British Virgin Islands · Private charter planning
The hardest part of a BVI charter is rarely sailing the boat. It is the boat you chose, the food you guessed at, the route you over-packed, and the fact that one person ends up working through the entire vacation. I fix those before you leave.
What actually goes wrong
Floor plans don't show berth quality, headroom, storage, refrigeration, or how four couples and a hired captain actually share three heads for a week. The brochure number and the livable number are different numbers.
Quantities depend on your galley, your fridge and freezer, how many nights you're ashore, who drinks what, and how hard the group plays. Most groups buy the wrong amount of the wrong things and discover it on day three.
One person books, plans, provisions, decides, mediates, reconciles the money, and cleans up. That role is created by an absence of structure — which means it can be designed out before anyone boards.
The work
Both start the same way: a working session where I go through your actual trip, and a written document your whole group can use. Deeper engagements — full trip design, provisioning execution on island, and group operations — are quoted after the first conversation.
Ninety minutes on your actual trip, and a document your whole group can use.
Who you'd be working with
I've sailed the British Virgin Islands since I was twelve and captained my own boat there since sixteen. Twenty years later, it's still the trip I most want to be on.
It began as my parents' dream — two Jimmy Buffett fans who wanted to see the islands he sang about. When my stepdad, a Navy captain, joined the family and asked where we most wanted to travel, the answer was the BVI, and we've gone back nearly every year since. He taught me to sail; trial, error, and a stubborn love of getting things right when there's no room to get them wrong did the rest.
Over more than twenty years I've run everything from a 50-foot monohull to a 55-foot catamaran and most things in between — in just about every wind, sea state, and boat-or-crew surprise the islands can produce. That's where the judgment comes from: not a brochure or a blog, but two decades of learning firsthand what makes a week effortless and what quietly wrecks it. And I love it out there — the steady trade winds, the warm water, the even warmer people.
Somewhere along the way it became clear we were unusually good at this. The people we brought down were struck by how smoothly our weeks ran — and it was just as clear, watching other groups, how stressful and chaotic the same trip could be. There's a wide gap between what people picture and what they actually get. Closing it is the whole reason Chart Table exists.
I don't sell boats and I'm not a charter company — I have no stake in your trip except that it goes well. I tell you exactly what I'd do if it were my week and my group, and I put it in writing. I've spent my career on the business and legal side of complex deals, and I bring that same independent, in-your-corner scrutiny to your charter: reading the fine print, pressure-testing the plan, and making sure you get real value for what a week like this costs.
Alex Robertson — Founder, Chart Table
Free assessment
A short diagnostic on the things that decide whether a charter works. You'll get a readiness score, a breakdown by category, and the specific risks in your trip as it stands today.
This changes which questions matter.