It is the most beautiful place in the country to get married and the least forgiving to plan for. The tide decides everything and it does not negotiate.
Every couple who asks us about a sandbank has seen the same photographs, and they are right: there is nowhere better. What the photographs do not show is that the place your guests are standing will be under water a few hours later, and that every single decision about the evening follows from that.
Start with the tide table, not the menu. The usable window on most banks near Male is five or six hours, and it moves by roughly fifty minutes a day. So the date and the start time are chosen together, and the start time is not negotiable once it is set. We write the closing time into the quotation, in words, because a couple who has not understood it will ask at nine o'clock for another hour and there is no other hour to give.
Then count the boats. Ninety guests is two boats running shuttles for about forty minutes, which means the first guests are on the bank forty minutes before the last ones. That is a real problem if there is nothing for them to do, so the first shuttle arrives to drinks and shade already standing, which means the crew went over at noon.
Power is a generator, and a generator on sand needs a platform, fuel for twice the hours you think and a silencer if anybody is going to make a speech. Lighting has to work in two states, because the light on a bank at six is nothing like the light at eight, and a set that looks beautiful in the dark can look like a building site in the last of the sun.
Everything that goes on a bank has to be moved by two people at speed, so we use trolleys and cases rather than trestles and boxes. The test we apply is simple: if the weather turned, could we have all of it off the sand in forty minutes. If the answer is no, it does not go.
And food. Nothing that has to be kept hot for more than an hour, nothing that needs a kitchen we do not have, and far more water than anybody plans for. Ninety people on open sand in the afternoon will drink twice what the same ninety drink in a hall.
It sounds like a list of reasons not to do it. It is not. It is the list that makes it work, and the couples who have the best evenings on a sandbank are the ones who agreed the closing time in February and then thought about nothing but their guests in June.
