Big Rib's

They're not just Trenders anymore

- Dennis Caprio

About 12 years ago, a friend and I drove a 16-foot Zodiac Medline RIB roughly 60 miles from Essex to Norwalk, Connecticut. My experience with inflatables had been limited to small, soft-bottom tenders, slowly putting through mooring fields or going ashore for lunch, so the comfort and performance of our RIB opened a whole new world to me. A RIB could be my only boat.

Many Europeans embraced the RIB as their primary boat as soon as manufacturers built models big enough to carry the entire family. RIBs are lightweight, seakindly, safe and remarkably fast. The buoyancy tubes, in addition to softening the ride in rough seas, give the boats uncommonly good transverse stability, which makes them ideal for plucking folks out of the water during rescues. All of these characteristics account for the type’s popularity among police departments, coast patrols and militaries. Add luxury to the recipe, and you’ll understand why RIBs are gaining an enthusiastic following among everyday boaters in the United States.

Great Britain’s Royal National Lifeboat Institution developed the RIB in 1964. The organization thought a hard bottom — plywood at first — would reduce wear on the fabric bottom of inflatable inshore lifeboats. With a bottom plane as leveled as Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats, they battered themselves to bits in any sea state feistier than dead calm.