Sailing's home waters

The British Virgin Islands look as if somebody designed them for sailing. Some sixty islands and cays ring the Sir Francis Drake Channel, a broad corridor of protected water with steady trade winds down its length, and nothing worth visiting sits more than a couple of hours from anything else. It is the easiest serious cruising ground on earth, which is exactly why the world's charter fleets are based here, and why a superyacht changes the arithmetic so completely. The crowd is real, but the crowd is on a schedule, and you are not.

Line of sight cruising

Navigation here is done by looking. Pick an island, sail at it, anchor, repeat. The channel keeps the sea flat while the breeze holds fifteen to twenty knots through winter, which makes this one of the rare destinations where a crewed sailing yacht makes as much sense as a motoryacht, and arguably more. The territory also rebuilt smartly after Hurricane Irma in 2017. The Bitter End Yacht Club is back on North Sound in new form, Saba Rock reopened, and the beach bars and boatyards returned with fresh paint and the same owners, which tells you most of what you need to know about the place.

The circuit worth doing

Start at Norman Island, where the snorkelling at the Caves and the nearby Indians justifies the first morning. Work east along the channel to Cooper Island, whose beach club does an honest lunch and a serious rum list. Virgin Gorda brings The Baths, a shoreline of house sized granite boulders stacked into grottoes and lit pools. Anchor off at first light and you will have them to yourself for an hour before the day fleet arrives, which is an hour more than most visitors ever get. North Sound, at the island's top end, is a lagoon of moorings and resorts built for a lay day. Then run downwind to Anegada, the outlier, a coral island so low its palms clear the horizon before the land does, ringed by Horseshoe Reef, with flamingos on the salt ponds and lobster grilled on the beach at sunset. Finish at Jost Van Dyke, where the Painkiller was invented at the Soggy Dollar Bar in White Bay and Foxy's in Great Harbour has hosted the fleet's last night since 1968.

The Baths belong to whoever arrives first, and the yacht anchored off at dawn always wins.

Ashore

Tortola is the seat of things, with Road Town's marinas, a Main Street worth an hour and hillsides that earn the drive over to Cane Garden Bay. The territory's pleasures are deliberately informal: a roti from a roadside kitchen, johnny cakes at breakfast, the Anegada Lobster Festival each November, and the full moon parties at Trellis Bay, where fireballs burn on steel sculptures standing in the shallows. BVIslanders have been dealing with visiting sailors for three centuries, and the tone ashore is easy, unhurried and entirely unimpressed by yacht size, which is its own kind of luxury.

When to come

December to April is the classic window. The Christmas winds blow fresh through late December and January, the calendar is busiest around the holidays and Easter, and the sailing is at its glorious best. May and June are softer, warmer in the water and far quieter. The hurricane season runs June to November, with the core of it best avoided, but November and early December are the insider's weeks, the fleet still thin, the bars open and the season's first Painkillers being mixed at White Bay. The islands also pair naturally with St Barths and the Leewards for a longer Caribbean season. To match the right yacht to the circuit, our charter team will tell you plainly which yachts and crews know these waters best.