Start from the weather and work backwards. The BVI is warm all year and the trade winds blow steadily, so you will live in shorts, swimwear and a t-shirt, and change into something marginally smarter perhaps twice. Two to four t-shirts and the same number of shorts or skirts carry most people through a week, alongside three or four sets of swimwear, because nothing you swim in will be dry when you want it again.

Fabric matters more than quantity. Anything quick drying earns its place twice over: it packs smaller, and it comes back to you within the hour rather than hanging damp in a cabin that is already humid.

For your feet, take deck shoes with pale non marking soles, something you can walk a beach or a boardwalk in, and flip flops or water shoes. Add a light windbreaker and one sweatshirt for the evening breeze and you are done. Detail on the conditions themselves sits in our guide to a BVI yacht rental.

On shoes the thing that matters is soles. Deck shoes with white non-marking soles are worth having, because dark rubber scuffs a charter boat's decks and you are the one who gets asked about it at check out.

Leave the hard suitcase at home. This is the instruction charter companies repeat most, and it is not fussiness. A rigid case cannot be folded, cannot be squashed into a locker and cannot be stowed anywhere useful, so it lives in your cabin all week taking up the floor you wanted to stand on.

Soft luggage solves it completely. A duffel, a soft case with wheels or a large backpack empties out, rolls flat and slides under a bunk where you forget about it until the last morning. If two of you are sharing a cabin, one soft bag each is realistic, two each is not.

The same logic runs through everything else. Stowage on a yacht is measured in small awkward spaces rather than cupboards, which is why quick drying clothes and travel sizes keep coming up: they compress. Pack the bag, then take a third of it out. Nobody has come back from a charter wishing they had brought more.

The paperwork is the part you genuinely cannot solve from an anchorage. Passports for everyone aboard, photocopies kept separately from the originals, and a check on visa requirements for your nationality well before you travel rather than at the airport. Travel insurance documents with the policy number to hand are worth more than a certificate sitting in an inbox you cannot open at sea.

Bring your charter paperwork, any pre charter hotel confirmation, and your transfer arrangements from the airport to the base, printed if your phone is likely to be flat after a long flight. If you are sailing the boat yourselves, bring the qualifications the operator asked for. If you have added a skipper, that requirement sits with them instead, which is one of the quieter reasons crews choose a BVI yacht charter with skipper.

On money, the BVI uses the US dollar. Cards work in the larger restaurants and marinas and there are cash machines in the main ports, but carry some cash for the beach bars and the smaller stops, and change it before you fly.

Bring cash in US dollars. The BVI uses the US dollar, so there is nothing to change on arrival, and the rate is better arranged before you fly than at a marina counter. A credit card is worth having alongside it and is accepted in most restaurants and marinas, but the smaller beach bars are cash only. There are ATMs in the larger ports and marinas if you run short, though not in the small anchorages, so draw what you need before you leave the busier stops.