The logistics of bareboat sailing charters require a lot of planning. A seat-of-the-pants kind of experience may be thrilling, but it may not be safe for you and your crew. You should get charts and cruising guides for the area in which you plan to sail. Once you have a plan, meet with your crew and go over all the things that need their input and what they need to know about safety.
Your initial choice of a cruising location will make things significantly easier from a planning and a sailing perspective. The Bahamas and Virgin Islands are great places to do a bareboat charter especially if you are new at it. You can easily get charts and guides for those areas.
Most bareboat charterers follow this kind of itinerary. Sail from the location of the boat to your first overnight anchorage on the first day of your trip. Some charterers stay in the boat in the marina where they pick the boat up the first night. Either way, the point is that you need enough daylight to sail from one overnight anchorage to the next. The cruising guides will tell you about the good and the bad of most of the possible anchorages. A good sailing speed to assume is about 6-8 knots. You can achieve that kind of speed with good wind, motoring or both. With that speed, take the charts and estimate the anchorages that can be reached in about four hours. Plot your whole trip out on a chart using this procedure. You may want to take longer or shorter daily sails. That may be decided for you by choosing anchorages that have more appeal to you. For example, there may be a good restaurant at an anchorage that you want to go to. That kind of information can be found in a cruising guide.
You should tell your crew about when to wear a life jacket, about man overboard procedures and other safety issues. Tell them about these things before you leave for your trip. Do some hands on drills once you’re on the boat before you leave the marina. As captain, you are responsible for the crew’s safety.
Depending on where you will be sailing, you have three choices and several combinations of those choices for provisioning the boat. You can bring your provisions, you can buy them when you get to the boat and you can have the charter company provide them.
Taking your own provisions is probably a good idea if you are driving to where you will pick up your boat and you expect the prices for food there to be high. Otherwise, this is probably not a good idea.
Buying your food once you get to your boat is usually the least expensive way to provision your boat. You have to refer to a cruising guide or ask the charter company to find out if there is a grocery store within a reasonable distance of your boat. You should prepare a menu for the trip before you leave home and make a grocery list from that.
Your charter company will most likely give you the option of having them provide all or part of your food. It is usually a little more expensive to have this service provided. If they do offer this service, information about its cost and what they provide will be on their website.
If the boat does not have some sort of icemaker, you will need to find out where you can get ice, fuel and possibly water on your itinerary. That is also information you may find in a cruising guide.
Cruising guides will sometimes give you all sorts of useful tips. They may tell you where to anchor in a particular harbor or what path to take going into a harbor at different tides.
