Antigua & Barbuda

The passage into English Harbour on Antigua is one of those approaches that rewards the navigator who knows what is coming. The entrance is narrow — the headland of Fort Berkeley to port, Fort Charlotte to starboard — and the harbour itself is small and almost landlocked. Then it opens, and Nelson’s Dockyard is there: eighteenth-century Georgian naval architecture in coral stone, meticulously restored, occupied now by charter boats and a handful of excellent restaurants rather than His Majesty’s frigates, but still entirely legible as a working dockyard. An Antigua superyacht charter that does not include at least one night here is missing the point.

Nelson himself was not particularly happy in English Harbour — he called it ‘this vile place’ and spent his posting trying to leave — but he left behind the finest collection of Georgian dockyard buildings in the Caribbean, and the Antiguan government has invested seriously in their preservation. The Pillars of Hercules restaurant, in one of the restored sail lofts, is the finest dining in the harbour. The Dockyard Museum, in the former Naval Officer’s House, tells the full story.

Antigua Sailing Week in late April is, for those inclined, the best reason to time a charter around a sporting event in the Caribbean. The racing is genuinely competitive at the top level, the social programme is relentless, and the spectator experience from an anchored superyacht off the race start line at Carlisle Bay is one of the Caribbean’s most animated spectacles. ADY manages Antigua Sailing Week berth reservations as part of charter planning for the relevant dates.

Barbuda is the island that Antigua Sailing Week does not talk about much, because it requires an overnight passage north across the Barbuda Channel and a different kind of intention. The island is flat, low-lying, covered with scrub and inhabited by a small population that raises deer and processes seafood. The Frigate Bird Sanctuary — the largest colony of magnificent frigatebirds in the Western Hemisphere, nesting in the lagoon on the island’s western edge — is reached by small boat through mangrove channels. The pink-sand beach at Codrington Lagoon is fifteen kilometres long and, on most days, empty. An Antigua superyacht charter that extends to Barbuda is the version that you remember differently from the rest.