Grenada and the Windward Islands

Grenada, Carriacou, and the rest of the chain

St George's, the capital, sits on the sheltered Carenage waterfront and is Grenada's main port of entry; Prickly Bay, on the south coast, is usually described as the busiest cruising anchorage on the island, with two restaurants, a chandlery and the Spice Island Marine Services boatyard on its shore. True Blue Bay, Secret Harbour in Mount Hartman Bay, and Woburn Bay, home to Clarkes Court Boatyard, make up the rest of the south-coast cluster that most cruising boats use; Grenada Marine, on the south-east coast at St David's Harbour, is the odd one out, a working yard some distance from the anchorages everyone else uses.

North of the mainland, Carriacou and its own anchorage at Tyrrel Bay function as a distinct stop rather than simply the southern edge of the Grenadines - sources disagree sharply on the actual open-water distance between Grenada and Carriacou, with figures ranging from 15 to roughly 35 nautical miles depending on whether the point-to-point crossing or the full port-to-port run is being measured, so treat any single number with caution. The fuller run north to Bequia and the Grenadines proper is on the order of 100 nautical miles, and Trinidad, the other common hurricane-season option, is about 90 nautical miles south, commonly sailed overnight as an 80-mile beat or close reach across the equatorial current.

The boatyards, and what they actually offer

Clarkes Court Boatyard and Marina in Woburn Bay runs a 242 ton Italian travel lift, the largest on the island, plus a 32 ton submersible trailer for boats to 55 feet, and stores on the order of 300 boats. Spice Island Marine Services at Prickly Bay was the first yard in the southern Caribbean to bring in a Travelift, back in 1984, and still runs a 70 ton lift taking vessels to 85 feet LOA and 13 feet of draft, with room for roughly 240 boats. Grenada Marine at St David's Harbour runs a 70 ton lift built with an unusually wide 31.5 foot span for catamarans, in water up to 16 feet deep at high tide; published capacity is quoted as either about 220 or about 250 boats depending on the source, and both figures should be treated as approximate rather than exact. None of the boatyards has published a current rate card for 2025 or 2026 at the time of writing; Clarkes Court's own published sheet, still the most detailed available, dates to the second half of 2022 and should be read as a guide to structure rather than to current pricing - it showed dockage from about 1.10 dollars a foot a day, haul and launch fees rising in bands from about 7.40 dollars a foot for boats to 49 feet, and dry storage from around 0.55 to 1.20 dollars a foot a day depending on season and size.

Camper and Nicholsons' Port Louis Marina, inside St George's own lagoon a short walk from the Carenage, is the exception to the yard-and-anchorage pattern: a full marina of 227 berths, 30 of them built for superyachts from 30 to 110 metres, with a fuel dock reported to have been renewed for the site. True Blue Bay Marina and Secret Harbour Marina are smaller, resort-based facilities without haul-out on site - both send boats needing a lift to Spice Island Marine nearby - and Secret Harbour in particular clears no customs or immigration on site at all, sending cruisers to Prickly Bay instead.

Grenada is the Caribbean's honest answer to hurricane season - real boatyard capacity built for the job, and two recent storms, Ivan on the mainland and Beryl on Carriacou, as proof that safer is not the same as safe.

The insurance line that built this industry

The reason Grenada has a yachting economy at all, rather than simply a pretty coastline, is that hurricane-season insurance for boats laid up further north in the Caribbean often becomes conditional, or is withdrawn outright, unless the vessel is south of a latitude the policy names. St George's sits at roughly 12 degrees 3 minutes north, and one commonly cited historical boundary for a major underwriter's northern tropical storm zone put the line at 12 degrees 40 minutes north, comfortably clear of Grenada. That line is not fixed across the industry, and it has moved: Markel American's well-known Jackline yacht policy is reported to have shifted its own northern boundary from 12 degrees 40 minutes north down to 10 degrees 50 minutes north, a change that put Grenada, Trinidad, Isla Margarita and the ABC Islands all outside the safe zone under that specific policy and pushed some owners further south again, toward Puerto La Cruz in Venezuela.

The honest framing for an owner is that there is no single, permanent latitude that guarantees cover - every insurer draws its own box, some as far south as 10 degrees 50 minutes north, and a boat owner laying up in Grenada for the season should check the actual policy wording rather than assume geography alone settles the question. What is not in dispute is that Grenada's position at the southern, statistically quieter end of the belt is real, and it is the reason the island's yard capacity, marina infrastructure and cruiser community exist at the scale they do.

Clearing in, and what it costs

The Grenada Ports Authority's own listing names St George's, Grenville, Hillsborough and Tyrrel Bay on Carriacou, Prickly Bay, St David's and Le Phare Bleu Marina as official ports of entry, but a narrower, more recent first-hand account from a cruiser clearing in during 2024 names only Tyrrel Bay, Port Louis Marina and Prickly Bay Marina as the ports that are actually staffed for routine clearance - the difference most likely reflects which offices reliably have customs and immigration on hand rather than a change in the law. Costs reported by that same cruiser in 2024 included a 25 dollar annual charge for the SailClear electronic pre-arrival declaration, an 83.70 dollar fee for a three-month cruising permit extension, immigration extensions at 75 dollars per person per month, and a roughly 53 dollar overtime charge for a Saturday clearance - all figures from a single first-hand account rather than an official schedule, and worth treating as illustrative of the shape of the costs rather than as a current price list. The Ports Authority's own material, by contrast, describes a cruising permit granting an unlimited stay through a simplified one-page online form, which sits awkwardly against cruisers' accounts of recurring monthly or quarterly renewal fees; that gap between the official pitch and the lived experience is real and worth knowing about before arrival rather than discovering it at the customs desk.

Grenada is generally described, including by cruisers comparing it with the rest of the Windward Islands, as one of the more affordable places in the chain to provision, with lower marina rates and cheaper goods than islands further north; Real Value IGA at Grand Anse is commonly named as the best-stocked supermarket on the island, alongside the produce market in St George's itself. MAYAG, the Marine and Yachting Association of Grenada, functions as a local information point for cruisers navigating all of this.

Season, weather, and the two storms that mattered

The dry season runs roughly December to May with steady 15 to 20 knot trade winds from the north-east; the wet season, June to November, brings more frequent but usually short showers. Hurricane Ivan struck Grenada on 7 September 2004 as a category 3 storm with sustained winds of about 120 miles an hour at landfall (it went on to intensify further after passing the island), and it did real damage to the yachting infrastructure specifically: roughly a third of the estimated 670 boats in Grenada at the time were sunk or driven aground, nearly all the boats hauled at Spice Island Marine went over, about 18 per cent of those at Grenada Marine did the same, and more than half the 40-odd boats anchored in St George's Lagoon ended up ashore. Total damage across the island was estimated at more than 900 million US dollars, over twice the country's GDP at the time.

Twenty years later, Hurricane Beryl made landfall directly on Carriacou on 1 July 2024 as a category 4 storm with 150 mile an hour winds, the earliest category 4 storm on record in the Atlantic basin. Roughly 95 per cent of homes on Carriacou and Petite Martinique were damaged or destroyed; Grenada's prime minister, Dickon Mitchell, described the island afterward in blunt terms - in half an hour, Carriacou was flattened. Mainland Grenada, some 30 nautical miles south of the storm's track by one cruiser's account, was affected but far less severely. The lesson for the page is straightforward: Grenada's position is genuinely safer on average than islands further north, and the boatyard industry that has grown up around that fact is real, but Ivan and Beryl are both recent enough, and specific enough in the damage they did to boats and property, that no one should describe the island as immune.

The sailing calendar

Grenada Sailing Week 2026 ran from 25 to 30 January, with the 2027 edition already fixed for the last days of January into early February as part of the Caribbean Sailing Association's racing circuit; recent editions have run partly out of Carriacou as well as the mainland. The Carriacou Regatta, held annually in Hillsborough on the first weekend of August, traces back to 1965 and is built around traditional wooden sloop building and racing tied to the island's Scottish shipbuilding heritage, alongside boat parades and children's races - a genuinely different character to most Caribbean regattas, and one tied specifically to Carriacou's own maritime history rather than imported wholesale from elsewhere.

Around those fixed dates, the wider rhythm of the island is set by the hurricane season itself: cruisers and liveaboards arrive through June to August and mostly depart by mid to late October, tracking the official season rather than any single event on the calendar.

لمين هو: An owner laying up for hurricane season who wants real haul-out capacity and a working cruiser community rather than a resort marina alone, and who is willing to check their own policy's latitude line rather than assume Grenada's position alone guarantees cover.