Water like nowhere else on earth

The Bahamas is not really about the islands. It is about the water between them, a drowned plateau of sand where the ocean thins to a few metres for miles at a stretch and turns colours that do not photograph honestly. Around seven hundred islands sit scattered across it, most of them uninhabited, and the finest of them, the Exuma cays, form a chain of more than three hundred and sixty islets that no road, bridge or airport will ever join together. A yacht is not the best way to see the Exumas. It is the only way.

What chartering here is actually like

The rhythm is unlike the eastern Caribbean. There are no mountains and no long windward passages, just short hops between low cays, the anchor down by noon and the tender doing the real work: drifting mangrove creeks, landing on a sandbar that exists for three hours either side of low tide, chasing the light for the afternoon swim. Depth is the local currency. The banks are shallow enough that larger yachts run the deep blue of Exuma Sound, which plunges past a thousand metres a short swim from the bank edge, and slip through the cuts between the cays. A captain who knows the tide through those cuts is worth more than another ten metres of yacht. Nassau is the natural start, with Highbourne Cay, gateway to the chain, a morning's run south.

Down the Exuma chain

Norman's Cay keeps a drug smuggler's drowned aircraft in its shallows, now a snorkel stop in a couple of metres of gin. Shroud Cay is a ring of mangroves threaded with creeks that carry the tender through to a beach facing the open Sound. Warderick Wells is headquarters of the Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park, protected since 1958, where the moorings lie along a crescent of blinding sandbank and the fish life shows what the whole region once looked like. At Compass Cay the resident nurse sharks loiter around the dock like housecats. Staniel Cay brings the famous pair: Thunderball Grotto, the domed cave Bond swam through in 1965, and the swimming pigs of Big Major Cay, which are absurd, and before nine in the morning absurdly good fun. Further south, Great Exuma and the anchorages off George Town close the chain, and a detour northeast earns Harbour Island, where the clapboard cottages of Dunmore Town face five kilometres of pink sand and golf buggies outnumber cars.

The bank runs barely five metres deep for miles at a stretch, and the colour it makes has ruined every other sea for a generation of charterers.

Conch, rum and the Out Islands

Bahamian food is direct and very good. Conch is the national obsession, scored from the shell and turned into salad with lime, chilli and raw onion while you watch, or cracked and fried to order. In Nassau the Fish Fry at Arawak Cay does both at their loudest and best, sky juice, the local gin and coconut water, does the accompanying, and guava duff finishes the lesson. Out in the cays, dinner is grouper landed that afternoon or lobster in season, eaten on deck or among the pilots, guides and yacht crew at the Staniel Cay Yacht Club. Out Island life runs on small settlements, small planes and long memories, and the people of the chain treat visiting yachts as neighbours rather than trade.

When to come

The classic season runs November to April, when the air sits in the high twenties and passing winter fronts bring the occasional breezy day across the banks. December through March is peak, and even then the Exumas feel empty by Mediterranean standards. Summer is hotter, calmer underwater and quieter still, though it sits inside the June to November hurricane season and plans should stay flexible. The chain is under an hour's flight from Florida, which makes it the easiest serious cruising ground in the hemisphere to reach on short notice. When you are ready to look at yachts and dates, our charter team can point you to the yachts whose crews hold the local knowledge this water genuinely demands.