Both Abaco and Nassau will get you onto a catamaran in the Bahamas. But where you start your week decides what kind of week it is — and the difference is bigger than most people expect.
It's a fair question, and we get asked it a lot. Nassau is the name everyone knows. It's the busiest airport in the country and the launch point for the famous Exumas. So why would you base a charter two hundred miles north, in the Abacos? After years of sailing both, the honest answer is simple: in the Abacos, you're already there. There's no crossing to earn your paradise — you wake up in it on the first morning.
The crossing nobody mentions
Here's the part the Nassau brochures tend to skip. Nassau itself isn't the destination — the boats are based there, but the scenery you came for is the Exuma cays, and those start about 35 nautical miles to the south, across open water. That passage runs over the Yellow Bank, a stretch dotted with coral heads, and depending on the weather it can be a four-to-five-hour slog that's only comfortable in the right conditions and good light.
On a one-week charter you pay for that twice — a day out and a day back — and you're committed to it whether or not the wind and seas cooperate. It's the kind of passage that's genuinely rewarding for experienced crews, and genuinely stressful for everyone else.
A sea built for sailing
The Sea of Abaco is something rare: a long, shallow reach sheltered from the open Atlantic by an 80-mile chain of barrier cays, sitting atop one of the largest barrier reefs in the world. Those cays act as a giant breakwater. The water inside stays flat when the ocean outside is up, depths are honest, and the bottom is sand and turtle grass rather than coral — forgiving for sailors of every level.
The result is short, easy hops between anchorages instead of long offshore legs. Most of the good stuff sits within a relaxed 40-mile stretch, so a typical day is an hour or two of gentle sailing and the rest of it swimming, snorkelling, and ashore. And for all that, it stays surprisingly uncrowded — you'll share these anchorages with a fraction of the boats you'd see in the more famous cruising grounds.
The stops you actually remember
Tranquil doesn't mean empty. The Abacos pack an extraordinary amount into a small, sheltered area — the candy-striped Hope Town lighthouse, one of the last working kerosene lighthouses on earth; the legendary Sunday pig roast at Nipper's on Great Guana Cay; the floating bar off Tahiti Beach; the swimming pigs at No Name Cay; Firefly, Grabbers, Snappa's; and a string of pastel settlement villages first founded more than two centuries ago.
"But Nassau is easier to fly to"
It's the one real point in Nassau's favour — and it's smaller than it sounds. Marsh Harbour, our home port, sits about 175 miles off the Florida coast, roughly an hour's flight, with direct service from Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach, Orlando and more, plus quick connections through Nassau itself. You trade a slightly less obvious flight for a dramatically better first and last day on the water. We'd make that trade every time.
None of this is a knock on Nassau — it's a fine, lively city and a perfectly good place to begin a longer Exumas expedition. But if your week is precious and you'd rather spend it sailing than crossing, the Abacos quietly win. That's exactly why we put our fleet here.