What is a Bahamas yacht charter like?

When I booked our Bahamas yacht charter, I had little idea what a yacht vacation would be like. Would this be a week at sea, never touching land? Or would the boat be our floating hotel room, waiting for us at the end of each long day ashore?

The reality fell between those extremes. Every day we visited two or three destinations, spending four or five hours on land. Mornings and evenings, we hung out on board. And the boat was in motion for several hours a day.

If you think you might enjoy a Bahamas yacht vacation but you’re not sure what that entails, read on!

The Bahamas yacht charter experience

Our six-night private cruise of the Abacos Islands in the Bahamas was different from any beach vacation I’ve ever taken. On the upside, we enjoyed uncrowded crystalline beaches, flexibility of schedule and relaxing sunbathing on deck. On the downside, we found it a little uncomfortable to be taxied around by a captain who was with us 24/7. (We’re more used to exploring independently.) And although we found lots to explore, some people might find islands with no ice cream vendors and little entertainment to be boring.

A typical day on a Bahamas yacht charter

I’ll describe our experience as a family on a Bahamas yacht charter — specifically, on a 42-foot Bali Catspace, with a captain. If you are chartering a fully crewed superyacht, or renting a pocket yacht that you pilot yourself, you’ll have a different experience.

• 6:30 a.m. Despite a 3-hour time difference from home in California, I jumped out of bed at dawn daily. I loved having my coffee outside at sunrise, writing in my journal.
• 8 a.m. I put out cereal or cooked up some eggs for whatever family members had turned up at the saloon table. However, as the days went on the kids started sleeping in late to avoid seasickness during our morning travel.
• 9 a.m. Our captain pulled up anchor and headed up to the cockpit to drive us to the day’s first destination.
• 11 a.m. We climbed into the dingy and the captain brought us to our first destination of the day. The time of this first excursion actually varied depending on how far we needed to travel to get there. One day, we arrived at 1 p.m., another day, 9 a.m.
• 12 p.m. If the destination had a restaurant, we had lunch there. All the restaurants were your typical beach bar, with indoor and outdoor seating, killer views and a tropical cocktail menu.
• 3 p.m. Back on board, the captain would take us to a second destination. Some days, this was a spot out in the water where he thought there would be good snorkeling. Other days, it was another island.
• 5 p.m. We would return to the boat for the night. We enjoyed a tropical drink (mocktails for the kids) and a charcuterie board (which I made nightly). Then we would take our time making and eating dinner in the saloon.
• 8 p.m. After dinner, we would lie on deck and look at the stars, or stay inside and play a game in the saloon.
• 9:30 p.m. Most nights, we were in our cabins and ready to go to bed by this time!

What activities can you do in the Bahamas?

Before we left on our trip, I told the kids I’d buy them ice cream every day on our vacation. In reality, most of our stops in the Abacos Islands had no ice cream — or anything else — to buy. We enjoyed landing on beaches with no other people around, much less a snack bar. It was great to be able to explore nature, discovering creatures and splashing around, all on our own.

On the downside, being on either empty beaches or in restaurants patronized only by tourists meant that we didn’t meet many local residents during our Bahamas yacht charter. The two people we chatted with most were our captain and the taxi driver who brought us from the airport on day one and back to the airport for our return flight.

Here’s how we spent our days:

Visiting beaches

Beaches are really the main draw in the Bahamas. The sand was white powder, as soft as milled flour. The water was so clear that we could see the sand, even if we swam out into slightly deeper water. We would arrive on a new beach, walk around looking for shells and creatures, maybe bring an inflatible float out into the waves, or lie on the sand and read.

We visited the following beaches:

• No Name Cay, home of Big O’s Bar & Restaurant, where we got to meet feral “swimming” pigs.
• Nunjack Cay, a shallow cove where stingrays hang out to collect bits of squid from tourists in exchange for photo ops.
• Treasure Cay beach at the Beach Villa Owners Association. Unlike the first two, the water here gets deep enough to actually swim. The BVOA has bathrooms that the public can use, and you can even buy reverse osmosis filtered water for $1/gallon (bring your own container).
• White Sound on Green Turtle Cay, home of Bluff House Beach Resort & Marina. They have some cute swings over the water for a photo op.
• Great Guana Cay — we went to the tip of this island where it meets Scotland Cay, because the area right around where the islands meet is a snorkel spot. You can walk a short path to the ocean here as well.
• Tahiti Beach there was a gorgeous sandbar here and more sea life than other spots we visited.

Snorkeling

I had heard that the clear waters of the Bahamas make for excellent diving and snorkeling. So I was very excited to snorkel on this trip. I would say that my expectations were partially met.

Yes, the water is super clear. But like most places in the world, the Bahamas coral reefs are suffering from bleaching caused by warming seawater. It’s always sad to get underwater and see a bunch of dead coral. That said, the coral wasn’t all bleached. And I saw some cool fish, as well as a lot of cool purple sea fans.

In January, the water was warm enough to enjoy a midday swim when the sun was out. But for most of our snorkeling outings, I wore a wet suit, which kept me comfortable out there for an hour at a time.

Out of our group, I’m the most enthusiastic snorkeler, and my 15-year-old son Toth also enjoys it a lot. My 20-year-old daughter Nutmeg likes it, but after the first couple days she had had enough. My other daughter and my husband don’t snorkel, so they just chilled out and sunbathed during these stops.

Visiting Bahamas towns

Once we left Marsh Harbour, we visited only two towns in the Abacos during our Bahamas yacht charter: Hopetown and New Plymouth (on Green Turtle Cay.

New Plymouth had the feel of being a space shared by locals and tourists. It has some old colorful clapboard houses, hearkening back to the towns days as a Loyalist settlement during and after the Revolutionary War. Once the colonies became independant, some people who were loyal to Britain settled here.

We were lucky enough to witness a junkanoo here on New Year’s Day, one of the top highlights of our trip. I’ll write more about that later.

New Plymouth has some stores, where you can restock on supplies and water, like Sid’s. The village is also home to the Albert Lowe Museum, a historical collection that I wish we had seen. Since we were there on New Year’s Day, of course the museum was closed. But still, it was nice to walk the island’s narrow paths, check out its memorial garden and peek in at the various shops.

Hope Town boasts the main tourist attraction of the Abacos, the Elbow Reef Lighthouse. We saw this cheerfully striped lighthouse from the plane as we cruised down toward the airport. It was fun to walk the winding steps and gaze out the lighthouse windows at the beautiful bay, and to pick out our yacht among the boats anchored out there. The cool thing about this lighthouse is that it was never electrified: Its light is powered by kerosene and the lens is turned by hand.

Other than the lighthouse, Hopetown is both a historic village and an active vacation community. There are lots of little shops offering ice cream (finally!) and souvenirs. We had a fun mission walking the narrow town street looking for the Post Office, which turned out to have been shut down by Hurricane Dorian in 2019. The temporary PO was located in the police station, which is also the site of the town’s playground for children. Unfortunately, being Saturday, the temporary PO was also closed.

(Poor Erik just wanted to buy some stamps for his postcards, but he never found anywhere to buy any.)

In Hope Town, we visited with Hermann Schadtt, a retired German artist who ran a shop with his wife selling their original art and crafts. Hermann was refreshingly open about the ups and downs of running an art shop on remote tourist island. We bought a few postcards from him. When I took out a $10 Bahamanian bill to pay, he pointed out the drawing of the Elbow Reef Lighthouse on the back of it. That kind of made me wish I’d kept it, but I wanted some small bills for the next time I needed to tip someone.

We also bought a key lime pie from Vernon of Vernon’s Grocery. A thin man who looked very old, Vernon has taped up hand-scrawled jokes and commentary all over the shop. He told us that he kept only one pie at the register because otherwise people would open up the box and touch them. One woman, he told us with exasperation, had even lifted up the whole meringue layer to look at the top of the pie — then didn’t buy it. The pie, which cost about $27, was delicious.

Creatures we encountered on our Bahamas yacht charter

The animals we met were highlights of our yacht vacation.

• Feral pigs. When I left the dock at our very first stop, the first thing I saw was a mama sow lying on her side, nursing piglets. The Bahamas is famous for “swimming” pigs, and No Name Cay has just a few of them hanging around. However, we did not observe the pigs swimming by choice. They would enter the water when tourists lured them in with food. We didn’t love that vibe, but once the ohter tourists left (because the restaurant there had closed) the pigs crashed out in the shade to sleep and we enjoyed just watching them. They did let us scratch their backs as well.
• Sting rays. A little scary to me, but our captain assured me we would be safe as long as we avoided the stinging end. At Nunjack Cay, this is another situation where people feed the wildlife. But we did see another stingray quite randomly while wading somehwere else, maybe Treasure Cay.
• Dophins. We saw dolphins twice on the same day, breaching the water as we cruised in the yacht. Once I saw two breaching together which was very cool. Both times, they were pretty far away but still visible.
• Shark. We saw a shark’s fins at the top of the water at Nunjack Cay. We think it was a nurse shark.
• Green turtle. Also at Nunjack Cay, I saw one of these sea turtles while snorkeling (there is no reef there, I was just fooling around). The rest of my family saw one at another beach. Such a thrill! Apparently there used to be tons of these around the Abacos (hence Green Turtle Island) but they were almost decimated by hunting.
• Octopus. In a tidepool at the Tahiti Beach sand bar, my son saw something long and whitish and stepped closer to take a look. To his surprise, what he thought might be a sea cucumber retracted into a hollow under a rock, and he realize he had just seen an octopus tentacle! He fetched the rest of us and we stole as many looks as we could at the tentacled mass huddled under her rock.
• Sea stars. We saw a couple of these big red echinoderms just lying on the sand under the clear water. As you are supposed to, we let them be.

• Conchs. While there are tons of conch shells on every beach — and decorating every yard — in the Bahamas, it took us until our last day to see conch that we could confirm were alive. Tahiti Beach had tons of live conch, just hanging around. They didn’t seem too bothered when we picked them up to take a look.

• Sand dollars. Unlike the flat white things you might find on the beach, the sand dollars we saw while snorkeling and tide pooling were plump, purple and alive.

Cultural experiences in the Bahamas

To be honest, this was one of the downsides of yacht chartering to me: We felt kind of insulated from the country we were visiting. We spent most of our time with just the family, which was great, but also felt a bit sterile at times.

But we did have one amazing cultural experience: We got to attend a Junkanoo! This street parade celebration, which has a long history among people of African descent across the Caribbean, is reminiscent of Mardi Gras. Dancers don large and colorful homemade costumes and rock down the street to the beat of drums, whistles and horns.

The junkanoo we attended happened on Green Turtle Cay on New Year’s Day. I’m so grateful that our taxi driver, Brenda of First Lady Taxi 151, told us about it. It was such a warm and intimate community event, much smaller, I’m sure, than the junkanoo held in Nassau. Dancers wore costumes including sparkling pink flamingos, a pirate aboard a ship (the whole costume worn and held up by one man), peacocks and so much more. After the parade passed by, we walked around town, checking out the tables where local people were selling crafts and food. It was one of our favorite experiences of the entire vacation.

Activities we could have done on our Bahamas yacht charter but didn’t

• Fishing. My husband wanted to fish. Unfortunately, we didn’t rent any before departure because we didn’t know if our captain would be up for helping us fish or not. It turned out that our captain loves to fish, but he had already rented out his fishing equipment to someone else for the week.
• Paddleboarding. I tried to arrange renting paddleboards in advance. However, in the rush of the first day, when the office offered me inflatible paddleboards to rent, I changed my mind. I didn’t really want to deal with inflating them. But I do think it would have been fun to have a paddleboard on board.
• Swimming off the boat. I always imagined that yacht life would involve a lot of jumping off the yacht into the water. And it probably does — when the weather is warmer. Since we were out enjoying beaches or actively on the move during the warm parts of the day, we were only really hanging around the yacht in the morning and evening. During those times, no one felt like swimming because the temps dipped into the mid 60s.

Have you ever thought about chartering a yacht in the Bahamas? Do you have questions about it? Hit me up in the comments!