A medical kit is the one piece of safety gear you hope to open only to find a plaster. But the day you need more than a plaster, an hour offshore with a deep cut or a crew member in real pain, the contents of that box stop being a tick-box and become the difference between a manageable afternoon and a frightening one. Cruising French waters adds a regulatory layer on top of plain seamanship, and it pays to understand both the rule and the reality.
The legal floor: Division 240
France regulates leisure boat safety under Division 240, the order of 6 May 2019. It scales requirements by how far from a shelter you go, and the medical kit follows that ladder. The categories are basique within 2 nautical miles, cotier within 6, hauturier beyond 6. Crucially, a first aid kit only becomes legally mandatory once you go beyond 6 nautical miles from a shelter, in the so-called semi-offshore and offshore zones.
That threshold catches people out in two directions. Sail your boat within 6 miles all season and France does not legally require any first aid kit at all, which is a daft thing to take literally. Cross that 6 mile line, even briefly to round a headland or reach an island, and you are legally obliged to carry a compliant kit. The items inside it must always be in date; an expired box fails inspection and, more importantly, fails you. The Gendarmerie Maritime can and do check.
You can buy a ready-made Division 240 compliant kit, a coastal pharmacie de bord, from any French chandler, and for the purely legal box it is the simplest route. The Plastimo and Ocean Safety coastal kits are the common choices, sized for the under-6-mile and 6-to-60-mile bands, and they come pre-stamped as compliant so an inspecting officer is satisfied at a glance. But the legal box and the box a thinking cruiser actually wants are not the same thing.
It is worth being clear about who the rules apply to. Division 240 governs boats using French waters, and as a visiting foreign-flagged boat the picture is nuanced: your home-flag equipment requirements travel with you, but French authorities expect a reasonable standard of safety gear and the medical kit is part of that conversation. The pragmatic answer is simple. Carry a kit that meets the Division 240 distance band you are actually sailing in, keep it in date, and you sidestep any argument on the pontoon while also being properly equipped. Trying to lawyer your way out of carrying a first aid kit offshore is a strange hill to die on.
Where the regulation stops thinking
Division 240 sets a minimum. It assumes you can reach shore or call for help quickly, which along most of the French coast is true, given how close the French coastguard VHF cover sits. But a minimum kit is built for someone else's worst case, not yours. It will not contain the medicine your crew actually take, it will not cover the specific risks of your cruise, and it will not include the things that matter most when you are an hour or two from a doctor.
So I treat the compliant kit as the legal base and build a real kit on top of it. Think in layers: the legal minimum, then the everyday stuff you reach for weekly, then the serious gear for the day it all goes wrong, then the personal medicines no shop can supply.
What I actually carry
After enough seasons, my kit has settled into something like this, kept in a sealed waterproof box clipped within reach of the companionway, not buried in a locker under the spare warps.
- Wound care that goes beyond plasters: steri-strips and skin closures, a couple of sterile non-adherent dressings, a proper crepe bandage, a triangular bandage, surgical tape, antiseptic, and a pair of tweezers and good scissors.
- A burn dressing or two, because the galley is statistically your most dangerous place aboard, more than the foredeck.
- Painkillers in range, from paracetamol and ibuprofen up to something stronger your GP will prescribe for a serious injury offshore, plus an antihistamine for stings and allergic reactions.
- Seasickness remedies, the single most-used item on any passage. I carry both cinnarizine tablets, which take two to five hours to work, and for long crossings a scopolamine patch, which gives up to three days of cover. More on this in my piece on seasickness on a Biscay crossing.
- The boring essentials: a digital thermometer, disposable gloves, rehydration salts, sunscreen, and any over-the-counter remedies for stomach upsets and infections that the French pharmacy would sell you anyway.
The medicines no kit comes with
The most important contents are the ones unique to your crew. Prescription medicines, the inhaler, the EpiPen, the blood thinners, the contraceptive pill. Carry enough to outlast the whole cruise plus a comfortable margin, because refilling a UK-specific drug in a small French port is not guaranteed and French pharmacists dispense by generic molecule, not UK brand. Keep a written list of every regular medication with its generic name and dose, stored with the ship's papers, so a doctor or pharmacist ashore can read it. The practicalities of refills and consultations are in my notes on seeing a doctor in a French port.
Keep it usable, not just present
A kit is only as good as your ability to open it under stress. Two habits make the difference.
First, organise and label. Group wound care together, medicines together, and put a simple index card on the lid. When a crew member is bleeding and you are heeled over in a lumpy sea, you do not want to be reading the back of every box.
Second, learn the basics. A first aid course aimed at sailors, ideally one that covers being hours from help, is worth more than any expensive kit. Knowing how to close a wound, manage a burn, recognise the signs of a serious problem, and decide whether to press on or call for help, that is the real medical equipment. The box just holds the supplies.
Match the kit to the cruise, not the rulebook
The 6-mile threshold is a legal line, not a medical one. Your real risk is set by how far you are from competent help in time, not in distance. An hour off a busy stretch of the Cote d'Azur with a lifeboat station nearby is a very different exposure from the same hour off a thinly populated Atlantic coast in a rising sea. Build your kit for your worst realistic case, not the average day.
For a passage that takes you genuinely offshore, the kit needs to grow. Think about the things that matter when help is a long way off: a means of immobilising a limb, a way to control serious bleeding, more substantial pain relief that you have discussed with your GP in advance, and enough dressings to manage a wound for a day or more rather than an hour. A few worked scenarios concentrate the mind. A galley scald on day two of a Biscay crossing. A finger half severed by a winch. A crew member who cannot stop vomiting and is sliding into dehydration. If your kit and your knowledge handle those, the coastal pottering takes care of itself.
I also keep a laminated card of the key emergency contacts and call procedure with the kit, not separately, so the box that holds the bandages also tells me who to call and how. When you are stressed and one-handed, having the medical supplies and the emergency information in the same place is a small thing that pays off.
Check it every spring
I go through the whole kit at the start of each season, before the first proper passage. Throw out anything expired, top up what got used, replace the seasickness stock, and confirm the prescription medicines have enough life on them for the cruise ahead. It takes half an hour and it is the cheapest insurance aboard. A Division 240 kit ticks the legal box. A kit you have built, learned, and keep current is the one that actually looks after your crew when the nearest green cross is two hours and a rising sea away.
