7-Day Grenadines Sailing Itinerary: Bequia, Mustique, the Tobago Cays & Union Island

Not the BVI

Our BVI week is the Caribbean with the difficulty turned down: short hops in the lee of Tortola, a mooring ball at every stop, a beach bar at the end of every dinghy ride. The Grenadines are the same trade wind with the lee taken away. The islands lie in a line across the wind rather than along it, so most legs are a reach in open water with a swell running through the channels; the passages between them funnel the breeze, and the Bequia Channel on day one can blow ten knots harder than the forecast. There are far fewer moorings, and where they exist they are the point — Mustique and the Tobago Cays run on them. And you are further from everything: Bequia is the last big provisioning stop until you turn round.

What the Grenadines give back is the reason people come back every year. The water in the Tobago Cays is the colour the brochures promise, the anchorages are sand you can read from the bow, and the wind that makes the passages honest also makes them fast. In the Mediterranean series on this site each cruising ground had a thing that decided the week — rules in La Maddalena, wind in the Aeolians, other boats in Naples. Here it is simpler and stranger: the wind decides nothing, because it is always the same. Fifteen to twenty-five knots from the east, day and night, all week, with the Christmas winds pushing thirty from mid-December to late January. You do not plan around it. You plan inside it.

Before You Slip the Lines

Season. December to May, with the flattest water in February to April and the strongest wind from mid-December through January. The charter fleets run from November; hurricane season is June to November and Beryl is the reason nobody treats the southern Grenadines as outside the belt any more.

Clearing in. St Vincent and the Grenadines is one country, and Grenada — Carriacou, Petite Martinique and everything south — is another. Private yachts pay a cruise tax of EC$35 per person per month for everyone over twelve, plus small processing fees and about EC$35 overtime after 16:00 or at weekends; there is no cruising permit for a private boat, though charter yachts carry an SVG charter licence. File through SailClear before you arrive (a US$25 annual subscription since May 2024), then present passports, ship's papers, the last port clearance and three crew lists at a port of entry: Blue Lagoon, Kingstown, Wallilabou or Chateaubelair on St Vincent, and Bequia, Mustique, Canouan or Union Island down the chain. Starting from Blue Lagoon you are already cleared; starting from Grenada you clear out of Carriacou and in at Clifton, and the loop runs the other way.

What Beryl changed. Hurricane Beryl crossed Carriacou, Petite Martinique, Union Island and Mayreau as a Category 4 storm on 1 July 2024 and destroyed most of what stood on them; Canouan was hit, and Bequia and Mustique largely escaped. The anchorages are exactly as they were. Ashore, a year on, Union's yacht services, its grocery and several restaurants had reopened while Clifton and Ashton were still under tarpaulins, Customs and Immigration were clearing boats at the Bougainvilla, Chatham Bay's beach bars were trading from temporary shacks, and every beach bar on Salt Whistle Bay had gone and was being rebuilt. The Petit St Vincent resort is closed with a hoped-for reopening in 2026; Palm Island reopens in early 2027 under a new name. Carriacou's marine trades were back by the end of 2024. The practical rules are: provision in Bequia, top up water and fuel in Bequia or Canouan, do not count on a particular bar existing, spend money where you find it open, and read the Doyle Guides Windward updates the week you sail.

Every Stop on One Screen

Read the “sheltered from” column and notice what is missing: nothing on this route is sheltered from the east, because the east is where the wind comes from and the shelter is from the sea, not the wind. Every one of these anchorages is a place where the water is flat and the breeze is not. That is the whole character of the week, and it is why the radii are modest — 60 to 85 m in 3 to 15 m of sand — and why they need to be right.

Day 1 — Blue Lagoon to Bequia (9 nm)

Out through the reef at Blue Lagoon and straight into the Bequia Channel, which is the week's first lesson: nine miles across, with the trade wind compressed between two islands and a swell that has come from Africa, it is often the roughest water of the whole cruise and it happens before lunch on the first day. Reef before you leave, not after. Then round Devil's Table into Admiralty Bay, a mile-deep bay facing west with Port Elizabeth at its head: 4–15 m of soft mud over sand, excellent holding everywhere, a hundred or more boats in season and room for all of them. Moorings from the local operators are about EC$50 a night; anchoring is free, and the choice between the town side and Princess Margaret Beach on the south shore is the choice between a two-minute dinghy ride and a quiet night. Bequia is a proper island — a boatyard, a chandlery, sailmakers, the best provisioning south of St Vincent — and the customs office on the waterfront makes it the natural first or last port for anyone not starting at Blue Lagoon.

Day 2 — Bequia to Mustique (13 nm)

South-east out of the bay, round West Cay and Bequia's southern tip, and a close reach across to Mustique — thirteen miles with the wind forward of the beam and the sea on the bow, which is the hardest leg of the week and the reason to do it early. Call the harbourmaster on VHF 16 or 68 as you close Britannia Bay, the island's only permitted anchorage. The Mustique Company keeps about 35 moorings for yachts up to 60 feet in 4–15 m of sand; a boat any longer is shown where to anchor outside them, and nobody anchors without being told. The conservation fee is EC$200 for three nights for a yacht up to 70 feet (EC$450 to 100 feet, more above), mooring included, and it buys an evening at Basil's Bar on its stilts over the water and a walk or a mule ride round an island that has decided, very deliberately, to stay the way it is. Land only at the jetty and the public beach. Macaroni Beach on the windward side is the swim.

Day 3 — Mustique to Canouan (14 nm)

The payback for yesterday: fourteen miles with the wind on the quarter, past the bird islands of Battowia and Baliceaux and down to Canouan. The island is two things at once — a fishing village and one of the most expensive resorts in the Caribbean, with the Sandy Lane Yacht Club marina at Glossy Bay for the second kind of visitor. For the first kind, Charlestown Bay on the west coast is a working anchorage in 3–10 m of sand and mud with a port of entry, a fuel dock, a grocery, and enough trade-wind chop wrapping round the north point to make it comfortable rather than lovely. Anchor towards the southern end for the flattest water and keep clear of the ferry approach. If the base needs the boat back the night before the end of your week, this is the day you cut: sail Mustique to the Tobago Cays direct, 22 miles, and give Canouan a miss.

Day 4 — Canouan to the Tobago Cays (7 nm)

Seven miles south-west, leaving Mayreau to starboard, and in through the north entrance between Mayreau and the Baleine Rocks — not the southern channel, which is where charter yachts go aground every season. Then you are in the Tobago Cays: four uninhabited islets inside the sweep of Horseshoe Reef, 4–12 m of white sand, turtles grazing the seagrass off Baradal, and to the east nothing but a line of breakers and then the Atlantic. The reef takes all of the sea and none of the wind. You will lie to twenty knots all night in water that barely ripples, which is the most peculiar and the most beautiful anchorage on this site.

The rules are a marine park's. Everyone aboard pays EC$15 a day entry and the boat pays EC$60 a day whether it picks up a park mooring or anchors — the anchoring fee was set equal to the mooring fee on 1 January 2023 precisely so that nobody saves money by dropping a hook. The rangers come round in the patrol boat to collect, or you pay online. Anchor only on sand in the lagoon, never on coral or grass and never between the moorings and the turtle zone; the little anchoring area at Petit Tabac outside the reef was closed in January 2024, and you visit that island by dinghy. No fishing, five knots, scuba only with a local operator. Two practical things: the current runs hard through the cut between Petit Rameau and Petit Bateau, so take a mooring there or lie to two anchors, and the moorings are neither compulsory nor infallible — look at the one you pick up. The boat boys sell bread, ice, fish and a lobster barbecue on the beach at Petit Bateau, and after Beryl every dollar of it matters.

Day 5 — Tobago Cays to Union Island (4 nm)

The shortest leg, and the one that has changed most. Out of the Cays the way you came in, round Mayreau's south end and across to Clifton on Union Island, a harbour protected by Newlands Reef to the east with a channel through it and Happy Island — a bar built on a pile of conch shells — standing on the reef itself. Anchor in 3–8 m of sand and mud clear of the ferry channel and the airport approach, or take one of the local moorings. Union was the eye of the storm. A year on, the airport and the ferries were running, the grocery was open, the yacht services — the Anchorage, the Bougainvilla, Erika's — were back, and Customs and Immigration were clearing yachts at the Bougainvilla by the harbour rather than the wrecked office; the villages behind were still roofless in places. Go ashore. Eat where the kitchens are open, buy the fruit on the main road, and if you are heading on to Grenada this is where you clear out. Chatham Bay on the wild west side, where the beach bars have come back as shacks under tarpaulins, is the alternative night if Clifton's traffic wears thin.

Day 6 — Union to Petit St Vincent to Mayreau (13 nm)

South four miles to Petit St Vincent, the last island in St Vincent's waters, for lunch: a sand anchorage in 4–15 m off the west side, open to the north and not a night in the trades, with Mopion — a sandbar with a single thatched umbrella, the most photographed nothing in the Grenadines — a dinghy ride away. The resort has been closed since Beryl and hopes to reopen in 2026, so there is no bar to land at; the reef off the dock reaches further than it looks. Petite Martinique, a mile across the channel, is Grenada, and so are Carriacou and the Sandy Island lagoon beyond it — tempting, and a different country's paperwork.

Then back north, west of Union, nine miles to Salt Whistle Bay on Mayreau, and arrive early, because it is small and it is the night everyone wants. A near-circular bay behind a palm-fringed spit so narrow you can see the Atlantic breaking on the other side of it, 3–10 m of sand with excellent holding and shelter from every direction but south-west — the flattest night of the week in the strongest wind. Approach from the north; there is reef across the southern entrance. Beryl flattened the palms and took every beach bar on the spit and much of the village on the hill, including most of the church; rebuilding was well under way in Salt Whistle by mid-2025, and what is open when you arrive is worth your evening. Saline Bay on the south-west coast is the bigger, rollier fallback.

Day 7 — Mayreau to Bequia (24 nm)

The long leg home: twenty-four miles north-north-east, past Canouan and Mustique to port and starboard, with the trade wind just forward of the beam and the swell on the bow — a fast, wet, glorious sail that takes four to five hours and is the reason to have Bequia, not Blue Lagoon, as the last night. Admiralty Bay again, or Friendship Bay on the south coast if you want a quieter one. The Bequia Channel is nine miles and an hour and a half the next morning; leave by eight and the boat is back at the base before the wind has fully built.

Why an Anchor Alarm Matters on This Route

In the Mediterranean the anchor is set in a calm and tested at three in the morning by a wind that was not there when you went to bed; most of the drag stories on this site are that story. The Grenadines invert it. The anchor is tested the moment it lands, by the same twenty knots that will be blowing when you leave, and it is never unloaded for the rest of the week. Three things follow, and they change how the alarm should be set.

The first row is the one to remember, because it is the opposite of the Mediterranean instinct. A radius that is generous by Aeolian standards — 120 m in ten metres of water — is not generous here; it is a licence to drag forty metres downwind before anything happens, and forty metres downwind in Salt Whistle Bay is the boat behind you. Take the rode you actually have out, add the boat, add one length for the arc, and set that. In 6 m of Tobago Cays sand on 35 m of chain that is about 60 m, which is the figure on our page. The second thing is where the danger is. The reef is to windward and you cannot see it at night: the horizon east of the Cays looks like open ocean, and it is, beyond a line of coral a foot under the surface. Dragging takes you away from it, into the lagoon and your neighbours, which is why the boats that come to grief in the Grenadines mostly do so against each other. Finally, use the calm that does exist — the dawn lull, an hour of lighter air before the breeze builds again — to look at the track the alarm has drawn overnight. A fan is a boat that held. A fan with a tail is a boat that did not, and it is better to learn that at seven than at midnight. The method is in our guide to telling if the anchor is dragging, and the scope calculator turns depth and chain into the radius.

Variations: 5 Days, 10 Days, or From Grenada

• Five days: Bequia, Tobago Cays (via the west of Canouan, 22 nm), Salt Whistle Bay, Bequia. You lose Mustique and Union and keep the two nights that matter most.
• Ten days: add a second night in the Cays, a night in Chatham Bay on Union's west coast, and Carenage Bay on Canouan's south side; or clear out at Clifton and add Carriacou — Tyrrel Bay and the Sandy Island lagoon — before flying home from Grenada.
• From Grenada: the loop runs anticlockwise. Clear out at Prickly Bay or Port Louis, sail the 35 nm to Carriacou, clear in and out again there, cross to Clifton for SVG formalities, and work north through the Cays, Mayreau, Canouan and Mustique to Bequia before the long run home. Two extra clearances and the same anchorages.

The Bottom Line

Ninety-three miles, seven nights, one reef and a wind that does not stop. The Grenadines ask a little more than the BVI — reefs in before the Bequia Channel, a pocket of EC dollars for the park and the boat boys, provisions bought where they exist and patience with islands still putting their roofs back on — and they give back the best week's sailing in the Eastern Caribbean, in the colour of water the rest of the world uses as a screensaver.

And when the hook is down in six metres of sand behind Horseshoe Reef with twenty knots in the rigging and nothing to windward but a line of white, set the circle tight, centre it on the anchor, and let it watch the rim while you watch the stars. Every stop on this route is in our St Vincent & the Grenadines anchorage guide, and Carriacou is in the Grenada guide.