The Antigua Charter Yacht Show runs from 4 to 9 December, across Falmouth Harbour, English Harbour and Nelson's Dockyard. For six days the boats are open and a few hundred brokers move through them, boat after boat, in heat, on a schedule. Most of what they see blurs. What does not blur is a table that looks like somebody thought about it.
This is the one week of the Caribbean season where flowers are not decoration. They are part of the sales material.
What the brokers actually see
A broker walks the boat in twenty minutes and photographs three things: the main saloon, the dining table set, and the aft deck. Those photographs go into a brochure and a central agency listing and they stay there for a year.
So the flowers that matter are the ones in the frame. A single confident statement in the saloon, a table dressed as if guests were sitting down to it, and something alive on the aft deck. What does not pay is scattering small arrangements through every cabin, which costs the same and photographs as nothing.
Keep the dining table below eye level. An arrangement that blocks the sightline across the table reads as a prop in a photograph and gets moved by the first person who tries to sit there.
When should you order for the Antigua show?
Work backwards from Friday 4 December and two constraints decide everything.
The first is the import permit. Antigua needs one, it takes 5 to 7 working days, and it has to be granted before anything is bought at the auction. It is planned once and then covers later orders on the same species list for the rest of the season, so the sensible moment to start it is October, along with the rest of the winter. Leave it to the end of November and the permit, not the flowers, is what you are waiting for.
The second is the lane. Antigua is thirty five hours in the air, the longest of the Caribbean routes, and shipping is Monday to Friday because the flight and the export paperwork both need a working day. With 48 hours' notice before the auction in front of that, an order placed on the Monday of show week lands comfortably before the doors open on the Friday.
Once the permit is on file, a repeat order runs at about three days from your message to the passerelle. That is what makes a second delivery during the show realistic rather than hopeful. The Antigua lane is set out in full here.
Can you buy flowers in Antigua during show week?
Some, and not the ones you want. Local foliage and tropicals are genuinely available and genuinely good, and they should be in the arrangements because they belong there. The European palette, meaning hydrangea, garden roses, peonies and scented stock, is not grown on the island.
And show week is precisely when the little that exists runs out. Sixty boats all want flowers in the same four days. Anything you have not planned, you are competing for.
What survives six days on a table in the heat
Show week is long and the saloon doors are open all day. Choose for structure rather than delicacy: tight heads, firm stems, things that hold their shape as they open rather than collapsing. Orchid plants are the quiet winner here, because a plant does not wilt at four in the afternoon the way a cut arrangement does, and it still looks right on day six.
Anything that opens fast will be finished by the Tuesday. The ranking of what travels and lasts is here, and it applies doubly in December heat.
Two deliveries, not one
Plan the show as two orders. The first arrives before the boat opens and dresses everything. The second lands mid week and refreshes the table and the saloon, because by Monday the first one has done its work.
Crews who budget for one delivery spend the back half of the show apologising for the flowers. The second order is smaller and it is the one that keeps the photographs honest on the last day.
The dry goods are part of the order
Floral foam, containers, vases, tools and sundries all ship with the flowers, and they count towards the 100 kg volumetric minimum, which is measured by the space the boxes take rather than by what they weigh. Flowers are light and bulky, so that minimum is easier to reach than it sounds, and filling the rest of the box with the kit you would otherwise carry out from the Riviera is free capacity.
Send the vases you actually want to use. Nothing undoes a good order faster than arriving to find the only containers on board are the wrong height.
If the boat is doing Antigua and then the islands
Show week is rarely the whole winter. If the programme runs on to St Barths, Sint Maarten, Tortola or the Grenadines, each of those is its own permit on the same 5 to 7 working days, and the time to file them is the same October conversation. How we plan show weeks is here.
The next step
Send Maxime a message on WhatsApp with the boat, your berth and your two dates for the show. We will put the permit in now and hold the slots, so the only decision left in December is what goes on the table.