The question nobody asks at the pontoon

How we work

Why it gets settled before you pay

Two arrangements that look almost identical from the quayside are completely different in law. In the first you are carried as a passenger, which means the vessel must be certified for the carriage of passengers and the person at the helm must hold the professional qualification required for that activity. In the second you hire a craft without a crew and take it out yourself, which makes you the person in charge: responsible for holding any licence the craft requires, for complying with the rules of navigation, and for the consequences of how it is operated. A pleasure navigation licence belongs to the second world and does not authorise the first, however many times it is stretched to cover a paid trip.

The consequence that actually bites is insurance. Cover written for carried passengers does not extend to a hirer who has become the person in charge, and cover written for pleasure use does not respond to a commercial carriage of passengers. People discover this at the one moment it matters, which is after something has happened. There is also a number worth knowing because it sounds like a seating question and is not: a vessel carrying more than twelve passengers at sea is a passenger ship for the purposes of the international conventions, with a certification regime of a wholly different order. Thirteen is not twelve plus one, it is a different operation.

Everything else here follows from settling that question before money changes hands. On a trip, the vessel and the helm match the use. On a hire, the licence is checked and the instructions are given, and we say openly that we are not assessing anyone's competence beyond that, because a confident glance is not an assessment and treating it as one helps nobody. And one rule sits above the commercial arrangement entirely: if the person in charge decides not to sail, or to turn back, that decision stands and is refunded in full. A skipper weighing a refund against the sea state is the most dangerous thing afloat, so the refund is removed from the equation in advance.