Aluminium has a reputation for being as tough (and as sexy) as old boots. It has been seen as a commercial boat building material, ideally suited to heavy-duty, long-term abuse, but in some parts of the world things are changing. In Scandinavia and New Zealand, the material is roundly embraced. And as concerns about economy and ecological responsibility take hold, the UK’s boaters are also paying it greater attention. So what exactly is all the fuss about?Thursday, 06 May 2010 10:23
From 3.5-metre jet-RIBs to 45-foot superyacht shuttle craft, the world of high-end tenders has never been more exciting. Tom Isitt investigates.
Last month we looked at small, stowable tenders that might be pressed into service on a small sports boat. This month we’re looking at bigger, rigid-hulled tenders - not because we think you’ll be using a ten-metre RIB as a tender to your 21-foot ski-boat, but because some of them are very cool indeed. They are in fact so cool that you might well consider buying one as your everyday boat, particularly as the qualities that make a good tender also happen to be the things that make a good general-purpose leisure boat.
The Mothership Hierarchy
Once you step up from an inflatable roll-away tender to a rigid-hull tender, you’re into a whole new ball-game. The tenders are generally more sophisticated in design and construction and you need a lot more space to store them. Realistically, you can’t get a rigid tender onto anything smaller than a 40-footer, and even that can be pretty tricky. You either need davits on the back from which to hang it, or a swim-platform wide enough to fit chocks that will support the tender. Even then, you still have the problem of launching and recovering the tender. And don’t imagine two of you can do it manually, because you’ll need a crane or passarelle, or else a hydraulic swim-platform and none of these will happen much below 45 feet in length.
Of course, when you get beyond 50 feet, you get tender garages, hydraulic swim platforms and all manner of clever and sophisticated (not to mention wildly expensive) launch and recovery systems. One of the best of these is known as the Deckie. This is a fit young man who lives in a part of your boat called the crew quarters and who’s job it is to amuse your trophy girlfriend while you spend the afternoon on a conference call to New York. His other jobs include polishing the brightwork, pilfering from the petty cash in the galley, using the boat’s sat-phone to call his bookie in Sydney and (grudgingly) launching the tender when you want to go ashore.
Once you get up to superyacht territory, the tender garage changes from being a large storage locker at the back of your boat to being an actual garage, a bit like the one at home, but with much funkier contents. Usually they come complete with an eight to ten-metre RIB (maybe two, depending on how big the superyacht is), plus winches and cranes for launching, a personal watercraft or two, inflatable tow-toys, waterskis, scuba gear, windsurfers, sailing dinghies, a two-man sub and so-on. In fact, Lady Moura (a 344-foot superyacht) is believed to have a particularly impressive tender in the form of the Mangusta 92 Open!
Boating in groups is not just about hurtling across the Channel in a do or die bid to beat your mate (and his obviously inferior boat) to the nominated bar on the other side. The chances are, if you’re already regularly boating with others - whether it’s in the form of a flotilla of friends out for a casual cruise or as part of a boat club - you have found yourself part of a like-minded and supportive community. Regardless of how you do it, being part of a gaggle of boaters undeniably provides an active but safe environment, a strong social scene and an awful lot of fun.
It had been murmured in marine circles that the end of March was a bad time for an outdoor show. It hadn’t been explicitly asserted - more grumbled in a rather cowardly and indistinct ‘House of Commons’ fashion, as though the sages suggesting it were too flabby of chin and antiquainted of mind to enunciate the words with any conviction. Bla bla bla cold, rah rah rah wet, and so-on and so-forth . . .
As we munched our chocolate over Easter, it seems the P1 Powerboat Series was rapidly imploding. P1 owner, Asif Rangoonwala, pulled the plug on the Evolution and Supersport P1 series, leaving just the newly acquired SuperStock series (ex Honda four-stroke boats) alive and kicking to represent the P1 name. It’s a surprising move. There were already