A small island of serious polish

St Barths measures about twenty five square kilometres, has no deep water cruise terminal, and keeps an airstrip so short that nothing much larger than a nineteen seat turboprop can use it. None of this is a failure of infrastructure. It is the entire strategy. The island stays small, polished and slightly inconvenient on purpose, and the yacht is how St Barths prefers its guests to arrive, which is why, every winter, the anchorage off Gustavia gathers the most concentrated fleet of serious yachts in the western hemisphere.

A harbour town with a Swedish accent

Gustavia is the giveaway. Sweden ran the island from 1784 to 1878 and named the port for King Gustav III before selling it back to France, and the tidy grid of streets around the harbour still carries the bones of that century. Red roofs step up three green hillsides, the old chandleries have given way to Hermes and Loro Piana, and the fort above the harbour still looks out over the swimming pool decks of whatever arrived overnight. The result is unique in the Caribbean: a genuinely French island, baguettes and all, with creole warmth underneath and no interest whatever in volume tourism. Yachts of moderate size berth stern to in the middle of town. The big yachts lie off outside, with the whole theatre framed in the aft deck view.

Where to lie

Anse de Colombier, at the northwest tip, is the anchorage that sells the island. There is no road. You arrive by yacht or by a rocky half hour track, pick up a mooring inside the marine reserve, and share a half moon of pale sand with turtles and a handful of other yachts. Gustavia's outer harbour is the social berth, ringside for the evening promenade and the morning coffee run. On the south coast, Anse du Gouverneur and Anse de Grande Saline are wilder propositions for settled weather, both backed by nothing but scrub and dune, both among the loveliest beaches in the Caribbean. St Jean is the lively one, its bay split by the Eden Rock promontory, beach clubs at full hum through the season, while Flamands next door stays surprisingly calm.

The whole island is twenty minutes across, which means no anchorage is ever far from the best table in the Caribbean.

The table

Food is where the French inheritance pays out. Accras de morue arrive with the first drink, the catch is mahi mahi or wahoo landed that morning, and the wine lists read like Bordeaux and Burgundy went on holiday together. Maya's has fed the harbour crowd its creole cooking for more than three decades, Bonito looks down over Gustavia with ceviche and a proper cellar, L'Isola does Italian at full volume, and Shellona turns Shell Beach, a few minutes walk from the yacht, into a long Greek afternoon. Provisioning runs through genuinely French suppliers, so the yacht eats as well as the town, and the chef's dawn run for warm baguettes is a St Barths charter ritual in its own right.

The calendar, and when to come

The season opens in November and runs to April. New Year's Eve in Gustavia is the yachting world's school reunion, the outer anchorage stacked with the largest yachts afloat and dinner bookings harder to win than berths. In March the St Barth Bucket sends the world's great sailing yachts racing around the island, and Les Voiles de St Barth follows in April. Peak weeks price accordingly and book out a year ahead. For the same island with the volume turned down, take late November, early December or the shoulder into May, when the water is warm, the restaurants are open and the anchorages breathe again. Late summer is hurricane season and much of the island closes to draw breath. For either version, our charter team knows the moorings, the swell forecasts and the maitre d's by name.