TravelTalkOnline Forums Travel and Vacation Forums Southern Caribbean Sunsail/Moorings owners

Looking for advice from Sunsail/Moorings owners.

If you read my earlier post you saw that we are looking into charter boat ownership. Thanks all for your advice about different companies. I think we are going to go with Sunsail/Moorings for 2 major reasons...one the flexibility of being able to sail in different parts of the world and two the guaranteed income and the fact we don’t have to pay for maintenance.

My question is where would it be best to have it charter out of. Our choices are BVI, St. Lucia, Grenada. Anyone have experiences with these bases as owners? Do you feel like one place would get less wear and tear on the boat? I was thinking Grenada or St. Lucia over BVI just due to the fact that I feel like more inexperienced people charter in the BVI over the windward islands. If you have your boat at any of the above places do you have feedback on how you feel they take care of your boat?

hello, we're 'owners' in the Sunsail programme which is the sister of Moorings and these days we're all part of the same family. 'Our boat' is based in Lefkas, Greece but we sail all over the place & have been as far as Thailand, French Polynesia, The Caribbean and several bases in the Med, as you say, the variety and choice of sailing vacations in the programme is fantastic. Re 'your boat' we chatted to ex & current owners before going into the programme & have concluded that it's best not to think of it as your own boat; we have a Sunsail 404 which is a Moorings 4000 and I don't know but let's say there are a 100 of those out there, we feel like shareholders of them all, we're not at all precious about people getting on ours and we love the fact that we can get on 404's wherever we go, it's a timeshare system really in our eyes/ opinion. The base crews and staff are good everywhere, the boats get looked after & maintained well so we're very happy to be in the programme. I guess 'ownership' only becomes an issue at the end of the contract when you're deciding whether to buy the boat outright, and that's a whole different conversation, you'll have 5+ years of great sailing holidays before then, get in there & enjoy it

Thank you so much for the feedback. Since my last post we have found a boat that is based in Martinique. It is a Moorings 4000. We have also changed our view of it being "our boat" based on conversations we have had with different people. We had originally thought that we would be keeping the boat for personal use after it came out of charter but have since changed our mind due to the fact that Sunsail/Moorings no longer are putting new owner's cabin boats in charter. So, the boat we are purchasing is probably just our entry level boat and we will enjoy the next 64 months of being able to sail in different places and family trips back to our favorites.

Our good friend had his Moorings boat in charter for 5 years and then took delivery when it came out of the program. Now he wishes he would have just bought another boat and put the NEW boat in the Moorings program because he liked traveling anywhere he wanted a boat, instead of now owning the boat and just sailing the Caribbean. Hmmm.

We will soon be facing the same dilemma. If you think about what you spend on the boat in the scheme as defraying your costs against multiple charter holidays over the next 5 years, and you can actually use more than two weeks of owners time a year, then this is a great way to see the world and while not 'bargain prices' a lot cheaper than what you would have spent chartering the same amount of weeks as a paying customer. We go at least 6 weeks a year, instead of chartering only two weeks a year prior to joining the scheme. I have loved it.