The APA is the Advance Provisioning Allowance. It is the additional budget — typically twenty to thirty percent of the charter rate, that the charter client pays before the trip to cover the running expenses that the charter rate does not include.
The charter rate covers the boat and the crew. The APA covers everything else: the fuel the boat consumes during the charter, the marina fees at every stop, the food and drink for the guests and the crew, the water and ice, the laundry, the local taxes, the port authority fees, and the miscellaneous operational costs that the seven days of a crewed charter consistently produces.
On a forty-foot catamaran in the Mediterranean for one week, the charter rate might be €10,000. The APA is an additional €2,000 to €3,000 collected in advance and managed by the captain during the week. At the end of the week, the captain presents the accounts: what was spent from the APA and what remains. If the APA was overspent, if the week produced more fuel consumption or more marina fees or more provisioning costs than the advance estimate — the client pays the difference. If underspent, the balance is returned.
Why the APA Is Consistently Underestimated
The APA estimate is exactly that, an estimate. The actual fuel consumption depends on how much motoring the week produces, which depends on the wind conditions, which the estimate cannot predict. The marina fees depend on which marinas the route visits, which depends on the weather and the captain’s judgment and the availability of the anchorages that would avoid the marina fees altogether.
The provisioning depends on the guests’ dietary requirements and preferences and the specific food and drink consumption of the group across the week.
The charter industry is honest about the APA existing. It is less systematic about ensuring that the first-time charter client fully understands that the APA is not a deposit that is largely returned, it is a budget that is largely spent.
The week that includes three marina nights at €200 to €400 per night, two hundred litres of diesel at current Mediterranean fuel dock prices, provisioning for eight people for seven days, and the specific consumption pattern of the group that uses the boat as the boat is designed to be used, produces an APA spend that reaches the upper end of the estimate and occasionally exceeds it.
The Naora Alternative
The Naora membership has no APA. The annual participation covers the fuel, the marina fees, the provisioning, the water, the operational costs of the offshore sailing leg for the full duration of every leg within the annual allocation. The member does not receive an estimate of running costs at the beginning of the leg and a settlement document at the end.
The member arrives, sails, eats, dives, and departs. The operating costs of the circumnavigation are the operating costs of the Naora programme, managed as part of the programme’s budget rather than passed through to the member as the variable cost item that the APA system produces.
This is not a small operational difference. For the member who joins multiple legs per year — the Offshore member with forty days, the Ocean Explorer with one hundred, the elimination of the APA variable is the elimination of the budget uncertainty that the charter client manages across every charter week they book.
The Naora participation is the total cost of the offshore sailing experience for the duration of the membership. The APA is someone else’s problem.
