Robin Tattersall Starts First BVI Bareboat Company
by Dr. Robin Tattersall
Dr. Robin Tattersall, OBE has a distinguished 59 year career in the BVI as a plastic surgeon, a sailing Olympian and founder of the Bougainvillea Clinic, among other distinctions. Here he recounts how he started the BVI’s first bareboat charter company.
I arrived on Tortola on October 10, 1965 with my wife Jill, and our three sons aboard our 28 ft Sloop Summers Cloud. We had travelled out to the Caribbean on a Geest banana boat, which took twelve passengers, with our sloop shipped on deck. We disembarked in Castries, in the first week of September and after spending a week there getting the boat rigged and ready to sail, we set off for Tortola stopping at almost all the islands on the way before arriving in the BVI, and narrowly missing a hurricane!
Dr. Tattersall and family after arriving in the BVI in 1965.
At that time there were very few sailboats here apart from the locally built island sloops and larger inter island cargo vessels. Apart from my being the only surgeon, there were two other general doctors at the old Peebles Hospital, and I used to initially sail regularly to the out islands – Virgin Gorda, Jost Van Dyke and Anegada – to hold clinics.
About a year later, a visitor approached me and asked if I would rent him my boat, which of course, I initially refused. My initial salary as surgeon was $3000 per year so when he offered me $350 for the week, and had informed me that he was an experienced sailor owning a 35-footer back in the US, I rapidly changed my mind and agreed to the charter.
At the end of the week, he returned the boat in better condition than it had been at the beginning, as he had fixed all the things which I had not had time to deal with and so I decided that I should take this a stage further. It was at the time when Jack Van Ost, a dentist from Tenafly, New Jersey, a keen sailor himself, had just started the first bareboat company in the world called CSY. He had a fleet of sloops from the US, and having spent a trial run on Long Island Sound the previous summer he shipped them all over to the islands. He was originally based in St Thomas, although by 1967 he would relocate in the BVI.
Robin Tattersall racing his yacht Diva.
So, I decided, along with my older brother Ralph, and with another old friend in the UK, to form what was to be the first bareboat company in the BVI. We purchased three 28 ft Westerly sloops from the UK and formed a company called Virgin Voyages.
Alas, we had no real financial backing nor funds to advertise, and so after a couple of years we were forced to close down. However, before we did, an American came down the dock by the Pub, a popular watering hole in Road Town, and asked me what I thought about this bareboat chartering. To which I responded, “We have tried, but alas, it hasn’t worked and we are going to give it up.”
The American was Charlie Cary, who had recently retired from a successful business career. He loved to sail, and had decided that he would give it a go. So, the next year he started The Moorings with five 35 foot Pearson sloops.
The end of a good race at Foxy’s Bar on Jost Van Dyke. Robin (middle) and Justine and Foxy Callwood.
The rest is history! With The Moorings now the biggest charter company in the world.
I have never regretted that we didn’t pursue it further, because if I had, then I would never have enjoyed all the fun sailing and racing that I have done here, and around the Caribbean, for over half a century.
Bareboating has since then exploded both here and around the world. In the early days the vessels were mostly good sailing boats, but alas, particularly in the BVI, the majority of charter vessels are now catamarans which I refer to as floating Winnebagos.
Such is modern day life. Still, I will always remember with great fondness the early days of sailing in the BVI when elegant monohulls graced our waters, including many of the old classics from yesteryear!
