So I want to sail the Caribbean. I rent or buy a boat. Get a captain and off we go. How does the matter of reaching foreign ports (visa, passport, etc) work? In many places they have cafes with a dock. I don’t imagine every waitress doubles as a immigration officer for the country. Will the local navy/coast guard approach me at some point of my approach? Am I supposed to go some place and legally enter the country? How does it all work?
I would be starting from Puerto Rico so the thorny issue of entering the US is solved. Would I have to do customs somewhere on my return?
This is all purely hypothetical since I cannot afford to do this without first winning several lottery prices, so feel free to be vague and or anecdotal.
My experience is only on big ships (travelling between Europe and Australia) and on ferries (Greece to Italy, and France to England, in both cases before the European Union). It was not unlike arriving on a plane these days: you got off the ship or boat, lined up at the immigration desk on the wharf, showed your passport, declared what goods you were bringing in, and had your passport stamped. Sometimes the immigration process took place on board the ship itself, presumably because there weren’t the facilities available onshore.
Ports where I have entered like this: Aden, Bombay (now Mumbai), Brindisi, Colombo, Dover, Fremantle, Piraeus, Port Said, Suez, and Tilbury. All a long time ago.
I sailed into St. Kitts (and Nevis) and Grenada. The purser had all of our passports and took care of the customs and immigration stuff at each port. Didn’t seem to be much of a bother, just a small office in the harbor away from the big cruise ship jetties. At St. Kitts, we anchored and flew a yellow flag until she’d got the legalities taken care of. I don’t know if it would be any different for a smaller vessel.
We still trade e-mails now and then. If you like, I can get in touch with her and find out some more of the details.
Sapo, I probably shouldn’t be answering so quickly, but just in case no one provides some better answers (unlikely):
I read a book by someone, I think it was Hugh Downs (yes, THAT Hugh Downs), about sailing all over the Pacific in his sail boat, and he mentioned something about having to contact local customs/immigration poeple on the radio before sailing into their port and arranging to be met and cleared. So, there is probably a list of who to contact and what frequency and what the procedures are somewhere–I just don’t know where that is.
Or, maybe it was another book. But if you’re interested in doing this kind of stuff, I’d recommend Hugh Downs’ book anyway. It’s called “A Shoal of Stars.” Published back in the sixties, so a lot of stuff will be out of date now, but still a good read, IMHO.
I’ve done this several times in the US and British Virgin Islands. In each case I was doing a “bareboat” (no captain or crew provided) charter on sailboats from 38 to 50 feet long.
The approved procedure for moving from US to British territory is to first stop at one of a few designated places where there is a customs office. There you find a (mostly) friendly official who checks the passport of all aboard (no visa required), does (at most) a cursory customs inspection, and for boats not registered in his country collects a non-trivial (IIRC, something like $25) daily fee, based on your estimate of how long you will be in his country’s waters.
The actual enforcement of these rules seems always to have been casual. Given that lots of boats chartered in US territory (mostly St. Thomas) spend lots of time in tolerably remote areas of the British Virgin Islands, no doubt at any moment there are many that either never cleared at all, or underestimated the length of their stay. Officially, the penalties for failure to strictly comply can be severe; in practice, almost everyone seems to regard the system as a tax whose evasion is more or less acceptable when not too flagrant.
Actually, the cost of a bareboat charter vacation is surprisingly reasonable - less than staying in average shorebound accommodations. A captain and crew will add a lot to the cost, however.
The internet ate my post that would have come before Xema’s who now pretty much answered the questions I was making. (And thanks for all the replies so far)
I am more curious about reaching small off-the-beaten-path beaches than the larger port cities where I am sure the procedure is more or less straightforward. Would I have to touch base at a port before? It seems like the official answer is yes while the actual answer is not really.
Then what happens when you are caught red-handed at some beach without having checked in? Is this a “sorry officer I will be glad to comply in the 24 hour deadline” with no real penalties? Or will this mean fines, police records and all that?.
Another anecdote - while vacationing in St. Maarten (French & Dutch) about 10 years ago, a group of us took a chartered sail to Anguilla (British). We didn’t plan to land there, just swim & snorkel around it’s reefs. The skipper checked that we all had passports. While we were snorkeling, a customs/immigration official came out in a dinghy to our boat and inspected all our paperwork. We also took a ferry from St. Maarten to Saba, but since that’s also a Dutch possession IIRC we didn’t have to do anything.
My understanding when I was there was that if you were caught you’d typically pay a fine that wasn’t brutal, but enough to make you henceforward do things “by the book” - and to tell others not to cheat. There was certainly no question of a police record. I never heard of much enforcement effort, and certainly not in remote areas.
But I was last there in 2000 - things could well be quite different now. And my only experience of this has been in the Virgin Islands, which may or may not be typical.