helm: the water is warm, the shore is close, and the worst that happens is a capsize and a swim.
For adults it is a quiet pleasure too. Sailing a little open boat around a sheltered bay at sunset, no engine, no schedule, reconnects you with why you went sailing in the first place. The Gulf of Morbihan and the sheltered Glenan archipelago anchorages are made for it: protected water, somewhere to aim for, and almost always a breeze.
Fishing, swimming and foraging from the tender
The dinghy multiplies everything else you do at anchor. It is a fishing platform that reaches water the yacht cannot: paddle it over a shallow reef or into a creek mouth and drop a string of feathers, and you are into mackerel fishing for the family without ever lifting the yacht's anchor. Cuttlefish and squid, worked on light tackle close to the bottom, are if anything easier from a low, quiet tender than from the high topsides of a cruising boat.
It is a swimming base too. Anchor the dinghy off a beach the yacht cannot approach, and you have a floating step from which the children can swim ashore in safety, with an adult and a boat right there. The same low freeboard that makes a tender easy to swamp makes it easy to climb back into from the water, which matters more than people think when you are tired and cold.
And it is how you forage. Land the dinghy on a low-tide flat, set its anchor well up the sand, and walk out for cockles, clams, and razor fish, or work the rocks for mussels and winkles. The tender carries the bucket, the rake, and the catch home. Just watch the tide turning under you, because a foraging trip that runs long ends with a half-mile wade back to a stranded dinghy.
Stowing and launching without a fight
The unglamorous reality of tender life is getting the thing on and off the boat without losing your temper. An inflatable that rolls into a locker is a five-minute pumping job each time, which sounds trivial until you are doing it twice a day. Davits make a RIB instantly available but add weight aft and windage, and they are no use in a following sea where a pooping wave can fill the dinghy. Towing is simplest of all in settled weather, on a bridle with a long painter so the tender rides a wave behind you, but you must shorten right up in harbour and never tow on passage in anything lumpy, because a tender full of water becomes a sea anchor that can foul your prop or part the painter.
Whatever you choose, fit a decent painter, a good anchor and warp for the dinghy itself, and a way to lock the outboard, because tender and outboard theft from marinas is common enough that insurers ask about it. Mark the dinghy with the mother ship's name so a found, drifted tender finds its way back to you.
Safety, because the tender is where complacency lives
More cruising accidents happen in the dinghy than on the yacht, precisely because people relax. The tender feels trivial and it is not: it is a small, low, overloadable open boat, often handled at night, often after a drink ashore.
The rules that keep us out of trouble:
- Lifejackets in the dinghy, every time, for everyone. This is non-negotiable for children and a good idea for adults. Cold water shock is a real killer below 15C, and Brittany water sits between 15C and 19C even in summer, so a capsize is not just a laugh.
- A kill cord on the outboard, worn, so a fall does not leave a runaway boat circling its swimmer.
- Do not overload it. The maximum-persons plate is not a suggestion. A swamped tender between the yacht and the beach at night is a genuine emergency.
- Carry a bailer, a torch after dark, and the oars even when the outboard is on, because outboards die at the worst moment.
- Tell someone aboard where you are going and when you will be back, the same passage-planning discipline you would use for the yacht.
The dinghy is freedom, but it is still a boat at sea. Treat it like one and it will give you the best parts of the cruise: the creek nobody else reaches, the child's first solo sail, the empty beach at low water. A tender that only goes to the pontoon and back is a wasted boat.
