Just returned from 2 weeks with Conch Charters on our first cat charter and first charter with the company. Hope the following will be of use to future charterers.
For reference, I have chartered with Horizon, BVI yacht charters (twice) and Conch. Horizon was good although they mostly have Bavaria boats, not my favorite, but a good operation. Our biggest problem was that the main halyard came loose at the sail and we lost a day while they fixed it (and a crew member tole me they implied we may have caused the problem). I like BVIYC which I think is one of the best second teir outfits but they recently started to direct you to their brokers for discount information so this time Conch had the best deal for our time period, at least on a small cat. I sent emails to Conch, BVIYC and Island Yachts in St. Thomas and Conch was the most responsive by far to my emails and offered a good price on a Lagoon 380 cat. The boat, Kokomo, was clean and in good shape although my mate disliked the lack of counter top and cabinet space which seems common to small cats. Briefly, we had a probelm when the starbord engine quit, unfortunatly the one that powered the fridge. Their responce was pretty good to what turned out to be a rather difficult problem. Pretty good because I felt that they should have priortized a little better as we spent two nights, three days, in Little Harbor on Peter when we could have probably spent 1 night, two days if they had responded quicker. They were a little slow in returning when the problem turned out not to be fixed and their reasons were suspect at best. Otherwise the boat performed well. On return we waited two hours for our checkout, not sure why. We were given free fuel and a ride to the ferry for our engine difficulties. While waiting to checkout I had a chance to visit the boats that were on the dock and my feeling was that most of them were older but clean and well kept except for the large cat "Kronos?" which looked rather well used and their small monohull "Girls Night Out?" would only satisfy the most budget concious. Other than that I was surprised to find our boat had an autopilot which they didn't advertise, and a GPS but no local map chip. Finally, Conch has Anagada off limits as well as many other sites that someone that has been to the BVI might find overly restrictive.
Would I do it again. Yes, but I really wanted to try the Spanish VI this time which was of course off limits. I would ask a few more questions over the phone to find out more about the specific boat, Conch seems less internet oriented but has a free 800 number to call, but that may be my hang up. If there are problems they are technically very capable to handle it but you may have to be more assertive than I like to be on vacation to get problems resolved or speed things along. I don't mean to make this sound as if we did not have a good time, we did, or that we would not recommend Conch Charters. I just wanted to post my feelings about our experiences on this trip while they are fresh on my mind.
