SAIL.SailMagazine

Are you contemplating a Caribbean bareboat charter, but concerned about the cost? Here’s how you can blow those worries off the chart with just a few simple tricks.Most charter companies have tempting deals that offer full or partial meal provisioning. If you choose not to take advantage of these, you will save money by not paying for items that you don’t use. We recently met a couple who,

For the past few years we have chartered monohulls and catamarans in the Caribbean for the usual week or, sometimes, 10 days. We savored every moment of those brief charters, but invariably felt pressed for time and regretfully passed by anchorages we knew would be more perfect than all the rest. If only we had two weeks, or better yet, a whole month, we could ease into our vacation, explore

When the five of us— Dana, Bird, Pip, Laura and I—left Boston, Massachusetts, last April for a week’s charter in the Abacos, we thought we were in for a week of easy sailing and stress-free sunbathing. We certainly didn’t expect to become part of a sailing community. That hadn’t happened on any of our previous “girls' trip” charters together in St. Martin and the British Virgin Islands. Why would

It quickly became a running joke. “How come we never went snorkeling here before?” my wife, Shelly, would ask. “What a great beach. Why didn’t we go swimming like this the last time we were here?”The answer in each case was exactly the same: we’d been sailing, beating our way up and around St. John, reaching through the trades, reveling in the sheer joy of our boat speed. Not until the sun