Eight Hours to the Desertas, and How Many of Them at the Islands

There is a unit of measurement in boat tourism that deserves more suspicion than it gets, and the unit is the full day.

A full day to the Desertas Islands is eight hours. That number is true and it is also the least useful number on the page, because nobody books a day trip in order to spend time on a boat getting somewhere. They book it to be at the islands. Those are two different quantities, and only one of them gets printed.

So here is the honest unit. Not hours aboard. Hours at anchor.

Once you start counting that way, something becomes obvious. The islands are the same islands for everybody. They are a strictly protected nature reserve and what a boat may do there is regulated in exactly the same way whichever flag it flies. The boats differ less than the brochures suggest. What genuinely differs, between one operator and the next, is the water you have to cross before any of it starts.

The arithmetic nobody puts on the page

We measured both routes properly, on the chart, as a boat would actually run them.

From Marina da Quinta do Lorde, in Caniçal, to the anchorage at Deserta Grande is 17 nautical miles. From the Funchal marina, the same anchorage is 21.

Four miles does not sound like a great deal until you put a sailing boat's speed against it. At the five to six knots a 10 metre yacht actually averages on a passage like this, 17 miles is around three hours. Twenty-one miles is around three and three quarters. Do it in both directions and the difference is roughly an hour and a half.

An hour and a half, on an eight hour day, is not a detail. It is the difference between arriving, anchoring, swimming, eating, and sitting still long enough for the place to become quiet, and arriving, swimming quickly, and watching the skipper start to look at his watch.

It is not only the distance, it is the water

The four miles are the part you can put in a table. The part that matters more is harder to tabulate, and it is the reason we keep saying it.

Leaving from Funchal, you turn south and you are quickly out in the open channel, with nothing up to windward to take the edge off the swell. It is a passage across open water, and on a day with any sea running it feels like one.

Leaving from Caniçal, you are at the island's eastern tip already, and the run to the Desertas is a crossing from one piece of land to the next, along a chain, with the end of the peninsula behind you for the first part of it. The distance you save is modest. The difference in how the first hour feels, on a day when the Atlantic has some movement in it, is not.

That is a skipper's judgement and not a marketing claim, which is why it is worth asking any operator the same question directly: where does your route leave the shelter, and for how long.

What those ninety minutes buy

The anchorage on the eastern side of Deserta Grande is one of the few places in this archipelago where a boat can lie still in deep, clear water with a wall of volcanic rock above it and no other plan for the afternoon.

Ninety minutes there is lunch instead of a sandwich. It is a second swim after the water has stopped feeling cold. It is the hour when the seabirds work the cliff and nobody on board is talking. It is the reason the Desertas are worth the crossing at all, and it is precisely the hour that gets eaten when the crossing is longer.

If you want to know what you are looking at when you get there, we wrote the long version separately, in our guide to the Desertas Islands. This article is only about how to arrive with time left.

The crossing is not dead time

Worth saying, because the whole piece so far has treated the passage as a cost.

The channel between Madeira and the Desertas is deep, and deep water close to land is where things feed. We have had dolphins come to the bow halfway across more times than we have not. Turtles sit on the surface in the flat patches. In spring there are shearwaters working in lines you can follow with your eyes for a mile.

We do not promise any of it. We are not a whale watching company and nothing out there takes bookings. But the three hours are not a corridor to be endured, and if the wind is in the Northeast, which it usually is, most of them happen with the engine off.

What we will not promise

This is the tour the sea cancels most. The channel has its own wind and it does not care what day you flew in on. If the forecast is wrong for it, we move you or we refund you, and we would rather tell you that by email three days out than have you discover it at the pontoon.

We do not promise wildlife.

We do not go ashore. The reserve is protected and the day is spent on the water and in it.

And we will not tell you the sea will be flat, because on a crossing of this length that is not a promise anyone can keep.

Practical information

Where · Marina da Quinta do Lorde, Caniçal, on the eastern tip of Madeira. Three to four minutes on foot from the resort at Quinta do Lorde, and never from Funchal.

Distance · 17 nautical miles to the Deserta Grande anchorage. Around three hours under sail at five to six knots.

Boat · Dufour 325 Grand Large, 10 metres, licensed skipper aboard, maximum 6 guests, always private to your booking.

Best light · Early out, with the sun behind you on the way across and the cliffs lit on the way home.

Best for swimming · The anchorage itself. Deep, clear, and cold enough to be memorable in any month.

Booking · Direct. Tell us your dates early, because this is the day we most often have to move for weather.

In short

Ilhas Desertas, full day, 8 hours, 900 EUR the boat, maximum 6 guests, your group only. Seventeen miles out, seventeen back, and about ninety minutes more at the islands than the same day bought anywhere else on this island.

SeaYa! Madeira, private sailing from Marina da Quinta do Lorde, Caniçal. RNAAT nº 1040/2025.