Finding a Good Tender: Tom Cunliffe’s Outboard Tips

A good tender is worth its weight in gold and opens up new vistas to explore once you drop the hook. It can also get you into a good deal of trouble…

The trouble with yachts is, unless you’re lucky enough to have a centreboarder, most of them have deep keels. While I’m often content to stay onboard while lying to my anchor, there are occasions when the local creeks look full of promise, with no chance of exploring unless I take to the dinghy. Once upon a time, this was an undiluted pleasure. For years, my family and I sailed the sort of boat that can carry a hard tender. If well designed, it makes serious dinghy cruising a workable option without an outboard. We owned a boat for a decade and a half that could ship the 10ft glassfibre ‘stem’ dinghy I bought for 30 quid from the barman at the old National Sailing Centre in Cowes. It was butch, beat-up and painted post-box scarlet. The crew dubbed it ‘Erik the Red’ and ever afterwards it favoured a masculine pronoun. 

Erik was more than just a means of scrambling ashore. When times were hard in northwest Norway with the price of victuals through the deck-head, two of the lads would hop into Erik an hour or so before supper with hand-lines and a hip-flask. A rocky shoal a mile away was teeming with fat codfish. The ‘ship’ couldn’t get near it but Erik could. They’d come roistering home with the catch ready filleted just as the spuds were beginning to boil.

In the Caribbean, Erik tried his luck in the salvage game. An ancient coaster had piled into a reef round the corner from our anchorage in a recent hurricane. Inconveniently, she’d gone up on the storm surge so you couldn’t approach her within half a mile in anything that drew enough water to sail. Our expert reclamation team, led by a five-year-old, rowed round and crept aboard. There wasn’t much left worth lifting, but the heavy top section of the teak galley door made a classy forehatch for the yacht, complete with armoured glass deadlight. We’d never have lugged it back without Erik. 

For his next adventure, he became over-ambitious and enticed us on a dodgy voyage to Sandy Island off Anguilla. Approach to this mini-desert island with serious draught was a non-starter, so we rowed there instead. It was only a couple of miles and the place was idyllic. No people then, just white sand, turtle tracks, a few palm trees, the blue Caribbean on all sides, and rare black coral strewn over the beach by a recent storm. I still have a fan of it to remember my folly. 

The pull home into the teeth of the tradewind and the associated current supplied our comeuppance in full measure. We ran out of rum shortly before our star oarsman, a lusty 18-year-old recently released from Eton where he had pulled stroke in the school boat, gave it so much wellie that he snapped his oar. For a while an unscheduled stopover in Panama seemed the only realistic outcome, but the breeze went down with the sun and we limped in at cocktail time with one sweep and a bit of a paddle contrived from a bailer.

Nearer home, our dinghies have carried us into corners of rivers we’d never have seen without them. We’ve hoisted oilskin jackets and sailed away downwind in fine style, knowing full well that we’d have a stiff row back. Erik was pulled up to Breton towns at the top of the tide so we could nip ashore for a quick café/croissant before dropping back to the yacht on the mid-morning ebb. Rowing in dinghies has taught my family how to deal with the essential inadequacies of the human condition in a way no powered craft can hope to do. Kids droning round an anchorage or against a strong tide with an outboard are a noisy nuisance, but let them try the same game under oars and they’re in for a character-building moment of truth. 

Sadly, few of us remain pure at heart forever. In a flush of extravagance, we bought an old British Seagull outboard for Erik. Sally Seagull cost more than the boat although at £50 she proved a sound investment. She was never quite the same after an early trip to the bottom of a Norwegian fjord in 30ft of water but she increased the range of our excursions as she buzzed her merry song. This was, however, intermittent, and it was only when Sally was replaced by a Japanese pretender, for which we paid real money, that we developed the confidence to stretch out under power.

One notable venture under the rising sun trademark was in Ireland, a passage up-river from Baltimore to Skibbereen. The waterway dries, so this was to be another dawn raid with the making tide. There had been some social resistance to the excursion with the horticulturists agitating for a route march to a famous house with an open garden; a place, intelligence from McCarthy’s Bar advised, one should see before dying. The sailors prevailed, and away we went at half-flood into the grey Irish morning.

Slowly, the river edges sharpened with the coming light, then the sun rose in gold. The tide ran obediently on, lambs gambolled in the green fields and the engine from Tokyo purred sweetly. Halfway to Skibbereen we were admiring a kingfisher when our hearts lurched at that sudden sickening drop in revs the Seagull had taught us all about. Seconds later, the two-stroke motor stopped altogether. 

Brandishing his trusty Swiss Army knife, my mate whipped the lid off. If it had been British engineering with two moving parts, we’d have fixed it in no time, but this was a new world of sophistication. We were still prodding ineffectively at spotless plastic pipes and shiny items of unknown function when the boat bumped gently to a stop 10 yards off a small beach. Two chaps were looking at us. One was clearly master, the other his man.

“Can we help at all?” enquired the master.

“Would you have a 12 mil. spanner?” responded my ever-practical mate.

‘“We have at the house. Will you stop for a bite of breakfast?”

What could we say? The ‘man’ waded out and piggy-backed the ladies ashore. We were all led, via ancient wrought gates in a mossy wall, through woodland echoing with birdsong and onwards amongst grounds of fairytale loveliness to a perfect Regency house set on a noble lawn.

In a dining room straight from ‘Pride and Prejudice’ our host treated us to a full Irish breakfast, after which we were taken for a stroll in the garden. Around mid-morning, he said: “If you’ll excuse me, I’d better be opening up now, there will be people coming along on this beautiful day.”

We had stumbled upon the very house we had missed visiting. Arriving by water we had benefited from the sort of welcome that sometimes it seems only sailors receive. The tide for Skibbereen was long gone, but little cared we. Rowing home on the ebb would be a pleasure.

This is all very well, you may be thinking, but what about all the modern yachts not designed to carry a stem dinghy? Nobody I know can row an inflatable further than the next yacht, so the answer has to be the outboard, or sails. With a wee boat, a tiny rig and a cunningly contrived leeboard, the world is very much your oyster, but high levels of practical ingenuity are required to rig it all up in a blow-up boat. You might find an old Tinker Tramp sailing inflatable on eBay and fettle that, but even those marvels of compromise don’t suit everybody, so it’s back to the old petrol outboard complete with rip-cord or, when it breaks, the yacht-club tie. Thank goodness these little beasts are now so reliable that any crew with a lust for adventure can chance their luck around the sea’s edge. Disgracefully, the noise is as unforgivable as it always has been, but now we have the wonder of the electric alternative, so dig deep, save up and give the singing birds a chance. 

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