The northeastern United States has been a yacht charter destination since the earliest days of the American yachting tradition. Newport, Rhode Island — home of the America’s Cup for over a century — sits at the southern end of a coast that runs through Narragansett Bay, Buzzards Bay, Vineyard Sound and Nantucket to the granite islands and lobster-trap-buoyed passages of Maine. The sailing here is proper sailing: tidal currents, variable winds, fog on the banks in July.
Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket have their own mythologies — the summer communities, the grey-shingle architecture, the bicycles on the ferry docks. By superyacht, they are experienced differently: you arrive into Vineyard Haven in the evening and own it until the ferries start in the morning. The summer social calendar — regatta weekends, the concert series, the restaurant season — is available at whatever level of participation you choose.
The Pacific Northwest is a different matter. The Inside Passage from Puget Sound north to the Alaska Panhandle is one of the great cruising routes of the world: sheltered water between Vancouver Island and the mainland coast, punctuated by First Nations cultural sites, glacier-fed fjords, black bear on the shoreline and humpback whales in the straits. The light in July — twenty hours of it — is unlike anything in the lower forty-eight.
Alaska proper extends the itinerary north: Glacier Bay National Park, where tidewater glaciers calve directly into water the vessel is anchored in, is accessible to superyachts and offers an experience that belongs to a different category from conventional charter entirely.
