Your yacht, worked properly, while you are not on her
A yacht spends most of the year waiting. Charter management is the arrangement where she stops waiting: we place her in our programme at Gouvia, charter her through the season, and look after her through the winter. You keep the boat, you keep weeks of your own, and the rest of the year she earns instead of depreciating quietly on a pontoon.
We are not an agency subcontracting the work. We run four yachts of our own from this base and maintain them ourselves. Your boat is looked after by the same people, to the same standard, and the person who hands her to a charter crew is the person who services her.
What we take on
These are the things that otherwise fall to you, from four hundred miles away, in a language you may not read.
Maintenance, summer and winter
Running repairs between charters and the full programme out of season. Problems get found on our watch rather than by a charter crew in a bay at six in the evening.
Winterizing
Engine, systems, water, sails and canvas prepared for the lay-up so the boat comes out of winter ready to work rather than needing a month of attention first.
Guardianage
Someone with eyes on her through the months nothing is happening. Lines, fenders, bilges, batteries, weather — checked, not assumed.
Risk management for charters
Vetting who takes her out, briefing them properly, handling deposits and damage, and being reachable while they are away. Most charter damage is avoidable at handover.
Representation to the Greek authorities
Charter paperwork, crew lists, port authority formalities and the filings a foreign-owned yacht chartering in Greece has to keep in order.
Berthing arrangements
Her place at Gouvia, arranged and held as part of the programme, with the marina relationship handled at our end.
The weeks you keep
The point of owning a boat is sailing her. The point of managing her is that the rest of the year pays for it. Here is how we square those.
Three to eight weeks a season, depending on the boat and the agreement. Most of them fall in the shoulder months — May and October — which is deliberate, and not only because those weeks charter less.
May and October are the best sailing in the Ionian. The sea is warm enough either side of the summer, the wind is more interesting than the flat mornings of August, the ports are not full, and you are not queuing for a berth at four in the afternoon. Ask anyone who sails here every year which months they would choose, and very few say July.
Outside those months you can take up to two weeks, and they are booked separately rather than run together. A fortnight taken out of high season takes two of the weeks that pay for the boat's year, so we keep them apart.
Dates are agreed ahead of the season, before the boat goes on sale, so your weeks are blocked and never sold from under you.
At a glance
- Per season
- 3 to 8 weeks
- Mainly
- May and October
- Other months
- Up to 2 weeks, not taken back to back
- Agreed
- Before the season opens for booking
How the money works
Charter income is shared between you and us. The split depends on the yacht and on the length of the arrangement — we will not publish a single percentage here, because quoting one number for every boat would mean quoting the wrong number for most of them.
What moves it: the model, her age and condition, how many weeks she can realistically sell in this market, what the programme has to spend on her in the first year, and how long we are committing to each other. A boat that needs a season of catching up is a different proposition from one that arrives ready to work, and a three-year agreement is a different proposition from one year.
The costs listed above — maintenance, winterizing, guardianage, charter risk, authority representation, berthing — are carried within the programme rather than invoiced back to you week by week. What sits outside it depends on the boat, and it is written into the agreement before either of us signs, not discovered in September.
Nobody can promise you a season
Charter income varies. It moves with the weather, with how early the boat is on sale, with what the wider market does to prices, and with things neither of us controls — a bad August, an airline strike, a soft booking year across Greece.
Any management company that guarantees you a figure is either pricing that guarantee into your split or hoping you will not check. We would rather show you what the boats in this programme have actually done, for real weeks in real seasons, and let you judge from that. Ask and we will show you.
What to ask any management company
Including us. If a company cannot answer these quickly and in writing, that is your answer.
Who actually does the work?
Staff, or subcontractors you will never meet? Ask who lifts the floorboards when something goes wrong in August.
Is she insured for commercial charter?
A private policy does not cover chartering. Ask to see the policy, the excess, and who carries it.
Who holds the deposits?
And what happens when there is damage — who decides, who pays, and how long before you hear about it.
How and when do I get reported to?
Ask for the format. Bookings, income, expenses, work done. Ask how often, and ask to see last season's for another boat.
Can I see the maintenance record?
Not a promise of one — the actual log for a boat already in the programme. It tells you more than any brochure.
What happens at the end?
Notice period, condition on return, what is settled and when. Agree the exit while everyone is still enthusiastic.
Talk it through with us
Tell us the boat — model, year, where she is now, what she has had done. We will tell you honestly whether she suits this programme, roughly what a season looks like for a yacht like her, and what we would propose.
Full management terms and the owner enquiry form are on sailorsbreeze.co.uk, our dedicated site for owners. Thinking of buying rather than placing a boat you already own? That is a different arrangement — see yacht ownership.