Miami and the Florida Keys by Superyacht

There are few departures in yachting as theatrical as leaving Miami. You slip out through Government Cut with the towers of Brickell hardening in the morning haze astern, and within an hour the mainland has thinned to a green line and the water has turned the pale green of shallow ground. Ahead lies a chain of islands curving south and west for some hundred and twenty miles, ending in a town that has always been more Caribbean than American. A week here is not a passage-making week. It is a slow, warm, shallow-water drift down a reef line, and it suits a superyacht better than most people expect.

Miami: The Departure City

Miami earns its days before you ever untie. The run through Biscayne Bay past Fisher Island, Star Island and the Venetian Islands shows how the place is arranged: a city of causeways and private islands where a great many front doors face the bay rather than the street. Ashore, Ocean Drive holds its Art Deco pastels against the beach, and Vizcaya, the villa James Deering built on the bay in the 1910s, still presents its stone barge to the water exactly as it was designed to be approached, by boat.

Each February the city fills for the boat show, wonderful if that is what you came for and worth avoiding if not. Either way, Miami is a serious provisioning and crew-change port, which is why so many Keys charters begin and end here.

Biscayne Bay and Stiltsville

South of the Rickenbacker Causeway the bay empties out and Biscayne National Park begins, a park that is almost entirely water. On the flats near the Key Biscayne channels stand the last of the Stiltsville houses, timber cabins raised on pilings in open water, survivors of a much larger community that hurricanes reduced over the decades.

From here the geography dictates everything. Florida Bay, to the north-west of the islands, is almost uniformly too shallow for a yacht of any size. On the Atlantic side, Hawk Channel runs inside the reef from Key Biscayne all the way to Key West. It carries the depth a larger yacht needs, the reef shelters it from the ocean swell, and it puts the day's diving a mile or two off the beam. Your captain will spend the week on it.

The Upper Keys: Key Largo and Islamorada

Key Largo is where the reef announces itself. Offshore lies John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park, the first undersea park in the United States, now bordered by the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, which protects the only living coral barrier reef in the continental United States. Near Molasses Reef, the best known of the dive sites, stands Christ of the Abyss, a bronze figure set on the seabed with its arms raised, a genuinely moving thing to swim down to.

The sanctuary shapes the week for the better. Anchoring on coral is prohibited, and free mooring buoys are laid on the reefs so that visiting boats can tie up without touching the bottom. A good crew will have the tender on a buoy and the guests in the water within minutes.

Islamorada has built its name on fishing. The flats behind the islands hold bonefish, permit and tarpon, stalked from a skiff in inches of water, while the Gulf Stream runs close enough offshore to put sailfish and mahi within a morning's reach. Alligator Reef, marked by its skeletal iron lighthouse, is the snorkelling stop most crews choose. Skiff at dawn, reef after lunch, and the yacht never moving more than a few miles.

The Middle Keys and the Lower Keys

The middle of the chain belongs to Marathon and the Seven Mile Bridge, the long low span that carries the Overseas Highway across the widest gap in the islands. Beside it stands the derelict bridge of Henry Flagler's Overseas Railroad, which ran trains to Key West until a hurricane took it out in the 1930s. Just west, Bahia Honda has the best beach in the Keys by common consent, an honest arc of sand in a chain where most shorelines are mangrove or rock.

Past the bridge the islands grow quieter, and offshore lies Looe Key, the reef the lower Keys are known for, a spur-and-groove formation that on a still morning is as good as snorkelling gets in North America.

Key West

Key West is the point of the whole thing. It sits ninety miles from Cuba and much further from the rest of Florida in temperament: a town of tin roofs, shuttered conch houses, roosters in the street and an unembarrassed appetite for its own mythology. Hemingway's house on Whitehead Street is still full of the descendants of his cats, and every evening the crowd gathers at Mallory Square to watch the sun go down over the Gulf, either the most charming ritual in Florida or the most commercial, depending on your mood.

This is the one place in the Keys where logistics bite. Deep-water dockage is in real demand and the largest yachts often cannot lie alongside, so many anchor off the island's northwest side and run guests in by tender. It works perfectly well, but your broker and captain should be squaring it away weeks out.

Dry Tortugas: Seventy Miles Further

For those with the time, the Keys keep their best for last. Roughly seventy miles west of Key West, out where the charts empty, lies Dry Tortugas National Park: a handful of low sand islands and, on Garden Key, Fort Jefferson, an enormous unfinished nineteenth-century brick fort sitting improbably in the ocean with a moat around it. The snorkelling along the moat wall is excellent, and because almost everyone else arrives by ferry or seaplane and leaves the same day, a yacht that stays the night has the anchorage largely to itself. It is an overnight run each way and wants settled weather, which is why so few charters do it and why those that do never stop talking about it.

When to Go

The season runs roughly December into April, when the humidity drops and the water clears. Christmas, New Year and the weeks around the boat show are the busiest, and late spring is the quiet reward, with warm water and far fewer boats. The Atlantic hurricane season runs from June to November, which is why most yachts are elsewhere by then.

That elsewhere is often north. The fleet that works the Keys in winter runs up the coast for the American summer, and a charterer can follow the same rhythm: a February week on the reef, a July week among the mansions and islands described in our guide to Newport and New England.

The Keys reward a yacht planned around them: the right draft for Hawk Channel, a tender programme built for reef days, and a captain who knows the water. Explore the charter fleet and speak to the Ahoy Club team, who will match a yacht to your dates and handle the detail from the Miami berth to the anchorage off Fort Jefferson.