Tender Operations: Where Guest Days Go Wrong

Here is an uncomfortable truth the brochures never print: on a well-run yacht, the mothership is statistically close to harmless. The 50 metre with its professional bridge, its redundancy, and its 12 knots of stately progress almost never injures a guest. The tender is another animal entirely: an open boat, often capable of 40-plus knots, driven by the youngest qualified person aboard, loaded with guests who have had lunch and wine, operating off beaches and swim platforms. Every serious guest injury I have dealt with or reviewed in thirty years happened within fifty metres of a tender. The good news is that the failure points are few, known, and boringly preventable.

Failure point one is the transfer, mothership to tender and back, which produces more injuries than everything else combined. The dangerous cocktail is a moving swim platform, a moving tender, a guest in deck shoes with a phone in one hand, and a crew member too polite to give orders. My standing procedure is rigid: tender made fast fore and aft or held firm on power, one crew in the tender and one on the platform, guests board one at a time, hands free, bags passed separately, and a crew hand gripped wrist-to-wrist for every single guest regardless of age or athletic self-image. The day a principal's 28-year-old son waves off the hand is the day you say, pleasantly and immovably, that it is the boat's rule, not an assessment of him.

Failure point two is loading and trim, because tenders leave the yacht legal and arrive at the beach overloaded. A 7 metre RIB rated for ten persons is rated for ten sober persons in calm water, not ten guests plus beach bags, paddleboards, a cool box, and the spaniel. I cap guest numbers below the plate rating as a matter of policy, run two trips rather than one heavy one, and brief the deckhands that the second trip is never an apology, it is the standard. Nobody has ever complained about a five-minute wait. People complain at length, and through lawyers, about a swamped bow at the surf line.

Failure point three is the beach itself. A beach landing in any swell is the most demanding boat handling a junior crew member will do all season, and we hand it to them as if it were parking. Bow-to in surf, guests stepping off into moving water, the next set arriving while someone's grandmother is mid-thigh-deep and off balance: this is where wrists, ankles, and hips get broken. Where there is any meaningful shore break I either find a leeward landing, anchor off and swim the capable guests in, or cancel the beach and own the decision. The itinerary is not in command of the boat. That sentence has ended several arguments aboard, and it is worth what it costs.

Failure point four is speed and showmanship. Guests ask the deckhand to make it fun, the deckhand is 23, and the combination writes its own incident report: spinal compression injuries from slamming at speed are among the most common serious tender claims, and they happen to the guest sitting forward, not to the driver standing aft with bent knees. My boats run a posted tender speed policy, guest seating forward of the console only at displacement speeds in chop, kill cord worn without exception, and a blanket prohibition on wake jumping and beach buzzing. I tell the crew plainly: the guests will forget the fast ride by dinner, and remember the helicopter evacuation forever.

Failure point five is the water around the tender. Propellers and swimmers must never share water, which sounds obvious until cocktail hour at a crowded anchorage with guests dropping off the platform while the tender returns from shore. Engines are off, not in neutral, off, whenever swimmers are within range of the stern, and the swim zone and tender lane are physically separated, with the inflatable toys anchored on the opposite side from the tender approach. At night, add navigation lights checked before sunset, a handheld VHF and spotlight in the boat, lifejackets worn rather than stowed, and a hard rule about the driver drinking: zero, all season, no folklore exceptions.

None of this works as a memo, it only works as training, and training is where owners can actually see the difference between a crew and a payroll. On my boats, every tender driver does documented familiarisation on each hull, man-overboard recovery drills monthly, a beach-landing assessment with the mate before carrying guests, and a five-minute brief before every guest run covering load, route, weather, and contingencies. Total cost across a season is perhaps two crew-days of time. The alternative is explaining to an insurer why an unlogged driver was doing 35 knots in a busy anchorage, a conversation in which the policy's crew-training warranties suddenly become very legible.

Owners should ask exactly three questions to audit all of this in five minutes. Who is allowed to drive the tenders, and where is that written. When was the last man-overboard drill, and is it logged. What is the rule about swimmers and engines. A captain with crisp answers runs the kind of boat where the tender is what it should be: the best part of every guest day, the thing the grandchildren talk about at Christmas. Vague answers mean the gap between a perfect season and a casualty report is currently being managed by luck, and luck, in my experience, keeps poor logbooks.