A sample plan prepared for a composite group, published to show the shape and depth of what a Chart Table client receives. Specific provisioning quantities, shopping lists, and vendor arrangements are reserved for clients.
Charter Plan Review
A working review of your booked charter: the boat against your group, a realistic route with alternates, a provisioning plan sized to this boat, and the operating structure that keeps one person from running the whole week.
01
You have the right boat for this group, a realistic budget, and a base that makes your first and last days easy. Three things need attention before you fly.
First, this is a strong sailor's first BVI charter in a packed March mooring season. Hire a captain for the opening day so the checkout and your first crowded mooring aren't the hardest thing you do all week.
Second, your week is quietly two days shorter than the calendar says. Third, your provisioning hasn't yet accounted for this specific boat's refrigeration. Both are easy fixes, and they're below.
02
Four couples who mostly know each other, one pair who've never spent a night on a boat, and one person who gets seasick. That's a good, workable group, and it shapes almost everything that follows.
This isn't a hard-sailing crew and it doesn't need to be. The read from your intake is a group that wants beaches, snorkeling, good dinners, and easy days, with one or two people who'll genuinely enjoy being on the helm. That points to a relaxed route with short hops and time in the water, not a milage-chasing itinerary. Plan the week around the people who want to lie on the trampoline, not the one person who wants to trim sails all day, and everyone including that person has a better time.
Two specific things to get ahead of, because they're the ones that quietly turn into friction:
The biggest single driver of whether a week like this is a joy or a slog is who's aboard, and you've got that right: couples who know each other, no brand-new dates, no strangers. Protect it. If anyone is still deciding whether to add a person the rest of the group doesn't know well, our honest advice is don't. One person who doesn't fit is the hardest problem to solve at sea, because there's nowhere on a boat to get away from it.
03
The Lagoon 46 is a genuinely good choice for four couples: four real cabins, a head in each, and the flat, roomy living space that makes the difference on a group vacation.
You were right to go catamaran and right to go this size. For a group like this a cat is the big RV on the water: a place to spread out, a trampoline to lounge on, private cabins below. A monohull would have been a floating tent that heels while you're trying to relax. Forty-six feet is a comfortable size for eight; it's big enough to live on for a week and still a boat your skipper can handle. Every couple gets a private cabin with its own head, which removes the single most common source of onboard friction before it starts.
The brochure won't tell you the two things that most change your week. Ask your charter company directly:
Four cabins, four couples: nobody's in the salon, which is exactly how it should be. The salon berth that boats advertise as "sleeps two more" is a daytime living room for everyone; using it as a bed is a nightly chore and gives that person no privacy and no storage. Your booking avoids that trap entirely. Keep it that way: this boat is right for eight, not ten.
04
You booked seven days. Between arrival, provisioning, and the boat briefing, you have about five sailing days. A week planned around five days is a joy, while a week planned around seven is a scramble.
No operator releases the boat before the afternoon, and the charter clock starts the moment they do. The realistic shape of your front end: land and sleep ashore, spend a full day provisioning and moving aboard, take your briefings, and sail. Build the week around that and the first two days feel generous instead of frantic. Here's the route we'd run for this group: short hops, time in the water, the party night second-to-last, and an easy last morning.
| Day | Move | Why this, for this group |
|---|---|---|
| Sat | Arrive · night ashore | Land, settle into the villa, dinner and an early night. Do not try to sail today. It isn't possible, and starting tired sets the wrong tone. |
| Sun | Provision · move aboard | Provisioning run in the morning, stow everything, sleep aboard at the base. Take the boat briefing and chart briefing this afternoon if the base can fit you in. |
| Mon | → Marina Cay (2–3 hr) | A short first sail to shake out the boat and the crew. Close to base if you forgot something or a fault surfaces. Low-key mooring, one pretty beach bar. You want a win, not a blowout. |
| Tue | → Virgin Gorda / Bitter End | Up to the North Sound. Snorkeling, an easy afternoon, and the option of a dressed-up dinner at Bitter End if the group wants one elevated night. |
The rest of the week is planned to the same level of detail: the remaining five days with the reasoning behind each stop, the party night placed where it belongs, the weather alternates sized to this group, the Anegada decision, and exactly which moorings to reserve now, where, and on which app.
05
For eight adults, one week, with a couple of dinners ashore, plan on about $2,500 from a single provisioning run at One Mart. The whole thing works if you walk in with an exact meal list, and falls apart if you shop by inspiration.
There isn't enough cold storage on this boat to buy ingredients and "figure out dinner later." You provision for specific meals, breakfast through dinner, or you end up with both waste and shortages on the same trip. Here's the plan.
Family-style, one-pot, cooked by a rotating chef with a helper: nothing that needs plating or a dozen dishes. Every dinner below feeds eight out of one or two pots.
| Night | Dinner | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Mon | Enchiladas | Easy to make ahead, feeds a crowd from the oven, leftovers reheat. |
| Tue | Pasta, protein + veg | One pot, endlessly flexible, uses produce before it turns. |
Four more dinners matched to the route, which nights to eat ashore and why, and the exact market list the whole plan turns into.
Breakfast is a big pan of scrambled eggs and a breakfast meat before you weigh anchor, with toast optional. First one up starts the coffee. Lunch gets made before you leave the mooring: build a whole loaf of sandwiches in the morning, bag it back up, and pull it out underway. Nobody should ever go below to cook while you're sailing. That's how people get sick. A mid-sail sandwich is the move.
Your plan specifies exact amounts for every category below, sized to this boat's refrigeration, your number of nights aboard, and how this particular group eats and drinks. It's the part nobody can look up and get right, and getting it right is the difference between running short on day three and hauling home a cooler of waste.
Plus the exact shopping list, the pack-from-home items, and the two mistakes this group is most likely to make: one over-buy and one under-buy.
This is where our on-island relationships earn their keep. We can have your entire run designed, bought, kept cold, delivered, and stowed on the boat before you land, so you skip the single biggest time-sink and stress of the first day entirely. Or, if you'd rather shop yourself, we hand you the exact list and the local knowledge to do it fast. Ask us about full provisioning service.
06
This is the part that decides whether your skipper gets a vacation or becomes the unpaid staff. None of it is hard. It just has to be decided before anyone boards, not negotiated at the dock.
Four couples, four cabins: a flat fee per cabin, split evenly, no argument. The cabins on this boat are close enough in quality that it isn't worth a bidding war; assign them and move on. One tip your skipper will thank us for: take an aft cabin on the opposite hull from the air conditioning unit. It's a touch quieter at night.
Keep it simple and it never becomes the thing people remember:
Everyone has a job; nobody's stuck with all of them. Assign these before the trip:
Get buy-in by making it known before anyone arrives that chores are part of the trip, and then make them fun. A beer and a buddy while you swab the deck, telling stories about yesterday's sail, is a good time, not a burden. When everyone has skin in the game, the crew forms around it.
On the water, the skipper's word is final: safety, departure, and route aren't a democracy, and everyone should know that going in. The trade, and it's what makes the authority work: the skipper listens to everyone, takes every concern, and genuinely wants the crew calling out anything they see: a boat closing, a rock, a wrong-sounding noise. One person has one set of eyes. A crew that knows its observations are valued respects the calls that have to be one person's to make.
07
The two ends of the trip are where the avoidable stress lives. Handle them deliberately and the middle takes care of itself.
Three ways in, in rough order of ease:
Whichever you choose, you're arriving the day before you sail, so plan the villa night into the trip, not as an afterthought.
Until you're off the dock, your departure time belongs to the charter company, not you: the briefing schedule, the walkthrough, and the one small fault that always surfaces on checkout. Get on the base manager's list early, be easy and on time, learn names. Where you sit on that list is the difference between a twenty-minute fix and losing an afternoon. And leaving late with a working boat always beats leaving early with something broken.
The end of the week gets tight and hectic unless you front-load it:
Plan a group call a week after everyone's home: pass around photos, tell the stories. Coming home from a trip like this is jarring, and the debrief is how a hard-in-the-moment week becomes the one everyone wants to do again. It costs nothing and it's the difference between a vacation and a tradition.
08
In rough order, over the next two to three weeks:
When you're ready, we can take any of this the rest of the way: full provisioning handled on island, boat-fit questions with the operator, or a group prep call before you go.