Our Sailing
Destinations

The Ionian Islands define what Greek sailing should be: reliable afternoon winds, anchorages sheltered enough to sleep soundly, water so transparent that the sea floor is visible at six metres, and an island-to-island rhythm where every morning brings a new horizon. Seven distinct islands stretch across an azure arc — each utterly different in character, architecture and cuisine — yet every one of them within an easy day's sail of the last. For first-time charter guests and seasoned sailors alike, this is where the Mediterranean delivers on every promise.

The classic charter circuit departs Lefkada — road-linked to the mainland, thirty minutes from Preveza airport — and unwinds at a natural pace southward: the unspoiled lagoon bays of Meganisi, the perfectly preserved Venetian harbour village of Fiskardo on Kefalonia, the mythic anchorages of Ithaka, the improbable turquoise of Paxos and Antipaxos, and the cinematic limestone theatre of Navagio Bay on Zakynthos. No ferry transfers, no demanding passages, no compromises. The wind does the work; you enjoy the result.

• 🏖Porto Katsiki, Lefkada — consistently ranked among the finest beaches in Europe, and unmistakably so. White chalk cliffs plunge directly into fluorescent turquoise water; the contrast is so vivid that first-time visitors assume the photographs are edited. The beach is only accessible by sea or a long, steep clifftop descent — arriving by yacht in the early morning, with the anchorage entirely to yourself, is one of the great small privileges of Ionian sailing.
• 🏛Fiskardo, Kefalonia — the only Ionian village to survive the devastating 1953 earthquake intact, its Venetian-era architecture perfectly preserved in amber. Bougainvillea-draped neoclassical facades face a harbour shallow enough to see every anchor stone. Arrive before 17:00 to secure a berth, then spend the evening over Robola wine and fresh calamari at one of the waterfront tavernas that have served sailors here for generations.
• ⛵Ithaka — Odysseus's Island — sail into Vathy Bay on a long Mediterranean evening and you understand immediately why Homer's hero spent ten years trying to get home. The near-landlocked inlet is flanked by steep pine-covered hillsides, the white and terracotta houses of Vathy perfectly reflected in still water. The northern anchorages of Frikes and Kioni are smaller, quieter, and beloved by those who know the island well.
• 🏝Paxos & Antipaxos — two small islands south of Corfu whose reputation among sailors far exceeds their size. Paxos offers three characterful harbours: Gaios (the main town, with a Venetian fortress island), Loggos (a handful of tables, a single taverna, absolute calm) and Lakka (a horseshoe bay of textbook perfection). Antipaxos is almost entirely two beaches — Voutoumi and Vrika — where the water is the colour of the Caribbean and the sand is powdery white. Arrive by 14:00 in July and August to secure a mooring.
• 📸Navagio Bay, Zakynthos — the most photographed anchorage in the entire Mediterranean. An enclosed limestone amphitheatre frames a rusting freighter (abandoned here in 1980) against white sand and water of an almost unreal deep blue. Swim ashore in the early morning before the tourist excursion boats arrive; the north coast Blue Caves, only reachable by sea, complete this extraordinary day.
• 🌊Meganisi — the island time forgot — just fifteen minutes under sail from Nidri, yet a world away from the charter circuit. Three villages, deeply indented bays and no mass tourism to speak of. The tiny harbour at Spartochori has been a waypoint for local fishermen and passing yachts in equal measure for decades; the taverna at the top of the steps is where you discover what Greek cooking actually tastes like away from the tourist trail.

There is something extraordinary about clearing Lavrio Marina — forty minutes from Athens airport — and finding yourself, within hours, anchored beneath the pine-covered hillsides of Aegina, the Temple of Aphaia visible from the cockpit. The Saronic Gulf is the Mediterranean's most convenient sailing ground, and one of its finest.

The real discovery lies further east: Kea, Kythnos, Serifos and Sifnos receive a fraction of the crowds that swamp Santorini and Mykonos, yet match them in beauty and surpass them in authenticity. Sifnos alone — exceptional gastronomy, a clifftop monastery, the Chrysopigi sea-rock chapel — is worth the entire charter.

• 🚫Hydra — no cars, no motorbikes, no scooters have been permitted since the 1950s. Donkeys carry the luggage up the stepped lanes; cats rule the harbour walls. The 18th-century stone mansions of the island's shipping captains rise in an amphitheatre above one of the most perfectly proportioned harbours in the Aegean. Med-moor stern-to on the quay by late afternoon and watch the whole town come down to the waterfront at dusk.
• 🏛Aegina & Poros — the Temple of Aphaia (around 500 BCE) crowns a pine ridge and rivals the Parthenon for condition and setting; the island's pistachio orchards produce Greece's finest nuts, sold straight from the quay. An easy reach south, Poros sits in a narrow channel barely 200 metres off the Peloponnese, its clocktower town mirrored in flat, sheltered water — a textbook first overnight stop.
• ⛪Sifnos & the western Cyclades — Sifnos is a gastronomic island: mastelo lamb baked in clay, revithada chickpea stew left overnight in the oven, and the whitewashed Chrysopigi monastery balanced on its own sea-rock promontory. Neighbouring Serifos, Kythnos and Kea draw a fraction of the Santorini crowds — Kythnos even has natural hot springs running warm into the sea at Loutra.
• ⚓Lavrio — 40 minutes from the airport — clear the ATH terminal, pass the Temple of Poseidon at Cape Sounion on the drive in, and walk aboard the same evening. Sail Saturday morning straight into the Saronic Gulf. No island ferry transfer, no long delivery leg — the simplest charter logistics in Greece.
• 💨Reading the Meltemi — the dry north wind blows force 5–7 through July and August, brilliant for fast downwind passages but demanding at exposed anchorages. Sail in June, September or October for settled conditions, or plan early-afternoon arrivals into sheltered bays before the wind tops out for the day.

Seven volcanic islands rising from the Tyrrhenian Sea north of Sicily — some lush and perfumed with capers and Malvasia vines, others raw, sulphurous and geologically violent — form a UNESCO World Heritage landscape that has astonished sailors since the ancient Greeks named it after Aeolus, god of the winds.

Arriving by yacht is the only way to truly experience the Aeolians. To anchor in a deserted cala at Panarea while the ferry tourists queue for the hydrofoil, or drift past Vulcano's active caldera with sulphur on the air — is to inhabit a completely different journey from any other visitor on the water.

• 🌋Stromboli by night — time the approach to the Sciara del Fuoco for the hours either side of midnight. From two or three miles offshore the eruptions are unmistakable: a deep cough from the cone, then glowing rock tumbling down the black slope into the sea every fifteen to twenty minutes. Drop sail, let the boat drift and go quiet — there is nothing else quite like it in the Mediterranean.
• 🍸Panarea — the smallest and most exclusive island in the chain. Anchor off Cala Junco, a near-perfect rock-rimmed cove beside a Bronze Age settlement, or pick up a buoy off the islet of Lisca Bianca, then take the tender in to the single whitewashed village for dinner. No cars, one footpath of a main street, and the clearest water in the archipelago.
• 🍷Salina — the green island, rising to two extinct cones cloaked in caper bushes and Malvasia vines. Anchor off Pollara, the sunken-crater bay where Il Postino was filmed, for the finest sunset in the islands. The sweet Malvasia delle Lipari and the salt-cured capers are among southern Italy's great artisan products — buy both ashore in Santa Marina.
• 🛁Vulcano & Lipari — at Vulcano the natural sulphur mud baths sit right at the foot of the Gran Cratere; the smell announces the island a mile downwind, and the climb to the steaming crater rim takes about an hour. Lipari, the lively capital, has a clifftop castle, an outstanding archaeological museum and full provisioning — the practical hub of any Aeolian cruise.
• 🏝Filicudi & Alicudi — the two western outliers: no roads to speak of, barely a car, almost no other yachts. Anchor below the Bronze Age village at Capo Graziano on Filicudi, or off Alicudi, where mules still carry supplies up the stone stairways and the night sky is genuinely black. Complete, deliberate isolation.

The Strait of Bonifacio — between Sardinia's northern tip and the limestone cliffs of Corsica — concentrates every superlative the western Mediterranean has to offer: Caribbean-clear water, white-granite rockscapes polished by the Mistral, and a dramatic citadel clinging to the clifftop 70 metres above the sea.

Our signature two-week loop runs north from Olbia along the Costa Smeralda, through the Maddalena park, across the Strait to Bonifacio, then up Corsica's wild west coast to the Calanques de Piana — pink granite columns rising from the sea, a UNESCO landscape that seems almost geologically impossible.

• 🌊Maddalena Archipelago — sixty-two granite islands inside a national park, with water clarity that genuinely rivals the tropics. Anchor off Spargi at Cala Corsara, work the coves around Caprera (Garibaldi's island), and look in on the rose-tinted Spiaggia Rosa on Budelli — protected, off-limits to feet, but extraordinary from the water. The pink-and-grey rock, sculpted by millennia of Mistral, exists nowhere else in the Mediterranean.
• 🏰Bonifacio — there is no finer harbour entrance in the western Med. Sail into the hidden, fjord-like inlet beneath a citadel that grows straight out of 70-metre white limestone cliffs, undercut by the sea below. Moor in the inner marina, climb the stairway to the Haute Ville at dusk, and eat where the day-boats land. Just south lie the Lavezzi islands — low granite skerries over clear, shallow sand.
• 🌅Golfe de Porto & the Calanques de Piana — Corsica's UNESCO west coast: pink-granite pinnacles plunging into the sea, the Scandola nature reserve alongside reachable only by boat, and the hamlet of Girolata with no road in at all. Anchor in the gulf and watch the cliffs run from rose to gold to deep blood-red as the sun drops behind them.
• ⛵Costa Smeralda — Porto Cervo and Porto Rotondo offer full-service marinas, superyacht people-watching and the best provisioning on the coast, while quieter Cala di Volpe and the Capriccioli beaches sit only minutes away. Sail in early September and the Maxi Yacht Rolex Cup turns the whole gulf into the most spectacular free regatta in Europe.
• ⚠️Respect the Mistral — the northwesterly funnels through the Strait of Bonifacio and can build to force 7–8 with little warning, raising a short, steep sea. Always read the three-day forecast before committing to the passage, cross early in the day, and keep a bolt-hole anchorage ready on the Sardinian shore.

The French Riviera is sailing's most glamorous address: a 300-kilometre arc of coastline where the Maritime Alps descend directly to the sea, creating sheltered bays, iconic ports and pristine island nature reserves within a single week's sailing.

The Îles d'Hyères — Porquerolles, Port-Cros and Île du Levant — are the Riviera's best-kept sailing secret: a national park of pristine turquoise water and pine-forested beaches just an hour's sail from Saint-Tropez. Porquerolles in particular is a revelation: no cars, limited development since the 1970s, vineyard-to-sea beaches that belong entirely to the national park.

• 🏁Monaco — the most concentrated wealth on any waterfront on earth, and a genuinely thrilling place to bring a yacht. Berth or anchor off Port Hercule, walk up to Le Rocher and the old town, and time a May visit to the Grand Prix, when the harbour becomes the most extraordinary motorsport grandstand in existence — the cars threading the streets a few metres from your cockpit.
• 🎬Cannes, Antibes & the Îles de Lérins — the Vieux Port of Cannes and the vast Port-Vauban at Antibes are the working heart of Riviera yachting. A mile off Cannes lie the quiet Lérins islands: Sainte-Marguerite, with the fortress that held the Man in the Iron Mask, and Saint-Honorat, where monks still make wine — a calm anchorage within sight of the red carpet.
• 🏝Porquerolles & the Îles d'Hyères — the Riviera's best-kept sailing secret. Porquerolles is car-free, protected within the Parc National de Port-Cros, its pine forests and vineyard-backed beaches giving way to water as clear as anywhere in Provence. Anchor off the Plage Notre-Dame, cycle the dirt tracks, and taste the island's own Côtes de Provence rosé in the village square.
• 🌴Saint-Tropez & the Esterel — the Vieux Port is small and fiercely coveted; arrive early or anchor in the bay and tender ashore to the cafés of the old quay. South lies the three-kilometre sweep of Pampelonne; westward, the Massif de l'Esterel drops blood-red porphyry cliffs straight into the sea, with secluded calanques for a midday swim.
• 💨Working with the Mistral — the northwesterly can rise to force 6–7, most often in spring, building a sharp sea off the exposed capes. Shelter lies on the eastern sides of the Hyères islands; check MÉTÉO-FRANCE before every passage. Its one gift: once it has blown through, the air is scrubbed completely clear and the coastal visibility is astonishing.

At 60 degrees north in midsummer, the sun barely sets — it grazes the mountain peaks around midnight and rises again before 4am, painting the fjord walls in colours that shift from steel blue to copper to palest gold. To sail beneath 1,000-metre cliffs with waterfalls cascading from snowfields into the horizon is to experience landscape at a scale that recalibrates everything.

The challenge is real: fjord winds are localised, katabatic gusts arrive without warning from mountain gaps, and the water rarely exceeds 17°C even in July. This is sailing for those who want to feel genuinely alive — for sailors who return from the Adriatic with their appetite for adventure still unsatisfied.

• 🏔Sognefjord & the Nærøyfjord — Norway's longest fjord runs 204 kilometres inland and over 1,300 metres deep. Its UNESCO-listed Nærøy branch narrows to barely 250 metres between walls that climb to 1,700, waterfalls dropping straight from the snowfields. Motor in slowly toward the village of Gudvangen; the only sounds are the falls and your own wake against the rock.
• 🌸Hardangerfjord — the orchard fjord, easiest to reach from Bergen. Eidfjord sits at its head below the thundering Vøringsfossen and the vast Hardangervidda plateau; in May the banks turn white with cherry and apple blossom, and the boldest hikers walk out onto the Trolltunga ledge high above the water.
• ⚓Bergen & the home waters — the old Hanseatic wharf at Bryggen (UNESCO) is the city's heart. Provision at the harbourside fish market, ride the Fløibanen funicular for the departure view, then thread out through a sheltered maze of skerries and island sounds. Undredal, deep in the fjords, is worth the stop for its tiny stave church and its brown goat's cheese.
• 🌞The midnight sun — from late May to mid-July the sun never truly sets north of Bergen; it grazes the peaks near midnight and lifts again before four. Sailing a night passage in full golden light is disorientating at first and then completely addictive — though you will want blackout blinds in the cabins to sleep at all.
• 🦅Lofoten (for the ambitious) — far to the north, jagged peaks rise sheer from the Arctic sea, red rorbu cabins line every harbour, and the slim Trollfjord opens like a trapdoor in the cliffs. White nights through midsummer, the first northern lights from late August. As dramatic as sailing in Europe gets — best taken on with miles already under the keel.

The Baltic is sailing's best-kept secret: a vast inland sea of 377,000 km², home to some of the world's most intricate island archipelagos, with near-zero tidal range and a constellation of extraordinary UNESCO-listed cities along its shores.

The cities are what make a Baltic circuit unique: Stockholm's Gamla Stan, Helsinki's Art Nouveau harbour district, Tallinn's medieval core — perfectly preserved within its 13th-century walls — and Riga's Art Nouveau boulevards. No other sailing route in Europe passes through so many architecturally extraordinary capitals within a single charter week.

• ⛵Stockholm Archipelago — some thirty thousand islands fanning eighty kilometres out from the city. Sail from the cobbled quays of Gamla Stan past Vaxholm's fortress guarding the inner approach, then out to Sandhamn, the sailing village at the finish of the classic Round Gotland Race. In the inner skerries, red timber boathouses sit on bare granite and the water lies mirror-flat through the long midsummer evening.
• 🏰Gotland & Visby — Sweden's largest island, an overnight passage out into the open Baltic. Visby is a complete walled Hanseatic town: 3.4 kilometres of 13th-century rampart, dozens of towers and a skyline of roofless medieval church ruins. Time your arrival for August's Medieval Week, when the whole town steps back six hundred years.
• 🏛Tallinn & the Estonian coast — moor at the city harbour and walk straight into one of the best-preserved medieval cores in Europe: the merchants' lower town, the upper hill of Toompea, two kilometres of original wall. Out west, the quiet islands of Saaremaa and Hiiumaa offer juniper heath, old windmills and the moated bishop's castle at Kuressaare.
• 🇫🇮Helsinki & the Åland Islands — approach Helsinki past Suomenlinna, the great UNESCO sea fortress spread across islands at the harbour mouth. Westward lie the Åland Islands — Finnish by flag, Swedish by tongue, thousands of skerries deep — where Mariehamn keeps the towering windjammer Pommern as its maritime museum.
• 🌊No tides, no swell — the tidal range across most of the Baltic is only a few centimetres, and there is no ocean swell to contend with. Tidal planning disappears entirely, shallow skerry channels that would unnerve an Atlantic navigator open up, and anchoring becomes about as relaxed as cruising ever gets.

A direct flight of four hours puts you on the quayside in Las Palmas — and you arrive to 24°C, clear skies and 15 knots of north-easterly trade wind. The Canary Islands offer year-round sailing, with the best conditions from October to May: Caribbean-quality weather, without the transatlantic crossing.

Each island carries a radically different character: Lanzarote's otherworldly black lava fields and César Manrique's architecture erupting from the rock, Fuerteventura's Saharan sand dunes, and Tenerife's Teide — at 3,718 metres the highest peak in the Atlantic — towering above the cloud layer like a navigation mark for the whole archipelago.

• 💨Trade-wind reliability — the northeasterly trades blow a steady 15–25 knots roughly four days in five from October to May. These are the same winds that carried Columbus west in 1492, and they hand the charter sailor one glorious broad reach after another between the islands — a real taste of ocean sailing without ever leaving European airspace or crossing a time zone.
• ⚓Las Palmas de Gran Canaria — one of the great city marinas of the eastern Atlantic, with first-class fuel, provisioning and marine services and the lively Real Club Náutico ashore. Each November it fills with the ARC fleet preparing to cross to St Lucia; the island behind offers the dunes of Maspalomas and green ravines climbing into a cloud-forested interior.
• 🌋Lanzarote & La Graciosa — the artist César Manrique's island: the Jameos del Agua auditorium inside a lava tube, the Mirador del Río, the smoking ground of Timanfaya. Sail north through the strait to La Graciosa, a roadless island of sand tracks and white houses at Caleta del Sebo, and anchor off the golden Playas de Papagayo on the way.
• 🐋Tenerife & the Los Gigantes cliffs — the west coast runs beneath sheer 500-metre walls dropping straight into deep blue water, over a strait where pilot whales and dolphins are resident year-round. Teide — at 3,718 metres the highest peak in the Atlantic — stands above the cloud layer over your shoulder for the whole passage, a natural landfall mark for the entire archipelago.
• 🏛La Gomera — the last port before the New World — San Sebastián is where Columbus took on water in 1492, and it still feels like a frontier town. Behind it rise the dripping laurel forests of Garajonay (UNESCO); to the southwest, the Valle Gran Rey cuts terraced and palm-filled down to a black-sand bay — the classic end point of a Canary cruise.

This is the destination we know best, and the one we send sailors to with the most confidence. The Grenadines are a hundred-and-twenty-kilometre chain of islands strung along steady trade winds and warm, flat, turquoise water. You wake to a different anchorage every morning, sail an easy reach by lunchtime, and can smell the nutmeg on the breeze before you have even raised the land — short hops, reliable wind, no tidal gymnastics, and a swim off the stern at 29°C to close every day.

Grenada itself — the Spice Island — is the most Caribbean island in the Caribbean: green, mountainous, unhurried and genuinely warm in every sense. True Blue Marina, our partner base on the island's sheltered south coast, handles the whole charter end to end — boat provisioned, fuelled and briefed, with on-the-ground local knowledge no pilot book can carry — so that on the morning you step aboard, all that is left to do is slip the lines and turn north into the islands.

• 🐢Tobago Cays Marine Park — simply one of the great anchorages on earth: five uninhabited islands tucked behind Horseshoe Reef, the open Atlantic breaking on the coral a few hundred metres to windward while you lie in flat, electric-turquoise water. Pick up a park mooring before mid-morning, snorkel the reef wall, swim with the wild green turtles grazing the seagrass, and take the tender to Petit Bateau for lobster grilled on the sand at sunset. No anchoring on the coral — ever.
• 🌺St. George's, Grenada — a horseshoe of pastel warehouses wrapped around the Carenage, its working harbour. Climb to Fort George for the view over the whole anchorage, wander the Saturday market for nutmeg, mace, cloves and cinnamon grown a few kilometres inland, and snorkel or dive the Underwater Sculpture Park at Molinere Bay just up the coast — the first installation of its kind in the world.
• ⛵Bequia (BECK-way) — the most loved island in the chain. Admiralty Bay is a wide, easy, deep-water anchorage with the whole town strung around its shore; the old whaling traditions live on in the model-boat workshops near Port Elizabeth, and the path round to Princess Margaret Beach for a sundowner is a charter ritual. The kind of island guests ask to sail back to.
• 🤿Carriacou & the quiet north — Grenada's sleepy sister island, a half-day's sail up the chain, where the village of Windward still builds wooden sloops by hand on the beach. Anchor off Sandy Island — a sliver of white sand and palms inside a reef — and you may have a Caribbean postcard entirely to yourself. Mayreau and Salt Whistle Bay lie just beyond.
• 🪁Union Island & Mayreau — the southern Grenadines at their most relaxed: Clifton's reef-protected lagoon is a world-class flat-water kitesurfing spot, and a few hundred metres offshore sits Happy Island, a bar built by hand on a heap of conch shells. Nearby, Mayreau's Salt Whistle Bay is a near-perfect crescent where the Caribbean and the Atlantic are separated by a single strip of palms.
• ⭐The PBC partner advantage — this is what sets the Caribbean week apart. Through our base at True Blue Marina you get a priority berth, the boat provisioned and fuelled before you land, and a proper skipper's briefing covering the anchorages, the coral-safe routes, the best tables ashore and the current conditions island by island — the kind of local knowledge no published pilot book will ever carry.