Your guide to navigating Caribbean island customs and immigration while sailing

Caribbean island customs processes can be complicated, as each one manages it's borders different. Simon Hardaker helps guide you through some of the rules.

There are great pilot guides written by the likes of Doyle and constantly updated online resources like Noonsite, noforeignland and Navily to help visiting yacht skippers navigate the complex Caribbean island customs and immigration process.

What you’ll actually find in each customs and immigration office is a bit of a lottery, which this article will hopefully prepare you for.

Most of the islands are relatively small; you could cruise around each of them in a day or two if you really wanted to.

If you aim to see as much and as many of them as possible during what might be a single season, you’ll end up sailing between islands every few days and frequently treading the sometimes tortuous and ambiguous path through border control.

SailClear, an online system launched in 2013, now operates in about 20 Caribbean islands.

It costs US$25 annually to register and brings some uniformity to the Caribbean island customs and immigration process and shortens the time needed in their various offices.

It doesn’t cover all the Caribbean islands, and each island seems to apply it in slightly different ways.

The website is a bit slow and clunky, but once all the details about the yacht, the crew, and how much rum is aboard are all entered, most of the questions that officials want to know are answered.

The web form notifying yacht arrival time and date should be completed 24 hours ahead of arrival. Doing this gives skippers an identification number to provide to the officials to start the process when you get to their office.

French Caribbean islands customs process

The French islands don’t use SailClear, they introduced their own online system in September 2024.

It’s a simple matter to sign up if you follow the Noonsite link about clearing into Martinique, for example. It means in effect that you’ll be able to complete the process of check-in and check-out online, as long as you’re transiting between French islands.

If, however, you’re leaving the French islands to go somewhere like Antigua, you will still need to go ashore in the French port of entry before going. You can get an official stamp and signature which you can present at your next port of entry.

Be aware, industrial action is quite frequent around the French islands and may affect either your clearance procedure or even things like the water supply in a marina. You might find, as we did once, checking out of Ille des Saintes, that the answer was: ‘Non, we are on strike captain.’

This resulted in a lengthy 25-mile diversion to mainland Guadeloupe to complete the necessary formalities.

You might wonder, then, why you’d go to all this bureaucratic trouble. The answer is pretty simple.

Whenever you visit another island in the Caribbean, the first thing that the immigration officer asks to see is the exit paperwork and stamp from the island you’ve just come from. No exit paper, no entry.

Officials do not regularly ride around the anchorages of the Caribbean like they do in Europe, but in more popular ones they do. Don’t be ‘the one’; a fine may be the least of your problems.

Careful where you check in

You should also check where exactly on the island you’re supposed to check in.

There’s sometimes more than one place, and occasionally a financial benefit to one over the other. In Antigua for example, Jolly Harbour is less expensive than Falmouth Harbour.

If you are entering the BVIs by boat though, where there are a couple of ‘entry’ points, I strongly recommend that you anchor or moor up exactly as indicated in the guides. If Virgin Gorda is your closest port of entry, the anchorage is Spanish Town or the harbour there.

As I was clearing our yacht in there, another skipper arrived to check his superyacht in. When asked where he was anchored, he said ‘around the corner in Virgin Gorda Yacht Harbour’.

‘You should be here,’ the officer indicated, pointing outside his window to the Spanish Town anchorage. ‘There was a big swell when we arrived so we went around the corner’.

The officer responded: ‘The fine for not properly checking in is…’

It was a lot of money. The professional skipper should have known better, but I imagine he was under pressure from the owner to anchor somewhere with a nicer view.

If the BVIs are on your itinerary in 2025 and 2026, the paper-based system is projected to move to an embarkation/ disembarkation online system.

To begin with, the system will operate for ferry terminals and airports, but yachts could be next. Another thing to consider if cruising the BVIs it that there’s only a month to cruise before your yacht becomes liable for temporary import duties of approximately US$200.

Overall, we found that the French islands, for the most part, are the easiest to clear in and out from. Contrast this with other islands where bureaucracy has taken hold. I’m sorry to say, officials in these islands probably learned well from the British at some point in their history.

Dealing with this kind of officialdom sometimes requires a whole new level of obsequiousness on the part of skippers. You can spend a long time working your way through their system.

Dress to impress when going through Caribbean island customs

Dress for the occasion. If you look the part, they take you more seriously – crew shirt or T-shirt, shorts, shoes or even flipflops are ok. It’s just courteous. After all, the officers have all turned up in uniform in the same heat.

On arrival, queue to see the officer from customs. They address you as captain, you address her as Ma’am, him as Sir. The officers use a tone like a teacher might with a pupil handing in their homework late.  You say it like you mean it, because they have the power to make you wait for a very long time. In one case I actually overheard a rather objectionable young skipper being denied entry.

Communication breakdown

Since Covid-19, there are big glass or plastic screens erected between skippers and the officials. It’s almost impossible to hear what each says through this ‘wall’ sometimes. At one immigration office,

I was asked how many guns I have onboard. I mistakenly heard ‘crew’ not guns and blithely replied, four. The officer nearly fell off his chair. People do sometimes carry guns on yachts and officials will generally confiscate them while the yacht is visiting their island.

The person from customs completes five separate forms with the same information, gathered from my online submissions and makes copies of them. They give me all five forms back and I sign as skipper at the bottom of each to take to immigration, which is usually in the same building, but not always.

Some islands only require the skipper to present themselves with all the crew passports. Others will want to see the whole crew; there’s little way of knowing which applies ahead of time but Navily and Noonsite often have the up-to-date experiences of other skippers to refer to.

Caribbean island customs come with endless bureaucracy

I show the passports to the immigration officer, and ships registration papers again, which the officer takes yet another copy of. They scan our passports and ask how much tobacco, rum and guns I have aboard.

They keep one of the forms and give me all the others back, all stamped with an official immigration stamp and signature, and send me right back to the customs officer I saw at the beginning.

She takes the forms back, keeps the other copies, for I don’t know what, and gives me one copy to keep. It’s important that I do so. It’s evidence of my status as a visiting yacht skipper and qualifies me for 20% off the price of products and services in chandleries.

I’m nearly done. Next, I need some money to give to Port Control or the harbourmaster. You’ll need to have cash as well as credit cards ready, as in some offices they only accept one or the other, and sometimes a combination of each for different types of fee.

There are fees for everything; anchoring, the environment and National Parks, refuse, fees to pass under bridges – yes, seriously– and just about anything else you can think of. This can mount up to, in some cases, a couple of hundred East Caribbean dollars.

This is just when clearing in to an island. I do pretty much the same again on the way out, including paying again, but usually it costs less when departing, and crucially, collecting the all-important exit form to hand to the next Caribbean island’s customs officer.

Once you’re safely cleared in, the crew and I can move on to the fun part and get a rum punch or two. Actually, as skipper, I might have some catching up to do as the crew might have illicitly smuggled themselves ashore already.

Lessons learnt about navigating Caribbean island customs

1. Keep your papers organised

Keep all your boat papers together in the same folder for when you check in: yacht registration, insurance certificate, yacht certificates of conformity, radio licences, and ownership documents for yacht and dinghy. You never know when you’ll be required to present them.

2. Keep a record of details

We printed off a table detailing all the current crew names and passport information, plus all the vessel details. We used this, either as an aide memoire, or as an attachment when allowed to.

Skippers will get very used to parroting, excuse the pun, the boat’s SSR (UK registration) number and its tonnage and dimensions.

A copy of the UK SSR form was required at all ports, but it only has yacht length, not beam, draught and net tonnage, which some authorities want. In marinas, insurance certificates are always required for the period that you’re there.

3. Fly the correct flag

Everywhere we went, courtesy flags were flown. On arrival, Flag Q should be flown below the relevant courtesy flag for that island from the starboard spreader flag hoist. In the French Caribbean islands, yachts often just flew the French flag rather than the specific island one.

4. Create DIY flags

Make your own flags. We made lots of them before we left the UK. The simple ones like France for the French islands are easy. You need to get a bit more creative for flags like Dominica (we drew the parrot onto the background colours) and it passed muster on each of the trips we made there.

5. Be aware of island time

You’d also be well advised not to rely on all the various immigration, customs and port authorities being open at the same time. I’ve experienced officers pulling out the closed sign an hour before the published closing time.

Simon Hardaker has cruised across the Atlantic twice in a Beneteau Oceanis 50 which he co-owns. The responsibilities of a yacht skipper cruising the Caribbean include clearing the yacht and her crew through customs and immigration offices. In this article he provides directions for what you need to provide to the officials and the attitude required to navigate the bureaucracy of the various islands.

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