Marine Mail Call for Cruising Sailors on the Go
The ideal is to be toes in the sand and away from “civilization,” watching the sun slowly dip into a turquoise sea. That’s all well and good until you need your tax papers, or a part for the boat, or a treat from the United States. For cruising sailors, getting ready to sail away includes getting ready to figure out how you will get your mail while you wander the seas.
“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night,” is the oft-quoted unofficial motto of the US Postal Service, but it doesn’t mention open ocean, hurricanes, or lee shores.
Some cruisers keep their US-based home address and have a trusted person to forward their mail. Many people sell off their home and use family abodes in the US as their new official address. And others use a mail-forwarding service. Mail forwarding services have multiplied like bunnies since the old days and are all over now.
Research before you commit. Is the state and town important to you? Keep in mind many forwarding services do not count as a physical residence for things such as voter registration or a driver’s license. Will they allow someone who is not you to collect your mail in person? And what are the fees for pickup versus forwarding.
Speaking of fees, check all of the fees. There will be a monthly fee for the service, but do they also charge for storing mail past a certain number of days, scanning, or holding bulky packages? Do they offer tracking? Don’t get caught off guard by these important details.
Once you decide where your mail will land, the adventure begins. You sail away, and your mail piles up at that location. Now you are anchored at St. Somewhere and you want to check your mail. If you use a mail service, you log into your service for scans of the envelopes in your box. You can usually tell them to throw it away, open and scan it, or bundle it for forwarding.
Now you need to figure out how it gets to you in the islands. A common way is by airplane visitor. This can mean your visitor or even a cruising buddy’s visitor.
Another way to get your mail is via marinas in various ports. This is super convenient in the US or Caribbean islands that are US territories. Call ahead and ask the marina if they will hold mail for you. Some might only provide the service if you take a slip, but others will do it if they know you’re coming fairly soon and plan to anchor nearby, take a mooring, or fuel up. Keep in mind that priority mail and Prime always take longer when going to the islands, even if it’s a US address.
In the Caribbean there are also mail collection services that use a Miami address and routinely ship to the islands. When it arrives, you pay the duty on the item and/or a price per pound, along with a monthly fee for the service. The costs can add up, but the upside is that they will hold your packages and mail for a long time. We did this in places such as the Dominican Republic and Sint Maarten.
Are you overwhelmed yet? Let’s follow some mail from start to finish.
We had a virtual mailbox service in our home port in Annapolis. Mail and small packages piled up there, as we used our virtual portal to check on what we wanted to get our hands on and what could be thrown away.
We also paid for an annual box in Sint Maarten for a couple of years. It made sense as all watery roads seem to pass through Sint Maarten, so we would use that as our Caribbean mail accumulation point. It is also duty free, so that’s a huge bonus.
When we were getting close to arriving in Sint Maarten, we forwarded our Annapolis mail to their Miami address. We also started ordering boat parts, Amazon, and other goodies to that Miami address. All of that mail would arrive in Miami and be shipped out twice a week to the island.
The mail service store in Sint Maarten would hold it for us. They had no online portal, but we could email or call to check for arrivals.
We would arrive in Sint Maarten, anchor, and dinghy to shore just about a block away from the physical store. We would walk in, savor the cold air conditioning, and ask for our mail. They would have us sign, pay the fees per pound, and voilà, we have our mail and packages.
Sometimes, we would have to catch a weather window without all of our mail. Or we would be long gone from Sint Maarten and still need some school books, boat parts, or “Everything But the Bagel” seasoning. Priorities, right?
In that case, we would jump on the coconut telegraph and see which friends were passing through Sint Maarten and eventually headed our way. We call the mail service, give them permission to hand over our mail to the friend, and the friend pays the fees, or we give the service a charge card over the phone. Then, the mail jumps on the friend’s boat and the dance begins. We play weather tag and hope to meet up a couple hundred nautical miles later somewhere in the same harbor. We mix some cocktails as a thank you, and the friend comes with a dinghy full of mail and packages like a salty Santa Claus.
It takes some planning but where there’s a will, there’s a way.
About the Author: For three years, Annapolis sailor Cindy Wallach cruised the Caribbean with her family aboard their St. Francis 44 MK II catamaran Majestic, which is now for sale through multihullcompany.com.
