Boating News
Bareboat Chartering 101- It's easy, it's a deal, and short of selling up and setting sail, it's the best way to see the world from the deck of a boat
By Lynda Morris Childress
In the early 1950s, Eric and Susan Hiscock built a 30-foot wooden cruising sloop and set out to sail the world. Over the next 30 years of wandering, they wrote and published volumes about ocean voyaging that fueled the dreams of countless others who followed in their wake. Though their books remain classics and the tenets of good seamanship they set forth remain unchanged, much about the cruising world has changed since the Hiscocks first went to sea.
Fifty years ago, the only way a sailor with wanderlust could see the world under sail was to stash away some cash, buy a boat, outfit it for ocean voyaging, sever his shoreside connections, hoist the sails, and go.
All that began to change in the mid to late 1960s when Jack Van Ost started Caribbean Sailing Yachts (CSY) on Tortola, in the British Virgin Islands. By the 1970s, Van Ost and CSY had expanded down island to St. Vincent. Also jumping in to the charter game on Tortola were Charlie and Ginny Carey, who in 1969 started a company called The Moorings. Their fledgling business, providing qualified clients with clean, well-equipped boats for rent without skippers or crew, helped ignite an industry that today puts the dreams of faraway ports at the fingertips of sailors all over the world.
Why Bareboat Charter?
Today, it�s not necessary to cast off the dock lines and leave land life behind to visit places that once were only accessible to the Hiscocks and a handful of others. Now, charter bases are in almost every corner of the world, and thanks to jet travel, it�s possible to explore the most remote ones and still be back in the office three weeks later.
If you�re a longtime boat owner, you may have been sailing the same boat for years. Maybe you�ve thought of trading up. In addition to simply being fun, sailing a variety of different boats makes you a better skipper or crewmember. Because �bareboating� means that you and your crew are fully responsible for safely operating the boat and navigating successfully in unfamiliar waters, meeting these new challenges will improve your skills.
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