Nassau to the Berry Islands: the Bahamas' Quiet Corner by Superyacht

Ask a charter broker to name a Bahamian cruising ground and the answer comes back Exumas, almost every time. It is the right answer for most people. But a little over fifty miles north of Nassau sits a chain of some thirty cays that almost nobody charters, and for a certain kind of guest it is the better week entirely.

The Berry Islands are shaped like a hook, curling from the Northwest Providence Channel down toward the edge of the Tongue of the Ocean. Just over five hundred people live in the whole chain, nearly all of them at Bullock's Harbour on Great Harbour Cay. Everything else is beach, bank, bonefish flat and private island. There is no procession of day boats from Nassau, no queue for the famous photograph. If the appeal of a yacht is that it takes you where the crowd is not, this is the Bahamas doing exactly that.

Why the Geography Matters Here

The Berries sit on a knife edge, and that is the whole point of the place. To the west lie the shallow banks — endless pale water, sandbars that surface on the ebb, flats where bonefish move in inches of it. To the east and south, the seabed simply falls away into the Tongue of the Ocean, a deep trench that plunges thousands of feet within sight of the beach.

That means a single anchorage can offer a morning of sandbar picnicking and an afternoon of serious blue-water fishing, with the tender ride between them measured in minutes rather than hours. Few cruising grounds anywhere put those two experiences so close together, and no other part of the Bahamas does it this quietly.

Chub Cay: The Southern Gateway

Coming up from Nassau, Chub Cay is the natural landfall — a half-day's easy cruise, and the island most yachts use as their base in the southern Berries. It has long been known as the billfish capital of the Bahamas, and the reputation is earned rather than marketed: the drop-off known as the Pocket lies just offshore, where the banks give way to deep water and the big pelagics gather.

Divers get the same geography from the other direction. The Chub Cay Wall is a genuinely good dive, with reliable visibility, Caribbean reef sharks patrolling the edge, spotted eagle rays and stands of black coral down the face. Guests who dive will find it a more serious proposition than the gentle reef snorkelling further south in the chain, and the crew will plan it around the day's current rather than the day's schedule.

Chub also has a marina and an airstrip, which makes it a practical place to begin or end a week, or to swap guests mid-charter without a long run back to Nassau.

Up the Chain: Whale Cays and Little Harbour

Running north, the character changes. This middle stretch is the private Berries — a run of cays that have been in single ownership for the better part of a century, each with its own small story.

Little Whale Cay was developed by the financier Wallace Groves, who later founded Freeport, and remains a bird sanctuary. Its larger neighbour, Big Whale Cay, was the retreat of Marion Barbara Carstairs, the Standard Oil heiress and powerboat racer, who built a small Spanish-styled village there complete with church. You do not land at these places — they are private — but cruising past them with the story in hand is a pleasant hour, and the anchorages nearby are empty.

A little further on, Little Harbour Cay holds one of the chain's few settlements, founded by the ancestors of the Darville family, who still run the conch bar that has fed passing boats for generations. It is an unpolished, wholly genuine slice of Out Island life, and it is the kind of stop a good crew will arrange ahead rather than simply turn up to.

Hoffman's Cay and the Blue Hole

The single most photographed thing in the Berry Islands is on uninhabited Hoffman's Cay, and reaching it is half the pleasure. There is no dock and no road: you anchor off, tender in to the beach, and walk a short scrubby trail inland until the ground opens into a near-circular blue hole several hundred feet across, ringed by limestone and dropping into darkness.

A ledge stands roughly twenty feet above the water on one side, and jumping from it is a rite of passage for everyone aboard who fancies it. The water is brackish and startlingly deep, and the walk back to the beach afterwards, salt drying on your shoulders, is one of those small perfect moments a charter week is actually made of.

Great Harbour Cay and the Northern End

Great Harbour Cay is the largest island in the chain and the closest thing the Berries have to a town, with Bullock's Harbour, a small airstrip and miles of beach on the Atlantic side. Its harbour is one of the best-protected in the Bahamas — a deep inland basin reached through a cut in the rock, long used as a refuge when weather threatens. For a charter it means a secure overnight and easy provisioning, and for guests it means a morning ashore in a place that has never once been arranged for tourists.

North of here the chain finishes at Great Stirrup Cay and Little Stirrup Cay, and honesty is owed about both. They are owned by cruise lines — Norwegian since the 1970s, Royal Caribbean respectively — and on a ship day they are busy. A well-planned itinerary simply consults the cruise schedules and gives them a wide berth, which is easy enough and costs you nothing: the good anchorages are all further south.

How the Week Actually Flows

A Berry Islands week is slower than an Exumas week. Distances are shorter, the list of appointments is shorter still, and the days fill with fishing, flats, and sandbars rather than with the next landmark. Many charters pair the two, running the Berries for three or four days of quiet and then dropping down past Nassau to the busier cays described in our guide to the Exumas — a fortnight that gives you both the hush and the highlights.

Draft governs everything on the banks, as it does everywhere in the Bahamas. Deeper vessels work the eastern side of the chain and reach the shallows by tender, which is why the tender and toy programme matters here more than the length of the yacht. A capable chase boat turns the sandbars and the blue hole from a nice idea into the shape of your day.

When to Go

The Berries keep the standard Bahamian season: November through April, with steady trade winds and the Christmas and New Year weeks the glittering, premium-rate peak that is spoken for far in advance. June through November is Atlantic hurricane season, when flexible dates and a watchful captain matter more than any itinerary. The shoulder weeks either side of the peak are, as ever, the quiet reward.

If you want the Bahamas without the traffic, this is where it still is. Speak to the Ahoy Club team about matching a yacht from the charter fleet to your dates, and about how the week's running costs work — our guide to the Advance Provisioning Allowance explains what sits inside the charter fee and what sits outside it.