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Fraser says the 115-foot Benetti Heaven Can Wait is accepting inquiries for remaining open summer charter dates in the Bahamas.

Heaven Can Wait is a 2006 build that most recently was refitted in 2020. The yacht bases in Nassau, with no delivery fees on itineraries that are round-trip from that home port.

Accommodations are for 10 guests in five staterooms, including a main-deck master. The yacht charters with seven crew.

What’s the lowest weekly base rate to charter Heaven Can Wait? It’s $85,000 per week.

How to book a week on board: Contact a charter broker at fraseryachts.com

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The 131-foot Sunseeker Acacia has joined the Fraser charter fleet, with year-round availability in the Bahamas.

Acacia is a 2012 build that most recently was refitted in 2022. The yacht accommodates 10 guests in five staterooms that can be arranged for a group of friends or a multigenerational family.

Guest amenities on the sundeck include workout space, a hot tub, lounge areas and dining. For guests who prefer to have fun out on the water, Acacia carries what Fraser calls a “massive selection of toys,” including an inflatable beach-club platform and toy dock.

The lowest weekly base rate to charter Acacia is $140,000.

What is Acacia’s cruising speed? It’s 14 knots, with a top hop of 23 knots.

Take the next step: Contact a charter broker at fraseryachts.com

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It’s always a good day when a new build becomes available for charter, giving guests a chance to check out the latest offering from a prominent builder. That’s the story of Sea-renity, a Horizon FD100 that is marketed as a 2023 build and is now based in the Bahamas for charter inquiries throughout the summer season.

This particular FD100 has an interior that’s unusual, with a substantial amount of light wood that’s paired with black accent items throughout all the guest spaces. The decor was created by the Miami-based JAC design studio. “A lot of boats these days, it’s grays or blues and greens. This is different,” says Sarah Egger, charter manager with Fraser.

At an industry charter-yacht show in the Bahamas earlier this year, brokers also commented about how large the boat felt compared with others that are the same length overall. The extensive use of glazing certainly contributes to that ambience, as does the combination of decor and overall design. “The space on the inside, the volume, it seems much bigger than it is,” Egger adds. “I think it’s the lightness, but it’s also the build. That Horizon has a wider beam.”

As of this writing, Sea-renity had just completed its first few charters with friends of the owners on board, and the new owners had used it as well. Egger says a few of the favorite spaces are the yacht’s three bars—one in the beach club, one on the aft deck and one on the bridge deck next to the hot tub—along with the Portuguese seating and sunning space forward of the bridge. There’s also a beach club aft, which Egger says the owners are planning to fill with an increasing number of water toys. A towed tender is also in the works.

Sea-renity itself has a cruising speed of 13 knots and a top hop of 20 knots, which should be plenty fast for zipping around the Bahamas in style.    

The Horizon FD100

This is a current model available for orders with Horizon Yachts. It can be built as a skyline or tri-deck, which means either an enclosed sky lounge or an open flybridge, respectively. The designer of the Horizon FD100 is Cor D. Rover, whose other work includes yachts as large as the 220-foot Benetti Seasense. He has been working with Horizon Yachts since 2012. As a team, Rover’s studio and Horizon count more than 60 yachts either built or in build now. 

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Located just off the northern tip of Eleuthera, Harbour Island doesn’t have a to-do list so much as a just-be list. While cruisers can certainly go offshore fishing and snorkeling in its crystal-clear waters, the island’s Pink Sand Beach invites visitors to simply sit back and relax.

Pink Sand Beach 

This waterfront expanse is the magnet and money shot of Harbour Island. Its always-cool powder-soft sand beckons the barefoot to stroll its 3-mile stretch along the eastern, Atlantic Ocean side of Briland, as locals call their home island. The sand’s trademark pale-pink hue, which stems from the pinkish-red shells of a single-celled organism called foraminifera, has landed the beach in countless social-media snaps as well as on several “best beaches in the world” lists.

Queen Conch

To riff on Bubba’s shrimp rhapsody in the movie Forrest Gump, Queen Conch is renowned for serving up this mighty mollusk in a multitude of delicious freshly prepared dishes: conch fritters, cracked conch fries, conch pasta, conch ceviche and, especially, its house specialty, conch salad, which often runs out before the dinner crowd. Customers from all over pull up a chair on the restaurant’s colorful open-air patio and pair the restaurant’s fare with great harbor views and a Goombay Smash, the official drink of the Bahamas, or a bottle of Kalik, a popular Bahamian lager.

Dunmore Town

Rent a golf cart, and explore the bougainvillea-lined streets of Dunmore Town, one of the oldest settlements in the Bahamas and the only town on Harbour Island. Its Georgian architecture, upscale boutiques and jet-set clientele draw comparisons between Harbour Island and Nantucket, Massachusetts. Start your morning at Arthur’s Bakery & Café to sample its jalapeño cheese bread and doughnuts, among other temptations. Stop in and browse at The Sugar Mill, the treasure trove of a boutique co-owned by India Hicks, the British designer, relative of the royal family and longtime resident who is the celebrity face of Harbour Island. Her book Island Style captures not only Hicks’ own design aesthetic—a combination of carefree Caribbean culture and British colonial formality—but also the overall Briland vibe. For dinner, there’s no shortage of refined restaurants. At The Landing, pair a bottle from its Wine Spectator-lauded list with contemporary seafood dishes. Or, at The Dunmore, enjoy “beach chic” and Caribbean-influenced seafood surrounded by vintage photographs in the clubhouse or with the gorgeous views on the patio.

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Fraser sends word that the 142-foot Christensen Grade I is offering a 10 percent drop on the weekly base rate for Bahamas yacht charter through September.

Typically, the lowest weekly base rate is $140,000. With the incentive rate, that number drops to $126,000.

Grade I is a 1995 build that most recently was refitted in 2018. Accommodations are for 12 guests in six staterooms, and the yacht charters with a 42-foot Yellowfin tender for fishing, snorkeling and other watersports.

According to Fraser, the yacht’s cruising speed is 12 knots with a top-end speed of 17 knots for minimizing cruising time between the islands in the Bahamas.

Where is Grade I is heading for winter 2023-24? The owner is considering inquiries for the Bahamas, the Caribbean and Costa Rica, including during the prime winter holiday weeks.

How to book a week on board: Contact a charter broker at fraseryachts.com

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In late December, the National Transportation Safety Board issued its findings about a collision that occurred a year earlier about 20 miles northwest of Nassau, Bahamas, between a 206-foot superyacht and a 159-foot commercial tanker. The probable cause of the collision, according to the NTSB, was that neither vessel maintained a proper lookout.

The findings served as a reminder to boaters on all kinds of vessels that maintaining a proper lookout is a mandatory part of basic seamanship, and that major damage and injuries can result from a failure to keep watch. The NTSB estimated the financial cost of the Bahamas incident at $7.9 million, including the sinking of the tanker and its cargo. In addition to that, three of the superyacht’s 12 crewmembers sustained minor injuries.

According to the report, the collision occurred at sunset on a day with visibility of 10 miles. Aboard the superyacht, the captain had left the wheelhouse to check on the guests, leaving the bosun in command. The bosun was working on log entries and facing away from the windshield at the time of the collision with the tanker, where the master had left that vessel’s bridge to use the head in his cabin.

The report further notes that both vessels had radar; however, “it is likely none of them had looked at the radar in the 12 minutes before the collision. … Additionally, there was no evidence that they used radar for long-range scanning. Therefore, neither crew used their vessel’s radar effectively.” The tanker also had AIS, but a power issue made it unusable.

The NTSB concluded that “had either kept a proper lookout, they likely would have detected each other and could have taken action to avoid the collision.”

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More than a few people from the United States and beyond have been frustrated the past few years when attempting to book a charter vacation. In 2020, the pandemic pretty much shut down international travel, forcing widespread booking cancellations. All those charters got rebooked into 2021 and 2022, often at the same time yacht owners were pulling their vessels off the charter market and instead keeping them for private, socially distanced use. And there were shipyard shutdowns that hampered construction schedules, leading to fewer new  charter yachts entering the market than in previous years. By summer 2022, even longtime charter clients were frustrated trying to find a ride.

“The market wasn’t prepared for the amount of demand that we had, especially from mid-June through August,” says Ben Harwood, head of charter for Burgess.

The booking backlog left charter yachts packed: Burgess says it handled 860 charters in 2022, while Camper & Nicholsons International reports 700 charters booked. “If you were looking to book a boat of quality at the last minute,” Harwood says, especially from mid-June through August, “it was very challenging.”

Things are looking better for this summer and going into winter 2023-24. Harwood says he still expects summer to be busy, but Burgess has a strategy in place for clients who are ready to book now.

“We have a number of yachts that are coming onto the market; they’re being delivered in May or June, but we’re not advertising them until we know they’re going to deliver on time,” he says. “They’re new builds that no one knows about, but we can talk to clients on a case-by-case basis.”

Charter Yacht Artisan: One of Benetti’s Biggest

The 207-foot Artisan, launched in 2019 and refitted in 2022, is one of the biggest yachts that Italian yard Benetti has built to date. Accommodations are for 12 guests in seven staterooms, with the owner’s stateroom alone spanning more than 1,700 square feet. Burgess says charter inquiries are being accepted now for bookings this summer in the West Mediterranean, and during the winter season in the Bahamas and Caribbean.

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For David and Nicole Kruegel, cruising is for their birds. Leeloo, a white-bellied caique parrot, and Atticus (Atti for short), an eclectus parrot, take to the seas as eagerly as they do the air. The Kruegels are significantly expanding their voyages in their new full-time home on the water—a 2009 Outer Reef 650 Motoryacht—and the 7-year-old parrots are enthusiastic companions.

Boats and birds have been constants in Nicole’s life. Her childhood home was Tempest, a 1937 46-foot wooden sloop anchored in Dana Point, California. She got her first bird, a lovebird, at age 7 and has had feathered friends ever since. David grew up in Ormond Beach, Florida, and has spent countless hours water-skiing, surfing and scuba diving. Their mutual love of the water drew them together and assured they would always be a boating couple.

They started in 2007 with a 19-foot center-console, then, two years later, moved up to a 30-foot Regal. A 2016 cruise through the Abacos aboard their Mainship 430 trawler convinced the duo that it was time to find a boat that they, their two cats and the birds could live on full time. “Every time we sailed, we had to board the birds, and it was a big hassle to find a facility that could take care of them properly,” David says.

They took delivery of a Fountaine Pajot sailing catamaran in March 2020. After sailing along the Eastern Seaboard and the Florida Keys, in fall 2021, they returned to the Bahamas, this time with the parrots. “It was a learning experience for U.S. Fish and Wildlife, and for the Bahamian immigration and customs folks because they’d never had to do this before,” David says. The Kruegels scrambled to complete paperwork and health checks before leaving the United States. Upon their arrival at West End, they found the Bahamian officials less interested in paperwork than in taking selfies with the birds.

The family cruised Grand Bahama, the Abacos, Eleuthera, the Exumas, the Berry Islands and Bimini.

Having parrots “is like having a 3- or 4-year-old forever,” David says. First, there’s the diet. They need daily fresh fruits and vegetables, which can be difficult to find while cruising. Leeloo can be a picky eater. “We gave her a green apple in the Bahamas, and she threw it back at us,” Nicole says.

As the Kruegels settle into their Outer Reef 650 Motoryacht, Avalon, there’s something for everyone. The boat has a 3,500-nautical-mile range, which will enable them to check off a bucket-list item: transiting the Panama Canal and exploring the Pacific. The interior gives the humans plenty of room to lounge and the birds lots of interior flight space.

In the parrots’ customized aft starboard cabin, the top bunk has been removed to allow more room for their cage and a view out the window. The birds also have their own head with a perch beside a big mirror. “Leeloo likes to look at herself and talk to herself all day,” Nicole says. There’s also plenty of room for the birds’ snacks and toys.

On rough sea days, the parrots prefer to hunker down in their cabin. But on calm days, “they can’t wait to get out,” Nicole says. “They’re eager to see where they are and what’s going on. They get so excited.”

Fan Favorite

Outer Reef Yachts has experienced strong demand for the 650. Recently, it has invested in reengineering this bluewater voyager. The 650’s updated design has enabled a 4-stateroom, 4½-head layout—a best-in-class long-range motoryacht.

The Lineup

The Outer Reef 650 MY is part of the builder’s Classic series, which includes 15 other model variations from 63 to 90 feet LOA across three vessel classes called S, M and X. Beam dimensions identify each class. It also has Trident, a modern long-range sports motoryacht line with 62- and 72-footers as well as an Explorer series with a 108- and 115-footer.

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Y.CO says it has welcomed the 187-foot Feadship Halo to the charter fleet, with inquiries being accepted for summer bookings in the Mediterranean as well as winter bookings in the Caribbean and Bahamas.

Halo is a 2015 build that accommodates 12 guests in six staterooms. The yacht charters with 14 crew.

The yacht was built to be a world-cruising platform. It has a gym, a pool with custom carbon-fiber awnings, and an outdoor cinema.

“Halo is a fantastic charter program that has everything necessary to keep guests of all ages entertained,” Yasmine Naitijja of Y.CO Charter Management stated in a press release. “Her incredible sundeck is a sensational area for guests to relax and soak up the views, while the fitness and wellbeing offering—an onboard gym, pool, and personal trainer and yoga instructor among the crew—will suit anyone with an active lifestyle.”

What’s the lowest weekly base rate to charter Halo? It’s $425,000 in the Caribbean and Bahamas.

How to book a week on board: contact a charter broker at y.co

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Edmiston says the 164-foot Heesen Ela is available for Bahamas yacht charter at a reduced rate through the end of this winter and into the spring.

The lowest weekly base rate is now $320,000, down from $380,000.

Ela is a 2021 build that accommodates 12 guests in six staterooms. The yacht charters with nine crew.

Features include a sundeck hot tub, a gymnasium with a sauna and an outdoor cinema on the bow. Interiors are by Cristiano Gatto Design.

Where is Ela expected to charter this summer? In the West Mediterranean. Inquiries are being accepted now.

Take the next step: contact a charter broker at edmiston.com

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