St. Vincent & the Grenadines Yacht Charters

Your week begins at Blue Lagoon Marina on St. Vincent's southwest coast, a short transfer from Argyle International. Your professional crew meets you at the slip with cold drinks and a chart briefing that frames the route ahead, walks you through the boat, and gets your gear stowed. The marina sits inside a reef-protected lagoon with a narrow cut to the open Caribbean—a calm staging point before the first sail.

Around mid-morning, lines off for the easy nine-nautical-mile reach south to Bequia. It's the gentlest leg of the week, deliberately short to let everyone find their sea legs without committing to a long passage on day one. The southwest coast of St. Vincent slips by to port, then the open channel to Bequia, then Admiralty Bay opens up on the bow—a deep, well-protected horseshoe with sailboats at anchor scattered across the bay and the pastel buildings of Port Elizabeth wrapped around the waterfront.

Tender ashore late afternoon for a walk along the Belmont Walkway—the seafront promenade that strings together the boutiques, the rum shops, and the open-air bars of Port Elizabeth. Bequia is the friendliest, most authentically Caribbean of the Grenadines: a working sailing community that built schooners by hand on the beach until well into the 1980s, and still has more salt in its character than any other island in the chain. Dinner aboard tonight—your chef leans into the local catch from the morning fish market—or ashore at Mac's Pizzeria up on the bluff for the lobster pizza that has been on the menu for forty years.

After a slow breakfast aboard, your captain clears Admiralty Bay for the sixteen-nautical-mile run southeast to Mustique. The trades fill in by mid-morning, and the boat reaches comfortably across the open channel with Bequia receding behind and Mustique's low green profile growing on the bow. Most of the morning you'll be on the foredeck or at the helm if you want a turn at the wheel.

Your crew picks up a mooring ball in Britannia Bay on Mustique's west coast—the only legal anchorage on the island, run by the Mustique Company that's owned the place since 1958. Mustique is the private island that Princess Margaret put on the map and the Mick Jagger / David Bowie / Mark Knopfler crowd kept there. There are no resorts in the conventional sense; the island is a private estate of about a hundred villas and a few tasteful infrastructure buildings, kept deliberately quiet. Most guests rent a Kawasaki Mule from the company office at the dock and spend the afternoon driving the perimeter road—Macaroni Beach on the Atlantic side, the turtle sanctuary at L'Ansecoy Bay, the dramatic windward cliffs at Endeavor.

Dinner is the headline. Basil's Bar at Britannia Bay—open-air, on stilts over the water, thatched roof, the most famous beach bar in the Caribbean. The bar took a direct hit from Hurricane Beryl in July 2024 and was completely flattened; Mick Jagger personally funded the rebuild, and it reopened in late 2024 better than before. Wednesday is the long-running Jump Up night when the live band plays late and the island's villa renters and yacht crews end up dancing on the same floor. Other nights are quieter, but the food is excellent on any of them. Tender back to the boat under a star-loaded Caribbean sky.

Today is the day the chain really opens up. A twenty-five-mile downwind reach south takes you past Canouan—a stop you'll make on the way back—straight through to Mayreau, the smallest inhabited island in the Grenadines and the one that holds the prettiest single anchorage in the chain. The morning runs to a long, easy reach with the trades steady on the quarter, the islands of the Grenadines stepping past you on the port beam like a postcard sequence.

Salt Whistle Bay sits on Mayreau's northwest tip—a narrow neck of palm-lined sand barely a hundred yards across, with the Caribbean on one side and the open Atlantic on the other. You anchor in the lee side and the boat sits in flat, clear, sand-bottomed water with the palms a stone's throw off the bow. The beach itself is the best swim spot in the chain after the Tobago Cays—shallow for a long way out, no current, and quiet enough that some afternoons you'll have it to yourself.

Lunch on the hook, an afternoon swimming and paddleboarding, and a late tender ashore for a quiet sunset walk on the sand. There's a small village (Old Wall) about a fifteen-minute walk up the hill on the south side of the island if you want to climb up to the church for the view across to the Tobago Cays you'll sail into tomorrow. Dinner aboard tonight, chef-prepared, the boat barely moving on its chain. This is the rest-day before the marquee day.

A short three-mile reposition this morning brings you into the Tobago Cays Marine Park—the centerpiece of the entire Grenadines charter and one of the great in-water experiences anywhere in the Caribbean. Five small uninhabited islands—Petit Rameau, Petit Bateau, Baradal, Petit Tabac, and Jamesby—sit inside a horseshoe-shaped barrier reef that breaks the Atlantic swell on its eastern edge. You anchor inside the reef in fifteen feet of impossibly clear water, with the open ocean a hundred yards behind you and the cays spread across the western half of your view.

The marine park has been a no-take protected area since 2006, and the result is a fish population and a turtle population that have rebuilt to remarkable density. The seagrass beds between Baradal and Petit Bateau are one of the most reliable green sea turtle viewing spots in the Caribbean—you slip into the water from the swim platform, swim a hundred meters, and there will be turtles. Park rules are strict and well-enforced (no chasing, no touching, snorkel from above), which is exactly why the population is healthy. A guided dinghy tour with one of the park's marine rangers makes the morning—they know which patches the turtles are working that week.

Lunch is a beach barbecue on Petit Bateau or Baradal, arranged through one of the local boat boys who will set up a table on the sand, grill the lobster (caught that morning, alive in a basket by the table until you order), pour the rum punch, and clean up afterward. It's the most rewarding meal of the trip and one of the most quintessentially Grenadines experiences—you eat with your feet in the sand, the boat at anchor a hundred meters offshore, the reef breaking white on the horizon.

Afternoon is a tender ride out to Petit Tabac—the small palm-fringed islet on the Atlantic side of the reef where Captain Jack Sparrow gets marooned in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie. It's the most photographed spit of sand in the eastern Caribbean. Back aboard for sundowners, dinner aboard tonight on the hook, and a night sleeping inside the marine park with the reef breaking white in the dark.

After a slow morning swim off the back of the boat in the Cays, lines off for the short twelve-mile run southwest to Petit St. Vincent. The route threads past Mayreau and into Clifton Harbour on Union Island, where your captain clears outbound paperwork (Union has the only customs office in the southern Grenadines) and you have time ashore for an hour or two.

The reason to stop in Clifton, beyond the paperwork, is Happy Island—a small bar that sits on a man-made island in the middle of the harbor's reef. Janti Ramage built the island himself, by hand, by piling up empty conch shells he salvaged from the local fishermen, then poured a concrete top, then built a thatched bar on it. The whole thing is about the size of a tennis court. The drink is the rum punch, and the experience of sitting on a bar built out of seashells with the boats of Clifton anchored around you is a Grenadines moment that doesn't really exist anywhere else.

By mid-afternoon, your captain points the bow east for the short hop across the channel to Petit St. Vincent and Palm Island, the two southernmost cays in the chain. PSV is a private island resort that allows yacht guests on the beach and at the bar; Palm Island is the same setup. Both are reef-fringed, palm-covered, and quiet—the kind of last-stop anchorage that resets the trip after the social energy of Mustique and the marquee energy of the Cays. Anchor off the leeward side of PSV, swim ashore, walk the beach, and have a sundowner at the resort's beach bar. Dinner aboard tonight, chef-prepared, the boat sitting on the hook with the lights of Carriacou (Grenada) twenty miles south.

The first leg of the homeward run—twenty-five miles north back through the chain to Canouan. With the trades on the quarter, this is a fast, dry reach in the typical December-through-May charter window, and your captain has the option of sailing the rhumb line or angling out for a wider tack to extend the day on the water. Most groups vote for whichever puts the boat at the dock by mid-afternoon.

Canouan is the dark-horse stop on the chain. Smaller than Bequia, quieter than Mustique, and home to the Sandy Lane Yacht Club marina on the south end—one of the most polished megayacht facilities anywhere in the Caribbean and the reason a particular slice of the global ultra-high-net-worth crowd has quietly made Canouan their preferred Grenadines stop. You don't have to engage with that scene to enjoy the island. Glossy Bay, the public beach above the marina, is gorgeous. The Soho House Canouan beach club is open to walk-ins for lunch. There's a Jim Fazio-designed golf course on the high ground above the marina if anyone in the group wants to play. Or you simply anchor in Charlestown Bay on the leeward side, swim, paddleboard, and watch the boats coming in and out of the channel.

Dinner is your call. The marina's restaurants are the safer bet for a polished evening; the village tavernas above Charlestown Bay are the local choice. Either way, the boat is a short tender ride from the dock and a quiet night at anchor.

The longest leg of the homeward run, but it's a downwind-quartering reach with the trades doing most of the work—roughly thirty-two miles back north past Mustique and into Bequia. Your captain picks the start time around when the breeze fills in, and the boat rides home on the quarter for most of the morning. Plenty of time at the helm or on the foredeck if anyone wants it.

Late afternoon, you're back inside Admiralty Bay where the trip started, and the bay does the closing-of-the-loop work for you—the same anchorage, the same view of Port Elizabeth, the same boats moored across the curve, but now you've sailed the chain and you know what every island down the line looks like. There's something quietly satisfying about that.

Tonight is the farewell dinner. Two strong options: ashore at Mac's Pizzeria for the lobster pizza and the view down over the harbor, or aboard with your chef pulling out the stops on a three-course plating on the aft deck. Either is the right call. Tender back late, a nightcap on deck, and the last night at anchor in the Grenadines.

A last slow breakfast aboard at anchor in Admiralty Bay, a final swim off the back of the boat, and a short morning sail back across the channel to Blue Lagoon Marina on St. Vincent—the same nine-mile leg you opened the trip with, in reverse. Your crew handles every logistic from the slip: transfer to Argyle International, onward connections to Barbados or direct flights to Miami and the East Coast, a last photo with the boat in the background. Step off with salt in your hair, a week of the Grenadines behind you, and a pretty good idea of when you're coming back.

The flight into Hewanorra (UVF) lands on St. Lucia's southern tip; the transfer runs up the island to Rodney Bay on the northwest coast, where your crew meets you at the slip with cold drinks and a chart briefing that lays out the ten days south. Rodney Bay is St. Lucia's full-service yachting hub — fuel, provisioning, and the customs office that clears you out of the country are all here — so the boat is stored, fueled, and cleared while you settle in.

By late morning, lines off and south down St. Lucia's leeward coast. The mountains block the trades on this side, so the first few hours are a quiet motor-sail through the wind shadows with the breeze funneling down the valleys, the green volcanic ridge sliding by to port. You pass Marigot Bay — the hurricane-hole cove where the original Doctor Dolittle was filmed — and then, in the last few miles, the Pitons announce themselves: two sheer volcanic plugs rising straight out of the sea, Gros Piton and Petit Piton, the most photographed silhouette in the Caribbean and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

There's no anchoring here — the Soufrière Marine Management Area protects the reefs, and the water drops away too deep to set a hook anyway — so your captain picks up one of the park moorings at Anse des Pitons, in the saddle of water directly between the two peaks, with Sugar Beach in the notch behind you. The afternoon is a snorkel on the reef off Anse Chastanet or the drift along Petit Piton's base, a swim off the back of the boat, and then the light goes gold on the spires and you have dinner aboard with the two mountains filling the whole sky. It's a hard first night to beat, and the trip has barely started.

This is the day the trip earns its name. Your captain watches the forecast and picks a start time around when the breeze fills, because there's real water to cover — roughly fifty miles from the Pitons to Bequia, the longest single passage of the charter. Clear of St. Lucia's wind shadow, the boat hardens up into the open St. Lucia Channel: twenty-five-plus miles of blue water with the east-northeast trades and the Atlantic swell on the beam, a fast, lively reach that is exactly why this route exists. Lines go out the back as soon as you're in deep water — this channel is prime trolling ground, and mahi-mahi and wahoo are the signature catch.

Mid-passage, the high green wall of St. Vincent rises ahead and the boat slips into its lee. The wind drops behind the mountains and the water goes flat, and for a couple of hours St. Vincent is simply the scenery — the La Soufrière volcano (which last erupted in 2021) towering into the cloud, the deep cuts of Cumberland Bay, and Wallilabou, the cove where the first Pirates of the Caribbean built its Port Royal set and left the dock pilings standing. This itinerary doesn't overnight on the mainland; the play is to keep the boat moving and let the coast roll by, which is its own kind of pleasure after a morning of open water.

Out of St. Vincent's lee, the breeze returns for the last nine miles across the Bequia Channel, and Admiralty Bay opens on the bow — a deep, well-protected horseshoe full of moored sailboats, with the pastel waterfront of Port Elizabeth wrapped around it. Bequia is the friendliest and most authentically salty of the Grenadines, a working boat-building island where the Sargeant brothers still carve model schooners by hand near the ferry dock. Tender ashore for a walk along the Belmont Walkway, a cold Hairoun at a waterfront bar, and dinner aboard or up the hill at Mac's Pizzeria for the lobster pizza. You've earned the chair.

A slow Bequia morning first — coffee on deck, a last walk through Port Elizabeth's fish market, maybe a stop at the model-boat shop — and then lines off mid-morning for the sixteen-mile reach southeast to Mustique. The trades fill in across the open channel and the boat sails comfortably with Bequia receding astern and Mustique's low green profile growing on the bow. If anyone wants a turn at the helm, this is an easy, forgiving leg to take it.

Your captain picks up a mooring in Britannia Bay on Mustique's west coast — the only legal anchorage on the island, run by the Mustique Company that has owned the place since 1958. There are no resorts here in the usual sense; Mustique is a private estate of about a hundred villas, the island Princess Margaret put on the map and the Mick Jagger and David Bowie crowd kept quiet. Most guests rent a Kawasaki Mule from the company office and spend the afternoon driving the perimeter road — Macaroni Beach on the Atlantic side, the windward cliffs, the turtle sanctuary at the north end.

Dinner is the headline. Basil's Bar at Britannia Bay — open-air, on stilts over the water, thatched roof — founded in 1976 by Basil Charles and reimagined by the designer Philippe Starck a few years back. Basil also started the Mustique Blues Festival, which fills the bar every January and February. Wednesday is the long-running Jump Up night when the band plays late and villa renters and yacht crews end up on the same dance floor; any other night is quieter and the food is excellent regardless. Tender back to the boat under a sky absolutely loaded with stars.

A twenty-mile run south down the heart of the chain, past Canouan on the way. Canouan is the polished island these days — the Sandy Lane Yacht Club marina on its south end is one of the most exclusive megayacht facilities in the Caribbean, and there's a Soho House on the beach — but it's largely a private, gated world, so most crewed charters cruise past its leeward coast and press on to the smaller islands. With the trades on the quarter, this is a fast, easy reach with the Grenadines stepping past on the port beam.

Mayreau is the smallest inhabited island in the chain and it holds the prettiest single anchorage in the Grenadines: Salt Whistle Bay, a narrow palm-lined neck of sand on the island's northwest tip, with the calm Caribbean on one side and the Atlantic surf a hundred feet away on the other. You anchor in the lee and the boat sits in flat, clear, sand-bottomed water with the beach a stone's throw off the bow. Hurricane Beryl came through hard here in 2024 and stripped the palms; they're coming back, and the bay's natural shape — the swim, the water, the setting — is exactly as good as it always was.

Lunch on the hook, an afternoon swimming and paddleboarding off the back, and a late tender ashore for a quiet sunset walk on the sand. There's a small hilltop village a fifteen-minute climb up the south side if you want the view across to the Tobago Cays you'll sail into tomorrow — from the church terrace you can see the whole marine park laid out below. Dinner aboard tonight, the boat barely moving on its chain. This is the deep-breath day before the headliner.

A short three-mile reposition this morning brings you into the Tobago Cays Marine Park — the centerpiece of the Grenadines and one of the great in-water experiences anywhere in the Caribbean. Five small uninhabited islands sit inside a horseshoe-shaped barrier reef that takes the full Atlantic swell on its eastern edge; you anchor inside the reef in fifteen feet of staggeringly clear water, the open ocean breaking white a hundred yards behind you and the cays spread across the western half of the view. The park came through Hurricane Beryl in good shape — the reef and the turtle grounds are intact, and it remains the strongest single stop in the southern Grenadines.

The seagrass beds off Baradal are a protected turtle-watching reserve and one of the most reliable green-sea-turtle snorkels in the Caribbean. You swim out from the swim platform and they're there, grazing the grass; park rules are strict and well enforced — snorkel from above, no chasing, no touching — which is exactly why the population is so healthy. A guided dinghy tour with one of the park rangers makes the morning, because they know which patches the turtles are working that week.

Lunch is a beach barbecue on Petit Bateau, arranged through one of the local boat boys who sets a table on the sand, grills the lobster (caught that morning, alive in a basket by the table until you order), pours the rum punch, and clears it all afterward. It's the most quintessentially Grenadines meal of the trip — feet in the sand, the boat on the hook a hundred meters offshore. The afternoon is a tender ride out to Petit Tabac, the palm-fringed spit on the Atlantic side where the first Pirates of the Caribbean marooned Jack Sparrow, then sundowners back aboard and a night sleeping inside the marine park with the reef breaking in the dark.

A short six-mile hop out of the Cays brings you to Union Island, the last of the Grenadines before the border. Union is the dramatic one — a jagged volcanic ridge that looks like a small Tahiti rising out of the sea — and it carries the southern customs office for St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Your captain ducks into Clifton Harbour, tucked behind its barrier reef on the windward side, to clear the boat outbound while you have an hour ashore in the most genuinely local town on the route.

Union took a hard, direct hit from Hurricane Beryl in 2024 and the town has been rebuilding ever since; the yacht services, the grocery, and the clearance office are all back up and running, and the place has a resilient, getting-on-with-it energy that's worth seeing. With the paperwork done, your captain rounds the island to Chatham Bay on the secluded west coast — a deep, quiet anchorage backed by a long empty beach, where a handful of rustic beach shacks are slowly coming back to life serving grilled fish and lobster in the sand.

The afternoon is yours in the lee: swimming and paddleboarding in the calm water, a walk down the empty beach, snorkeling the rocky ends of the bay. Chatham is the kind of anchorage that resets the trip after the social energy of Mustique and the marquee of the Cays — there's nothing to do and nowhere to be, which is precisely the point. Sundowners on the aft deck, dinner aboard or ashore at one of the beach grills, and a quiet last night in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

A ten-mile sail across the border this morning takes you from St. Vincent and the Grenadines into Grenada — and into one of the quietest, most under-the-radar corners of the eastern Caribbean. Your captain makes for Tyrrel Bay on Carriacou, a deep, well-sheltered horseshoe with a purpose-built customs and immigration office at the marina, and clears the boat into the country while you settle into the new water.

Carriacou is the largest of Grenada's offshore islands and a genuine boat-building community — they still lay down wooden sloops on the beach at Windward, by eye, the way the Scots shipwrights who settled here taught them to. The island was very near the eye of Hurricane Beryl in 2024 and took serious damage; what's striking now is how green it has come back and how far the recovery has come, with businesses reopened and the harbor working again. It is, refreshingly, an island almost no charter guests ever see.

The afternoon's prize is Sandy Island — a tiny deserted sandbar with a fringe of palms, a mile off Carriacou's west coast, sitting inside the island's protected marine park. The reef around it is the best snorkeling on this end of Grenada, and the islet itself is a barefoot, no-footprints-but-yours kind of place. Anchor off, swim the reef, lay out on the sand, and tender across to the long calm sweep of Paradise Beach on the main island for a cold drink. Back aboard for the first Grenadian sunset, the big mainland passage on the chart for tomorrow.

The second marquee passage. Roughly thirty-three miles of open water separate Carriacou from mainland Grenada, and the rhumb line runs more into the trades than the easy reaches up north, so your captain may angle the course to keep the boat sailing and time the start around the morning breeze. Lines go out the back early — the banks and drop-offs along this stretch hold mahi-mahi, wahoo, and tuna, and it's the best fishing of the trip after the St. Lucia Channel.

The passage threads past some genuinely wild water. Isle de Ronde and the rock cluster known as the Sisters break up the horizon, and a couple of miles off the route lies Kick 'em Jenny — an active submarine volcano with a marine exclusion zone the authorities adjust based on its activity. Your captain checks the current advisory before departure and gives it the required berth; from the deck it's simply open ocean, but it's a good reminder that this whole island chain is the rim of a very much living volcanic arc.

By mid-afternoon Grenada's green northwest coast fills the bow and the boat slips into the lee for the run down to the anchorages at Dragon Bay and Molinère. The reason to be here is the Molinère Underwater Sculpture Park — the world's first, created by the artist Jason deCaires Taylor in 2006, a field of cast-concrete human figures arranged on the sandy bottom in fifteen feet of clear water, now half-claimed by coral and fish. You snorkel it straight off the boat in the late-afternoon light. Dinner aboard on the hook, the lights of St. George's glowing a few miles south.

A short morning sail down the coast drops you into St. George's, the capital and, by wide agreement, the prettiest harbor town in the Caribbean. The Carenage — the horseshoe inner harbor — is ringed by pastel Georgian warehouses with red-tile roofs that climb the hillside beneath Fort George, the French-built fort that has watched over the harbor since the seventeenth century. Your captain berths the boat at Port Louis Marina in the Lagoon, the modern yachting basin a short walk from town.

Grenada is the Isle of Spice, and St. George's is where you understand why: the market square is a wall of nutmeg, mace, cinnamon, and cocoa, the air smells like a baking cupboard, and nutmeg is the only spice to appear on a national flag. Spend the morning in town — the market, the fort with its view over the harbor and its weight of recent history, the waterfront — and the afternoon at Grand Anse, the two-mile sweep of white sand and calm water just south of the capital that is one of the great swimming beaches in the region.

Tonight is the proper dinner ashore. St. George's has the best restaurant scene on the whole route, from the marina's waterfront tables to the local spots serving oildown — the national one-pot of breadfruit, salt meat, dumplings, and callaloo simmered down in coconut milk. Or the chef pulls out the stops aboard with the trip's running list of catches reduced to one plated set. Either way, it's a celebration of a charter that has covered real ground.

The last full day works its way around Grenada's south coast, a different world from the open windward passages — a maze of reef-protected bays, mangrove inlets, and quiet anchorages tucked behind the headlands. Your captain rounds Point Salines past the airport and into the lee, with options that shape the day around what the group wants for a finish.

Hog Island is the classic call: a low, undeveloped island off the south coast with a calm anchorage and Roger's Bar, a bamboo-and-driftwood shack on the beach that throws the most famous Sunday gathering in Grenada — live music, rum punch, and a barbecue that draws every cruiser in the area. Even on a quiet weekday the anchorage is a gem. For a more active last day, your captain can set up an inland run from Prickly Bay — Annandale Falls, a nutmeg plantation, or the River Antoine distillery, the oldest working rum distillery in the Caribbean, still driven by a waterwheel.

Or the group simply spends the day on the water — a last snorkel, the full slate of toys off the transom, a long lunch on the aft deck — and lets the trip wind down at anchor. Tonight is the farewell dinner: the chef's best, paired wines from the cellar, and a toast to a charter that started under the Pitons and ran the whole eastern edge of the Caribbean to get here. Last night aboard on the south coast of the Isle of Spice.

A last slow breakfast aboard, a final swim off the back of the boat, and a short morning run back to Port Louis Marina in St. George's for check-out. Your crew handles every logistic from the dock — the transfer to Maurice Bishop International (GND) is fifteen minutes, and most groups schedule the flight for mid-afternoon or later to keep the morning unhurried. Step off with salt in your hair, three countries' worth of sailing behind you, and the rare satisfaction of having actually gone somewhere.