Calling little Scourges of the Spanish Main

If you happen to find yourself and your kids at Cowes Week, it may be to your benefit to visit the Sunsail stand. Get your kids to mark on a map where they think there may be treasure to plunder (if only you had the treasure map below…), fill in your details and you could win a free week’s charter in the British Virgin Islands for you and your family, and win your kids a crack at the Pirates of the British Virgin Islands Treasure Hunt.

Who wouldn’t want to go sailing here?

Finding adults who want to charter in the Caribbean isn’t difficult, it’s an incredible place to go sailing. For the children of the charterers however, there are only so many sandcastles you can build, games of I-Spy you can play and dolphins you can spot before attention starts to wander and tempers start to fray.

Working in tandem with the British Virgin Islands Tourist Board, yacht charter company Sunsail has come up with a clever way of keeping kids engaged and entertained as you sail around the archipelago. In recognition of the colourful and captivating history of this part of the Caribbean, there is now a ‘Pirates of the British Virgin Islands Treasure Hunt’ Tour.

While you’re checking forms and stowing kit in lockers, your pocket plunderers will be trying out their new pirate’s eye patch and going over a treasure map looking for six BVI Pirate Treasure Troves. Fortunately, rather than bury a coin in the sand ‘where X marks the spot, six paces north of the old bent palm tree,’ they’ve chosen locations that are somewhat less clandestine and far more entertaining.

‘Don’t ye breathe a word of this…’

These are Peg Leg’s restaurant and bar in Nanny Cay, Tortola, the Bitter End Yacht Club in Gorda Sound, Virgin Gorda, and Aragorn’s arts and crafts studio in Trellis Bay, Beef Island (also home to the Fire Ball Full Moon Party). After that you can haul your yards over and head for the Soggy Dollar Bar in White Bay, Jost Van Dyke, then the Pirate’s Bight restaurant in The Bight, Norman Island and then Deadman’s Beach Bar and Grill, in Deadman’s Bay, Peter Island.

‘Pieces-of-eight!’ Or pieces of six, anyway

A shiny golden doubloon awaits at each location. All your young corsairs need do is pull on their eye patch or bandana, thus identifying themselves as a bona fide sea-borne menace, and ask for their treasure. No pistols at dawn or crossed sabres required. There are six coins to collect and there’s a prize certificate for the successful brigand.

The real beauty of this little wheeze is that these are all sensational destinations that you would visit anyway.

If you don’t win but you like the sound of sailing your young picaroons around the BVI with some sort of a mission, then prices start from £1,597 for a one-week charter for a two-cabin Sunsail 38 (a Sunsail-spec Jeanneau Sun Odyssey 379, which sleeps up to six people). This includes hats, bandanas, eye-patches, treasure map as well as outboard, end cleaning, fuel and yacht damage waiver. Flights and transfers can be booked individually.

Want to know more? Visit www.sunsail.co.uk or call 020 3411 4760