Roger VegaLuxco Editorial Team Fifty nautical miles. That is the whole distance between a Miami marina and the customs dock in Alice Town, and a well-found motor yacht covers it before lunch. Here is how forty eight hours in Bimini actually run, hour by hour, from the first line off to the skyline coming back over the bow.
Two days is the right length. One is a boat ride with paperwork; three starts to feel like you are staying. The log below is a composite of the crossing as our crews run it in the settled months, March through May and again in the fall, with the tides and the light where they usually fall.
Lines off with the paperwork already filed: the cruising permit application, passports scanned, the crew list ready. Leaving by half past eight puts you in Alice Town with the morning still on your side. The bay is flat at this hour, and the sea buoy comes up before the coffee is finished.
About an hour out, the green of Biscayne gives way to a blue so deep it looks like something you could build on, and the depth sounder quietly gives up. This is the Gulf Stream, running north at two to four knots, which is why the captain is steering south of the line on the chart. Flying fish escort the boat for most of the next hour. Treat the passage as the first course, not the commute.
The quarantine flag goes up on the way in, the captain walks the documents to the customs office, and everyone else stays aboard until the Bahamian courtesy flag replaces it. Twenty minutes on a good day. From the dock the water is the color of a swimming pool and the town is one street long.
Lunch is at a stand on the King's Highway where the conch is cracked, diced and dressed with lime, onion and pepper while you watch. Order a second one. The Big Game Club is a short walk for anyone who wants a proper table, and the fish sandwich there has its own reputation.
South of the island sits the SS Sapona, a concrete ship driven aground by a 1926 hurricane and left standing in fifteen feet of water. Snorkel through the hull, where the fish have taken over the cargo hold. Then a short run to Honeymoon Harbour on Gun Cay, where the stingrays come to the shallows on their own and will circle your ankles if you stand still.
Back to the west side for the night. Dinner is whatever the galley bought at the dock that afternoon, usually hogfish or grouper, and the sun goes down over open Atlantic with nothing between the deck and it. The stars are noticeably better fifty miles from Miami.
Early, while the light is flat, run north to the Bimini Road: a line of rectangular limestone blocks in twenty feet of water that has launched a century of theories. Drift over it. Then the tender goes into the mangroves of East Bimini for the healing hole, a spring the locals have visited for generations. The water there is cool and mineral and strange.
Lunch aboard at anchor, then the afternoon on the flats south of the island, where the water is so clear the boat appears to float on nothing. Bonefish guides pole these flats; the tender can follow at a respectful distance. Anyone who wants a last swim takes it now, because the crossing waits for no one.
Customs again, quicker this time, and the bow points west. Two and a half hours across the Stream at twenty knots, with the sun going down ahead of you and the towers of Brickell rising out of the sea one by one. If the timing holds, the city lights come on just as you pass the sea buoy, which is the finest entrance Miami offers.
The fine print is short. Ask for a vessel with Bahamas legs: stabilized, fueled for the round trip, and drawing little enough to work the banks. Every yacht on our platform that runs this route has a crew that has done it dozens of times, and the paperwork travels ahead of you if you send it a week out.
Ready for the crossing? Explore the fleet and look for the boats already set up for the Bahamas.
Browse the fleet, pick your water, and let the crew handle the rest. The Logbook writes itself once you're aboard.