Route & Itinerary Helper

How the planner works

This tool does one narrow job extremely literally. It takes the curated must-visit spots we hold for your country, orders them by what you said you care about, and spreads them across the number of days you asked for. It does not invent places, and it does not invent distances. Everything in the table above comes from two files: our destination records, which carry the must-visit spots and the base marinas with their published coordinates, and our captain's notes, which carry the anonymised, first-hand commentary from skippers who charter those waters.

That means the planner is honest about its own edges. If a country has six curated spots and you ask for seven days at standard pace, you get six days of sailing plus one rest day — the tool will not manufacture a seventh stop to fill the gap, because a made-up anchorage is worse than no anchorage. If you ask for fewer days than the spots need, it tells you how many you are leaving out rather than quietly dropping them.

How we order the days

Every must-visit spot in our data carries a type — beach, snorkel, island, natural formation, village, resort and so on. When you tick an interest, any spot whose type matches it floats to the front of the queue; everything else keeps the exact order it already had in the destination record. We deliberately do not re-sort the remaining stops, because the recorded order is a real editorial judgement about what a first-time visitor should see, and shuffling it silently would hide that.

One honest caveat: our interest list is slightly wider than the spot-type vocabulary. Beach, snorkel and village exist as recorded spot types, so tick them and you will see the order change immediately. Nightlife and quiet bays have no direct equivalent in the spot records, so instead of pretending to re-sort, those two steer which captain's notes appear in the sidebar — where the crowd-strategy and mooring-practical advice actually lives.

Pace levels explained

Easy schedules one spot per day and inserts a rest-or-relocation day every fourth day, never on the final day. That rest day is not padding: it is filled with a real sentence from a captain's note — first a crowd, wildlife or mooring note for your own country, then any other note written for it, and only then a note from elsewhere in the same region, labelled with the country its author was writing about. Each note is used once and never repeated, so a long itinerary is not the same quote four times. Easy suits families with young children, mixed-ability crews and anyone who wants to be anchored by mid-afternoon.

One limit worth naming: only five of the destinations we cover have a crowd, wildlife or mooring note on file today, and thirteen have no note at all. When the archive runs out, a rest day carries a neutral planning sentence — top up water, dry the kit, walk ashore — instead of words we would have to invent. Adding a real note for the missing destinations is an ongoing job, not a solved one.

Standard places exactly one spot per day, which is what most bareboat weeks actually look like — a two-to-four hour morning passage, lunch on the hook, snorkelling or beach in the afternoon. Challenging packs two spots into every day, which is only realistic when the legs are short and the crew genuinely enjoys being under way. It is a poor match for young children, and the planner will say so in the sanity checks rather than let you discover it on day three. Night sailing is tracked separately, because permission to sail overnight is a capability question, not a pace question — pairing it with an easy pace usually means you paid for something the plan never uses.

What this tool will not do

It will not print a distance it cannot verify. Spot-to-spot legs show no number at all, because our destination records hold no coordinates for individual bays and anchorages; the leg row instead points you at the captain's notes for that country. Marina-to-marina figures are real great-circle calculations on published coordinates, and are labelled approximate because a straight line ignores headlands, reef passes and the tacking a real passage needs. It will not invent an anchorage to balance the table, and it will not tell you that a route is safe for your crew — that is what our qualification checker and your hired skipper are for. Treat the plan as a well-informed first draft, then confirm the detail with the people who sail those waters every week.

Frequently asked questions

Are the day-by-day distances and times on this page accurate?

Marina-to-marina legs use a straight-line (great-circle) figure computed from the published latitude and longitude in our destination data, and each one is labelled as approximate. Spot-to-spot legs are deliberately given no number at all: our destination data does not carry coordinates for individual bays and anchorages, and a real leg varies with the skipper's route, the morning wind and how long you linger. The only honest answer is to confirm those legs in our Captain's Notes or with your hired skipper before you leave the dock.

How does the planner decide which spot goes on which day?

It looks at the `type` recorded against each of the country's must-visit spots. Any spot whose type matches an interest you ticked — snorkel, beach or village — floats to the front of the list, and everything else keeps the order it already has in the destination record. Your pace then decides how many spots land on each day: easy places one and adds a rest-or-relocation day every fourth day, standard places one a day, and challenging packs two. Nothing is re-sorted by distance, because we do not hold spot coordinates.

Can I change the order of the days or skip a stop?

Yes — the plan is a starting point, not a booking condition. Every stop links through to that destination's Captain's Notes, where anonymised local skippers tell you when a bay is worth skipping because of crowds, when the wind makes an anchorage uncomfortable and which nearby spot to substitute. Most crews re-order the middle days after the first morning forecast, and your hired skipper will do the same.

Why does the planner sometimes show a warning about pace or group?

Because the most common way a well-planned charter goes wrong is a mismatch between the paper plan and the people on board. Two spots a day with young children is the single most frequent reason a beautiful itinerary turns exhausting by day three, and night-sailing permission paired with an easy pace is an awkward combination that most crews never use. The planner surfaces both as a sanity check; the final call is yours, ideally after a short conversation with us.

Want to turn this route into a number? Run it through the budget calculator, or check whether you can skipper it yourself.