Bareboating in the Caribbean

An idle week cruising the blue Caribbean was once an adventure only for the rich or the very gregarious. One could buy a boat, or charter one with skipper and crew, which could run into thousands of dollars a week, or share space on a "headboat" with a dozen strangers. But in recent years a new way of vacation cruising has taken on, and it promises to do to crewed charters what Hertz did to chauffeured cars. This is bareboating --hiring a yacht without crew and sailing it yourself. In 1966 only two dozen bareboats were working in the entire Caribbean. Today there are some 270, and in Tortola in the British Virgin Islands (the center of the industry, with 120 boats available) there are more bareboat berths filled in a season than hotel rooms. Costing only between $150 and $300 per head per week, food and fuel included, bareboating compares favorably with a hotel vacation. Among the leading charterers are the Moorings (33 boats), Antilles Yachting Services (23), Fleet Indigo (14), Abaco Bahamas Charters (12) and Stevens Yachts (10). The oldest and largest firm is Caribbean Sailing Yachts, Inc., founded in 1967 by a sea-obsessed New Jersey dentist named Dr. John van Ost. C.S.Y. has 94 boats at its three bases --Abaco in the Bahamas, Tortola in the B. V.I. and St. Vincent, far south in the Windward Islands. Last year about 31,000 people chartered from these firms. To discover the joys--and tribulations --of bareboating, TIME Senior Writer Robert Hughes recently spent ten days sailing Relaxin', a C.S.Y. Carib 39, through the Grenadines. His report:

The air taxi from San Juan takes almost three hours to reach St. Vincent. As the islands slide by, embedded in their wrinkled sheet of sapphire, you run over your limited skills and lubberly sailing experience and watch your confidence begin to ebb. Bareboating is a cheap way to sail, but it is not for everyone--if only because a prospective skipper needs to show some experience before a charter firm will send him tacking off through the coral with $45,000 worth of boat under him. Anyone who knows the difference between windward and leeward but not between a boom vang and an outhaul feels apprehensive. There you will be, stuck on some molar of rock, the dummy of the Windward Islands. But to bridge the gap between the fumbling amateur and the moderately competent seaman, C.S.Y. has its "sail-'n'-learn" program. An instructor is put on board: a local sailor from St. Vincent or its neighboring island Bequia (pronounced, with an unreproducible West Indian lilt, Beck-wee). His job is not to sail the boat, but to give advice, evaluate your skill, rate it for future charters, and briskly pull you out of trouble in emergencies--as when, on the third day out, I forgot to watch the course when setting trolls for barracuda and nearly put the Carib on a notorious obstacle named Montezuma Shoal. Otherwise you sail yourself, needing only one friend as crew, and there is no faster way to learn how to handle the stiff, roomy 39-and 41-footers that are the staple of Windward chartering.

The tourist economy of the Grenadines--and even of more "developed" areas, like the Bahamas and the Virgin Islands--is much affected by chartering. Hotels and restaurants on the more remote islands depend entirely on the nights yachtsmen pass ashore, and last year bareboaters spent at least $3 million during their port stops. All the same, shore facilities tend to be primitive, and there is no need to sleep or eat on land. The boats come self-sufficient: overhauled, clean, tanked up, stocked with food and ice.

Silver Bugs. From the moment one hoists sail, cuts the engine and bears away downwind to Bequia, euphoria supervenes. It would be hard to find a better stretch of water for the amateur--if not the raw novice. You are never out of sight of land, so navigation is easy. The trade winds blow their dependable 15 knots all day, squalls are brief, and the yacht bowls along through a vast basin of sea, rimmed by a half-circle of blue mountain peaks that runs south to Grenada 60 miles away. Braced against the wheel, refreshed with iced milk punch (embellished on the label with a crude drawing of a hairy fist), and watching the flying fish skitter like fusiform silver bugs from the indigo waves, you slip into the most delectable and mindless of rhythms. That can be a mistake, even for real captains: one bright afternoon in 1971, the Antilles, a 20,000-ton French cruise liner, rammed a reef between the islands of Mustique and Carriacou at full steam, and its hulk still lies in the sun as a sobering memento mori.

Every island is fringed with mazes of coral, red and brown under the gin-clear water. The current in the channels is fast, and the wrong combination of tide and wind can raise a lumpy seven-foot sea. Yet no great crises occur: the snorkeling on the coral (especially in the Tobago Cays, an underwater reserve) is among the best in the Caribbean; jack and pompano bite in the shallows, the sun shines all day and plops into the ocean with a green flash straight out of a tourist leaflet; and on island after island the beaches are empty, not yet speckled with condominiums. Privacy is the reward of bareboating--not to mention a new and addictive confidence about sailing.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.