The other week
The island the boat cannot reach
There are places worth a week that no yacht programme reaches without a month of passage. That is what hotels are for.
A yacht is a wonderful machine with one structural limitation: she is where she is. A boat in the Mediterranean in July is four weeks and an ocean away from French Polynesia, and no amount of money compresses that. So the owners who use the water best keep two kinds of week: the one on the boat, and the one on an island the boat will never see.
The places that only work by air and then by boat
- French Polynesia: fly to Tahiti, then a hotel's own boat or a light aircraft to the atolls.
- The Maldives: a seaplane from Malé, and a resort that is the whole island.
- The Seychelles inner and outer islands, where the outer ones are private and reached by charter flight.
- The outer Caribbean and the Grenadine private islands, some of which rent whole.
- Parts of Indonesia and the Mergui archipelago, where the only serious alternative is a chartered expedition yacht.
The shore side of a yachting year: the dock, the terrace, the anchorage and the club
What the hotel does that the boat cannot
Stand still in one perfect place, with a spa, a dive centre, staff who live there and a reef that does not move. A yacht is a machine for seeing several places imperfectly; a great island hotel is a machine for seeing one place completely. Guests who love both usually describe the difference in exactly those terms.
And it removes the crew. Owners who spend eight weeks a year with thirteen people looking after them occasionally want a week where nobody knows their name at breakfast.
The charter alternative
For the same money as a fortnight at the best island resorts, a family can charter a yacht locally: a catamaran in the Grenadines, an expedition boat in Raja Ampat, a phinisi in Indonesia. It is a different standard of comfort and a much better standard of access, and it is how experienced travellers do the remote end of the world.
The rule of thumb, from people who have done both: if the point is the reef, charter locally. If the point is the rest, take the hotel.
Use it now
Shore Base Finder
Hotels with a dock, hotels as a charter base, and hotels for the week off the boat.
