SailTime is a new approach to boat access that makes it easier, quicker and more economical for anyone to have use of beautiful, well-equipped sailboat (or power boat if that’s your thing).  It’s a fractional membership club in which you pay a monthly fee for time on the boat of your choice.  Our boat is in the Sailtime Fleet at Naos Yachts in Marina Del Rey, California.  Our members have a cruising area for San Diego to Santa Barbara, and all of the Channel Islands.

Yacht chartering is a popular way to take a vacation and cruise a destination, such as the Caribbean, for a week or two. The basics are: fly into the destination, head to the charter company to pick up your yacht for the week, cruise from harbor to harbor, and then return the yacht to the charter base so you can get back to your regular life.  You can charter your yacht with a captain if you’re inexperienced or you feel like the yacht is more than you can handle yourself.  

Charter yachts are fairly standard spec yachts. Typically, the boats are up to 7 years old and see up to 30 different charter groups with different levels of experience per year. A week on a decent yacht will cost up to $10,000 depending on the condition of the vessel. Skimp, and you may find yourself spending more time with the maintenance department than you’d like.

If you are just interested in sailing for one to two weeks a year, chartering a yacht may be the right fit for you.  The drawback to chartering is that if you want to go for more than two weeks you will find other options, such as fractional boating, start to make much more sense.

If you like to boat more than one to two weeks a year or would like those weeks to be spread out over day-cruises instead of a solid week of boating, fractional boating is probably a a good fit for you. Fractional boating programs like SailTime offer you the ability to use a yacht several times a month (most of our members use the boat 3-4 times a month). For a bit more than a week in the Caribbean, you can have the use of “your” boat that often!  Figure the cost of a week in the Caribbean vs. several days a month and it starts to pencil out nicely.

Just like chartering you show up at the boat, you enjoy your time out on the water, and then return back to the base. But this is where the similarities end. When fractional boating with SailTime, you are one of a few trained members (our boat currently has five members) using the boat you joined. This means that the boat will be well cared for and in pristine condition when you show up for your turn.  And our boat, like most in the Sailtime program, is well appointed with lots of upgrades and amenities.

If Sailtime sounds interesting to you, we encourage you to seek out a local dealer.  And if your local dealer is Naos, we’d love to show you Fandango and see if it might be a good fit for you!

Here’s a brochure for the program.