Mega-Yacht Destination...Port Louis Marina, Grenada
The "Yacht Insider's" cruise from St. Vincent to Grenada finds fewer megayachts than expected.
January 25, 2010
My experience in the Caribbean, until this month, had been limited to such northern isles as Antigua, Sint Maarten, and Sint Barth’s, where megayachts converge at marinas so packed that they look like boat shows. In the southern Caribbean, that is absolutely not the case. During my 10-day charter with stops at eight different ports and anchorages, I saw exactly three motoryachts more than 100 feet long.
An almost-empty Port Louis Marina the morning of January 19. The motoryacht Kingfisher is on the right-hand side of the photo.
My interest was thus piqued as we cruised to our final stop: Port Louis Marina on Grenada. Part of the Camper & Nicholsons Marinas group, Port Louis officially opened in January 2008 and has since been promoted as a destination for yachts as long as 300 feet. I had expected to see the southern Caribbean’s version of Sint Barth’s when we tied up. Instead, I saw one lonely charter megayacht—the 144-foot Feadship Kingfisher (part of the Edmiston & Company fleet)—and a great number of empty slips at what looked to be a beautifully built and well-operated facility.
“You were here during a slow week,” Danny Donelan, a sales and marketing manager for Camper & Nicholsons Marinas, told me when I spoke with him a few days later from home. “The week before was completely packed. The big yachts tend to spend New Year’s up at Sint Barth’s and then come to the Southern Caribbean afterward, to enjoy the more untouched cruising grounds.”
I do know that about a year ago at this time, megayachts including the 120-foot custom build Touch, 197-foot Benetti Amnesia, 200-foot Lurssen Phoenix, and 370-foot Vulkan Le Grand Bleu were all spotted at Port Louis Marina. So perhaps I was, in fact, on site at a time not representative of the megayacht action this marina is seeing.
Most interesting to me, though, in terms of timing, is that Donelan says Port Louis Marina hopes to become a year-round destination—not just luring megayachts away from northern Caribbean during the winter, but also away from the Mediterranean during the summer.
“Grenada is a year-round destination,” he said. “We’re outside of the hurricane belt, and the weather is terrific during a lot of the summer months.”
The captain aboard my charter yacht told me the same thing. It will be interesting to see, if I return, say, next July, whether the Port Louis slips are any fuller than they were this time around.
