The boat she carries now, not the one she was drawn for

The tender stands on its road trailer, square in front of the open garage door, and two men are holding a tape across the opening. Inside, the old chocks are still bolted down, their shadow printed in the paint of the sole. The new boat is wider across the rubbing strake than the opening is at its sill, and sits higher on her own keel line.

The davit above the opening is the one fitted when the yacht was built. Nothing has been ordered yet, and that is the right order — the tape comes before the quotation. What the tender weighs and where she can be slung decides the appliance, and what the appliance weighs decides the structure under it.

Launch and recovery is one system, not a list of parts. The garage door, the cradle, the lifting appliance and the hydraulic circuit that drives it all land on the same structure, in a single load path. A yacht tender garage refit that renews the boat without re-engineering what carries her moves the fault; it does not remove it.

The faults show up in three places: the opening, the foundation under the appliance, and the drain under the trolley.

A yacht tender garage refit begins on the trailer, not in the garage

Every figure that matters comes off the tender that will actually be carried, not the one in the original general arrangement. The boat that arrives on the trailer is usually not the size the garage was drawn for. The chocks, the opening and the appliance may have been sized for a smaller, lighter boat, and the gap is rarely one dimension — length, beam over fendering and dry weight move together.

• Length and beam over the rubbing strake and fendering, not over the hull moulding.
• Dry weight, and laden weight with fuel, batteries and the gear that lives aboard.
• The position and rating of her lifting eyes, and the sling angle they were drawn for.
• The hull shape where the tender chocks and cradle bear, and the attitude she sits at on the trolley.
• The garage opening at its head and at its sill, not at its widest point.

The fault worth naming is the tender that passes on paper rather than in practice. She clears the width and fails at the door head because she sits nose-up on the trolley. Or she clears the opening, and the outreach needed to swing her clear of the sill puts the load beyond the radius the davit is rated at.

The garage is a wet compartment before it is a stowage

A tender comes back wet, into a compartment with a door seal, a sill, rails and a trolley. What settles it is not the stowage arrangement but where the water leaves it.

A sole that falls inboard puts the wash-down into the hull instead of over the side. The symptoms arrive in order: standing water in a space nobody coated as a wet one, then a corroded sill bar, then a hinge line weeping rust down the paint, then a seal that no longer compresses on a sill that has lost section.

So the compartment is specified like a wet locker, not a lazarette: coating, drainage gradient, scupper size and route, sill bar material, and whether the trolley rails can be unbolted to inspect the sole beneath. Its seal and its drainage belong with the rest of a yacht deck refit, not with the tender's invoice.

A davit's rating is the maker's; its foundation is the builder's

Davit, deck crane and transom slipway each buy a different geometry, and the geometry comes before the brand. For the two that lift, duty falls off with reach, and the slewing radius has to clear the rail, the passerelle in its stowage and the tender's own fendering, loaded and empty.

Then the second question — the one that gets skipped. The appliance carries the maker's rating. The foundation it lands on carries whatever the original builder designed for the original appliance, which is rarely the one that will replace it. A heavier appliance, or the same weight at a longer reach, moves the davit foundation into scope: a yacht tender garage refit then means the bolt pattern, the doubler or insert plate and the frame behind them are all redrawn and refabricated. It is the question ground tackle asks at the other end of the yacht, with the same answer.

That is work for a drawing office and a metal shop, not a chandlery order, and in Tuzla they are one walk apart. The doubler and the plate behind it are drawn in-house and cut a hundred metres from the berth, by a shop with no other yard's queue in front of it.

One hydraulic power pack, and what it takes with it

Davit, passerelle and crane are very often driven off one pump, one reservoir and one return filter. A failure that is entirely local — a hose chafed at the slew bearing, a weeping ram seal on the passerelle — empties the reservoir and takes the other two appliances with it.

A launch and recovery system that shares a power pack is decided by its runs rather than by its pump. Where each run is hosed and where it is hard-piped. How it crosses a moving joint without working the hose at the same point every cycle. Whether an isolation lets the crew lose one appliance and keep the means to recover the tender. Steering, stabiliser, passerelle and crane do not all want the same answer.

The manual fallback belongs in the same drawing and is rarely on it. A hand pump that cannot be reached with the tender swung out is not a fallback.

Weight high up, and the stability question it asks

The tender is an unusual weight: high, and only sometimes aboard — aboard on passage, absent at anchor. That makes the change a stability question as well as a strength one.

The chocks, the lashings and the deck beneath them carry that mass under acceleration in a seaway, not at rest on the hard.

So the appliance line goes into the weight register when it is specified. What a refit does to her weight and her stability is kept in a ledger, not summed at the end, and a davit refit is a large single entry in it.

Proved with a load, and then with the crew

A yacht tender garage refit closes on two separate pieces of evidence, and only one of them is paperwork.

The first is a load test of the installed appliance on its new foundation, witnessed to whatever her flag, her class and the appliance maker require, with the certificate filed beside the plate's material certificates. The rating was never in doubt; the thing under it was.

The second is a demonstration on the water, with the crew who will do this at two in the morning. The full cycle with the real tender: out of the chocks, through the opening, clear of the rail and away. Then the recovery, which is the half that goes wrong, followed by the manual fallback with the circuit dead. How fast and how safely she comes off and goes back is the owner's day. The trials programme is where that gets a date.

Reviva refits, rebuilds and restores at the yard in Tuzla. A davit foundation is cheapest to change in the week the appliance is chosen, and dearest once the deck has been closed over it.

Written at the yard in Tuzla. No rating, reach, load or test regime here is given as settled: the safe working load of an appliance belongs to its maker's data sheet, and what has to be tested, by whom and to what belongs to her flag and to class.