Provisioning for your charter in the British Virgin Islands is easy and can be an adventure in itself. First, you need to make the decision as to whether you are going to ask the charter operator or a provisioning company to do all provisioning for you or whether you are going to go shopping and provision yourself. If you have the boat provisioned, you will still get some choices as to meal selection and as to how many meals you want provisioned. Remember, the BVI offers many great and fun restaurants accessible to sailors; so how often do you plan to eat on the boat versus at a restaurant? Personally, we tend to plan to eat on the boat every other night and at a restaurant every other night.
Tortola has a number of large, supermarket style markets from which you can provision. Many of these are on the water and have docks so that you can take your dinghy directly to the market to pick up and transport provisions. Ask your charter operator about the markets convenient to your boat’s location.
Once you have departed Tortola, small markets are still readily available but tend to have smaller selections and higher prices. So generally it is a good idea to provision as much as possible (including non-perishables) on Tortola. Of course provisioning for a trip in the BVI almost always includes rum, which is a bargain there.