Nassau Charter Itinerary

Nassau Itinerary

Nassau Yacht Charter
The Bahamas run to some seven hundred islands and two thousand cays, which makes the question not where to go but what to leave out. This route answers it by heading south from Nassau through Eleuthera and into the Exumas, where the water turns a shade of blue that photographs badly and reads perfectly in person.





The week moves between two kinds of day. There are the towns ’ Nassau’s harbour, the colonial lanes of Dunmore Town ’ and there is everything reached only from the water: a plane wreck on a sandbar, a grotto lit from below, a beach with no road to it.





Every route we shape is a starting point, not a fixed schedule. Stay a second day where the light is right, move with the weather, or follow a captain who knows the cove worth the detour. That freedom is the point of chartering. What follows is one considered way to read the Bahamas; the rest we tailor to you.
Day 1

Nassau & Rose Island

The week begins in Nassau, then leaves it almost at once. A short passage east brings you to Rose Island, a thin green strip of empty beach where the tender does the work and lunch happens on the sand. Return in the evening and the capital shows its other face: the harbour lit, the restaurants filling, the pace picking up. An easy start, with the quiet part already banked.
Day 2

Harbour Island

Thread the Devil’s Backbone, a passage that earns its name and rewards a captain who knows it, and Harbour Island opens up on the far side. The sand here is genuinely pink, tinted by crushed coral, and it runs for three miles. Ashore, Dunmore Town keeps its clapboard houses and colonial calm. Bicycles outnumber cars. Nobody hurries.
Day 3

Eleuthera

Eleuthera is a hundred miles long and barely a mile wide in places, which means the Atlantic sits on one shoulder and the bank on the other. Work down the leeward coast, stopping where the chart suggests and the crew insists: hidden cays, a lagoon or two, water shallow enough to read the bottom. Dinner ashore on a beach, with the stars doing the lighting.
Day 4

Staniel Cay

Into the Exumas proper, and the character sharpens. Staniel Cay is small, well run and improbably well connected ’ a marina, a handful of tables worth booking, and reef within a tender ride in almost every direction. It is the practical heart of this stretch of the chain, and the base from which the next two days make sense.
Day 5

Big Major Cay & Thunderball Grotto

Big Major Cay comes first, where the swimming pigs paddle out to meet the tender and the whole thing is sillier and better than it sounds. Then Thunderball Grotto, a sea cave you enter at slack water, its roof pierced so the light drops in shafts through the fish. Snorkel it early, before the day boats. Spend the afternoon at anchor.
Day 6

Highbourne Cay

Sail north to Highbourne Cay, pausing at Norman’s Cay to snorkel a sunken smuggler’s plane, now furred with coral and patrolled by sergeant majors. Highbourne itself is trim and quiet: a marina, a beach on either side, a golf cart if you want to cross the island. Lunch is good here. So is doing nothing.
Day 7

Nassau

Turn back north-west for Nassau on a broad reach with the bank running turquoise beneath you. There is time for a last swim before the harbour, and time ashore for whatever the week left undone. The Bahamas do not make a ceremony of goodbyes. You simply arrive, and find you have already decided to come back.

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