Exumas: Chartering the Bahamas' Private Aquarium

Every yacht photographer eventually shoots the Exumas, and every one of them has the same problem: the archipelago looks retouched in person. One hundred twenty miles of cays strung like a dropped necklace, three hundred and sixty five of them by the usual count, and water that moves through jade, celadon and turquoise depending on what the sand beneath it is doing.

A chain with no roads worth the name

The Exumas run from just southeast of Nassau down to Great Exuma at the bottom, and for most of that length there is no hotel, no airport and no road that would take you anywhere you wanted to go. The best anchorages are reachable only by water. This is not a destination you visit from land. It is one you inhabit from a deck, and a week aboard with a crew that knows the tides turns the chain into a private estate.

The water is the reason. The Great Bahama Bank lies to the west of the cays in ten to fifteen feet of white sand, and Exuma Sound drops to a mile deep on the east. Between them the cuts run like rivers at the change of tide, and the colors do things that do not have names yet. On the first morning, someone on every charter asks whether the water is really that color. It is.

You do not visit the Exumas from land. You inhabit them from a deck.

The course from Highbourne south

Start at Highbourne Cay, at the top of the chain, where the marina fuel dock and the nurse sharks under it are the last piece of infrastructure you will see for a while. Then work south with the prevailing wind behind you and let each day pick one cay.

• Norman's Cay, for the sunken plane in ten feet of water that you can snorkel from the tender, and a beach bar that appears to have been built by accident.
• Shroud Cay, for the mangrove river that winds across the island and ends at a beach with no footprints on it. Take the tender at the top of the tide.
• Warderick Wells, headquarters of the Exuma Land and Sea Park, where a mooring in the north field puts you inside a horseshoe of sandbar and water so clear the boat casts a shadow on the bottom.
• Staniel Cay, for Thunderball Grotto, swum at slack tide, and the yacht club dock where the afternoon happens.
• Big Major Cay, for the swimming pigs, who have handled fame better than most celebrities and will board the tender if you let them.
• Black Point, for the settlement with the best laundry in the Bahamas and a bakery worth the dinghy ride.

Farther south the chain thins, the cays get lower and the anchorages emptier, until Georgetown on Great Exuma closes the run with a harbor full of cruising boats and an airport that gets you home.

When the chain is at its best

March through May is the sweet spot. The winter fronts have faded, the water is at eighty degrees, the summer squalls have not started and the charter fleet that filled the chain over the holidays has thinned out. November and early December run a close second, with the water still warm and the anchorages nearly empty. July and August are hot and glassy, and the storms keep to the afternoon.

A week is the right length. Two days gets you to Staniel and back in a hurry; ten starts to feel like you have moved there, which is not a complaint. The practical move is a yacht already positioned in Nassau or Georgetown, so the chain is your first morning rather than your second day. Ask the crew about the tides before you ask about anything else, because in the Exumas the tide decides which cut you take, when you swim the grotto and whether the river at Shroud is a river or a mud flat.

A handful of the yachts on our platform spend the spring in the chain. Explore the fleet and ask which ones are already there.