The Modern Yacht Tender as Mini Salvage Vessel
Helping boats in distress is part of the unwritten code of cruising. Whether it’s a grounded vessel or a tow in rough conditions, knowing how to assist safely can make all the difference. These hard-earned lessons offer practical guidance for real-world situations on the water.
Key Takeaways
- Assisting other vessels is common in cruising life
- Preparation and technique matter more than brute force
- Dinghy choice and setup can impact safety and success
- Towing and anchoring require careful planning to avoid accidents
Here’s the truth: if you’re a moderately active, physically-healthy cruising sailor with a normal dose of compassion—you’re going to have to repeatedly help your fellow yachtsmen in highly dangerous and difficult ways.
I don’t mean, like, once or twice. I mean dozens of times. I’ve assisted, in ways large and small, hundreds of mariners in distress during my 65 years of living aboard and ocean sailing.
Of course, assisting a boat that’s run aground in the intercoastal waterway during daylight isn’t usually too big of a deal—assisting that same vessel pounding in heavy surf on a reef in the Southern Ocean at night… Well, that can be a whole ‘nother kettle of fish.
“What does ‘helping’ mean? Sometimes, it’s only standing-by to reassure. Other times it is taking passengers off the stricken vessel. Occasionally, it can be pushing the stricken vessel with the bow of the dinghy. But the most common task is either attempting to tow the grounded vessel off via a tow line—and/or running out an anchor into deep water so the vessel can kedge itself off with its powerful windlass.
Since I’ve done this many, many times in a wide variety of craft, here are some pros and cons learned the hard way.
In a Rowboat:
Rowboats have numerous advantages—often they’re first on the scene if the distance is small. Another plus is that the rowboat has no prop to catch or cut anchor rodes, fish nets, or tow lines—nor to run over swimmers. (On St. Pete’s beach in the early ‘60s I saw a swimmer filleted open by ‘prop rash’ from the back of his skull to his buttocks—a sickening, truly sickening sight.) Getting hit in the head by an oar tip as you surface from inspecting the reef/hull damage is usually an annoyance, not a one-way trip to the morgue.
However, it is almost impossible to exert much pulling-power with a rowing dinghy.
Yes, I have rowed my engineless 22-foot, Corina, and my engineless Hughes 38, Wild Card, numerous times with my dinghy in still water. But exerting a major pull is an entirely different matter than maintaining a slight tug on the line with enough pressure to allow the towed vessel to drift through the water in a consistent direction.
At first, in fact, it appears as if the oars are doing nothing. Keep at it. Put your back into it. Don’t use your arms, use your buttocks and legs. Stay the course! And eventually, sans wind and current, even a 20,000-pound vessel will follow docilely, like a sledge being pulled by an ant.
And rowing tenders can be useful for passing Nylon rodes/towlines out to larger vessels in deep water that can pull with good effect.
Here are the disadvantages of using a rowing dinghy to lend assistance in an emergency: One, they’re tippy. Two, they’re hard fiberglass or wood, which means that they can severely damage the hull and smash your fingers. Three, oars are clumsy in a spiderweb of lines or while being crushed between the stricken vessel and a dozen other small craft attempting to help. Four, vessels that row well tend to have very little buoyancy aft—so hoisting a heavy or stuck anchor off the bottom is out of the question. Five, things can get ugly quick—as anyone in a rigid tender that’s been inadvertently pulled under the counter of a hobby-horsing vessel will attest. Six, once a rowboat gets muddy, it gets extremely slippery and the danger quadruples.
Now here’s a basic truism of all ‘towing off or kedging off’ situations—you don’t pull a line out from the stricken vessel in a rowboat, you take the line and its anchor in the small boat and then ‘pay it out’ as you move away. This not only allows you to get the kedge anchor the max distance away from the grounded vessel, but its exact placement is easier as well.
It is impossible to ‘pull out chain’ but it isn’t impossible to ‘pay out’ chain as you row away if you can control its escape!
From 1977 to 1989 I had only a ten-foot (a lovely George Lawley design) rowing dinghy while ocean-sailing on my self-constructed Endurance 36, Carlotta. Why? For numerous reasons—one, I was broke; two, I liked the exercise, and three, it allowed me to sail across oceans with my wife and (eventual) child without carrying explosive gasoline aboard.
Here’s how I’d typically ‘tow out an anchor’ from a grounded vessel:
First off, I took my time preparing so that the time I spent actually accomplishing the goal was as brief as possible. Example: I prepared the anchor to ‘flip’ into the water versus being lifted and tossed, because this is extremely time consuming when the weight of the rode is yanking you back towards the stricken vessel.
Second, I’d have them give me the entire nylon rode (or, god forbid, pile of chain) and place it aft in the dinghy (so that if it got away from me, it wouldn’t whip me in, say, in the head).
Bear in my mind that it is easy to injure or kill yourself while playing such games.
Third, I’d place the rode to be paid out in the deep notch I’ve cut in my dinghy’s teak transom—and use my Topsider-clad foot as a friction clutch jammed against the athwartship front bulkhead of my aft thwart.
This would allow me not only to control the line feed speed as I rowed away—but its tension as well. (Adding a little tension can keep it from fouling coral heads just beneath the surface.)
Hint: Don’t use all your energy early, as the end of the process is the most difficult under oars.
Once I have rowed to where I want to be, I take away my foot, take a final stroke on my oars, and tip over the anchor into the water—all at the same time.
This is dangerous—but often necessary. Is there a chance of severe injury? Yes. But if you want to circumnavigate numerous times as I have—you’ve probably already decided whether you’re a man or a mouse.
I’m a man—a stooooooopid man, sometimes; and a man with more balls than brains often; but that’s what I am… even at the age of seventy-three and counting.
Oh—before I forget: a notch in the transom can be marvelous—adding a rubber trailer roller to that notch can be perfection. My friend Larry has a light ten-foot plywood tender called the Vicar of Bray. It has a tiny foredeck. Under that foredeck Larry keeps a small, detachable plank with a bow roller at one end that projects slightly over the bow—and self-hooks into the foredeck’s aft bulkhead. Thus, Larry can use his ten-footer almost as a tugboat after hurricanes to help his beached friends.
One of the coolest, most creative ideas along these lines is a Kiwi sailor who would flop-out a pre-measured car mat over the bow of his inflatable. This thick plastic car mat not only had a roller chock (riveted in place, to lessen abrasion) forward—and three pre-arranged shock cords to hold it in place at the bow towing ring and aft on two sides.
This looked totally stupid and worked amazingly well!
What about a small tender with an outboard?
Outboards on the transom are a mixed blessing. Not only do they delight in wrapping nylon rodes in their blades—they also enjoy breaking their shear pins as the straight-hanging chain comes in contact with a spinning prop.
If my (long suffering) wife Carolyn is there to help, I often steer my tender backwards while she pays out the rode from the bow. This keeps the nylon cordage or chain away from the prop—while only lessening the outboard’s pulling power a bit. (Yes, my 2 HP Tohatsu doesn’t have reverse—I just spin and hold at 180 degrees… making sure it doesn’t flip the dinghy while at ninety-degrees.)
Bigger Boats, say 22-foot T-tops: Since these boats can pull so well in the hands of an experienced seaman, they are of great value—but in the hands of your average American half-drunk, stinkpotting throttle-jockey… well, not so much.
Which brings us to Towing Posts. Tugboats can ably assist freighters not only because of their massive pulling/pushing power, but because their prop is aft of their towing post. The physics of this is vital to understand.
A vessel with a tow post forward of its prop can always manage the angle it wants to be at whether it is moving through the water or not.
This is much safer and a huge towing advantage.
Most boats don’t have towing posts—so ‘throw me a line’ type rescues often consist of a powerboat taking a strain on the tossed line and its prop wash slowly ‘walking’ the vessel sidewise onto the reef.
Oops.
What about towing bridles for towing vessels without towing posts? Well, they can help a lot in open water while towing in a straight line—but they don’t do much in close quarters. Anyone who has tried to tow a large vessel from a small one knows the problem—the dinghy pulls strongly to whichever side of the outboard (prop, really) the tow line is on.
Bridles work best with a single snatch block on the tow line—that way it slides effortlessly rather than rachet/jumps.
One quick & dirty semi-solution is to put a circle of line around the entire (well-clamped) outboard—and arrange it so that line doesn’t damage the gasoline hose or shifting lever.
Don’t forget inertia! I’ve seen this happen a dozen times. A light towboat or small dinghy tows a heavy sailboat into the harbor at six knots—and stops just before an open slip. The 20,000 lb sailboat doesn’t slow at all—just smashes into the towboat… and, well, anything else extremely expensive that happens to be in the area.
Note: never ever accept a towline and put its splice over your bitts. This can’t be released under pressure—and you’ve just given command of your vessel to someone else. If you’re handed a tow line with a splice, just choke a couple of feet and tie it off. Now, you can cast it off instead of watching in utter horror as you’re savagely yanked into a fleet of expensive Fabergé eggs!
…or towed under a bridge!
Swimming?
Can an anchor be swam out? No. It’s almost always too heavy. But if the bottom is sandy and shallow, it can be s-l-o-w-l-y dragged five or six feet at a time by a snorkeler walking backwards on a sandy bottom. This takes forever—and unless there are two or three divers taking turns, is almost impossible.
On my second circumnavigation, while crossing the Pacific where sailors from the US and Australia often drag anchor in the deep anchorages of Polynesia, I carried a dedicated aluminum anchor with 300 feet of braided 3/8th inch nylon. (Don’t use twisted three-strand, it always hockles under extreme load.)
With this dedicated anchor set up, I could place the anchor quickly and run it back to the stricken vessel in moments, before the boat in the breaking surf could wedge itself further up the reef. Seconds count! And you’d be amazed how well this light tackle can hold in firm sand.
What’s the bottom line?
The best (if imperfect) solution/tender is, in my humble opinion, a RIB.
They are stable and have tremendous buoyancy. Plus, they are roomy. Even better, they don’t damage the stricken vessel (or its self-steering gear) further.
Those are the pluses—cancelled out by these negatives: There’s nothing to tie-to that won’t rip away. Anchors are often sharp and the rusty chain is highly abrasive—and inflatable boats are just expensive bits of rubber-impregnated fabric. (Moused bow shackles and D-shackles with jagged cotter pins can be as sharp as scalpels!)
So, here’s the reality—if you go to help a hapless vessel that has just sailed onto a reef, you’re probably gonna damage your inflatable. I have, many times.
…nobody said being a Good Samaritan would be cheap or easy.
If time is really of the essence and I’m on the brand-new Caribe 10.5’s that I begrudging buy every 12 years or so, I have the stricken vessel’s anchor lowered to the surface of the water. Then, from the bow of the inflatable, I pass a light line through the anchor’s shackle. I then (if an all-line rode) tow (in reverse) that underwater anchor out to blue water as its rode is paid out (they often jam, alas) by the foredeck crew of the grounded vessel until my dinghy is in place.
Then, I put a major strain on the rode to straighten and stretch it as much as possible and then cast off one end of the restraining line that I had put through the anchor’s shackle.
It drops to the bottom without ever having been in my dinghy.
With luck, I’ve quickly placed the anchor in deep water with more than 7-to-1 scope without slicing my dinghy to ribbons… or even getting myself dirty.
However, to be honest, most of the time I either badly damage my dinghy or, at minimum, dirty it up beyond belief.
And the big problem with this method is that the anchor rode often keeps jamming and the folks on the foredeck don’t know how to efficiently clear it.
Oh, incidentally, gloves and foot gear are a must when dealing with sharp anchors and abrasive chain in close quarters.
I offer these suggestions, dear reader, not because I have any particularly clever insights, but because if we yachties like to pre-think some of these ‘emergency’ procedures before we’re attempting to implement them with breaking waves pushing the stricken 20-ton vessel further up the frothing beach. Well, the more we pre-think these problems, the safer and more effective we can be as salvors and friends.
I enjoy helping others. I couldn’t live with myself if I just watched when I could be helping. We’re all in this game of life together. If this article prompts just one yachtie to cut a notch in his dinghy transom or pre-rig a towing bridle or carry a ‘keep away’ anchor with a long rode in the bow of their dinghy while crossing the Pacific… Well, my time wasn’t wasted.
Remember, we all have different levels of expertise—and different panic levels as well. I once helped rescue a newbie captain pounding on a reef who kept asking me, again and again, if his boat was, indeed, being smashed to smithereens on a reef.
“…but it can’t be a reef,” he kept saying, “It’s not on my screen!”
That’s one of the most distressing problems with life in the wild—it can be far different from the digital serenity of your screen.
Editor’s note: Fatty and Carolyn are still anchored in the world’s most expensive nation/state—living on the pennies that Scotsmen throw away.
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