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There is something about an invitation to join friends for 'sundowners' that conjures up wonderful images of glorious sunsets and mocktails with little paper parasols in them. 

"There are few things I like better" said a friend, just the other day, "than settling down with a long ice-cold 'sundowner' and watching the bareboats arrive. Total entertainment!"
If you've ever enjoyed that smug pleasure, you'll know exactly what he had in mind. 
For the uninitiated - a bareboat charter is one where the client hires a vessel without crew and crews it himself. Occasionally this is not apparent to the onlooker, the client being a seasoned sailor. More often than not, though, the client is someone who has seen snippets of sailing in movies and sports coverage, decided there's not much to it, maybe even done a quick sailing course and gone ahead with a booking. The sails go up and, usually, come down again pretty swiftly, in favour of motoring and gradually the only moving the boat does, (apart from rocking at anchor a bit, in the wash of a passing speedboat or dinghy,) is motoring from one bay to the next along and drifting away from hastily made moorings, dragging a badly set anchor with it. 

The boat rushes into the bay at top speed, usually an indication that it is being skippered by a hot-blooded Latin, a homicidal maniac or a bareboat charter client. Spotting a site to which he is attracted, the charterer nudges his way into a position which virtually guarantees that there will be an exchange of hull paint before long. He heaves the anchor off its roller, lets the brake off the chain and heaps the whole lot on top of the anchor, which is still drifting towards a spot somewhere below the charter vessel. Pausing for only as long as it takes to grab his designer shades and round up the stragglers, hastily spraying Eau De Holidaymaker onto their tanned leather throats, he has the whole gang ashore and sashaying up to the bar before you can say "Bareboat!"

As the evening wears on, it can get quite exciting if you're in an area where large bareboat charter companies operate. Later, when the sundowners have evolved into 'nightcaps', there will be three kinds of mayhem. It is possible that the boat is no longer there, when the bareboat crew wish to return to it and fall into their berths, because it has drifted out of sight, taking its anchor along for the ride. Or it's there, all right, with a furious neighbour fending it off the shiny new stainless steel bow railing he blew the whole of last year's re-fit budget on, having been thus occupied since the tide turned an hour and a half since. 

The other kind can be quite amusing to witness too... Quite often, the bigger companies hire out a fleet of boats which are all of the same make and model. They pride themselves on the uniformity of their vessels. Having all decided to read the same guide book, all the bareboat clients have come to the same spot and now our hapless 'gang' are confronted with the sight of any number of boats which look exactly like the one they arrived on... How cruel we are to be amused. Ha, ha, ha! Sorry! We'd be the first to admit that we have known our own anchors to drag but we like to think it has never been for lack of trying to be certain that they've held before turning our backs on them. This article is not intended to offend the careful but unlucky. Actually, it's not meant to offend anyone. However, if the cap fits...

In one harbour we spent a happy month, in Southern Spain, in '97. On the  'big' boats dock (anything over 30 feet seemed to qualify) in Aguadulce, a few kilometres West of Almeria, a sociable couple had set up a couple of plastic tables and some chairs on the quay astern of their boat, for the purposes of encouraging their (mainly British) neighbours to join them for sundowners. The neighbours would drift along at the appropriate time each evening, bringing with them whatever they fancied to drink, and all would sit around together, talking about whatever it is that sociable people talk about.

We're not that sociable, so we went just once, a couple of nights before we were due to leave, as it seemed churlish to go on politely declining to the very end of our stay. They seemed very nice, it's just that we're not great 'joiners-in' and we didn't want to put ourselves in the position of either feeling we had to attend regularly to avoid causing offence or of causing the offence by not bothering if we weren't enjoying it. We probably miss out on loads of good times that way, but we probably miss out on lots of tedium too.

Anyway, it was clear that we were in the minority, so we weren't causing a huge gap to be unfilled along one edge of the table or anything. There were always at least a dozen people round the table, and it must be said that the evening we spent with them was quite pleasant and relaxed. It's an idea we saw repeated only without the table and chairs, just a motley assortment of camp stools and cushions strewn about the jetty, at Coral Cove Marina, Trinidad, West Indies, in 1999, where the gathering was mostly Americans with a Canadian couple, some Scandinavians and, again, on one occasion, just before we left, our British selves. It was fun.

Are you a sundowner enthusiast? Do you look forward every day to taking the time to enjoy the spectacle of day being engulfed by night after a brief attempt to burn the darkness away? Tell us about your most spectacular or pleasant sundowner experiences. We'd love to hear from you!