Fort Lauderdale. A city built around its yachts.

Fort Lauderdale's guest marinas are unusually concentrated. Pier Sixty-Six Marina straddles the 17th Street Causeway with deep water, around 164 slips and no bridge between it and the ocean, which is why it takes the largest visiting yachts and why crews like it. Bahia Mar Yachting Center lies a little to the north behind the beach, with around 250 slips and a long parallel dock that makes it the natural home for big charter yachts on display. Las Olas Marina and the Hall of Fame Marina fill in between them. Further inland, up the New River, is the refit and service industry that the city is really built on, and a yacht there is a very different proposition for a visiting guest: it is a working yard, not a hotel dock.

So the first question is always which one. The difference between Pier Sixty-Six and a yard berth up the New River is fifteen minutes by car, a drawbridge or two, and a completely different arrival. Ask the captain for the marina name and the slip, and pass both to us. On a waterfront this size, the name of the city narrows things down about as well as London narrows down a hotel.

This is the local detail that catches everyone out. Several of the roads between the airport, the beach and the marinas cross the Intracoastal Waterway on bascule drawbridges, and they open for vessel traffic on a published schedule with seasonal restrictions. The 17th Street Causeway bridge, which carries the main road between the airport corridor and the beach, has around 55 feet of clearance and opens on a fixed pattern through the day. Las Olas Boulevard crosses on another. When a bridge goes up, a ten minute transfer becomes a twenty minute one, and there is no way around it: the alternative crossing is far enough away that going round costs more than waiting.

The practical answer is not to beat the bridges but to build ten or fifteen minutes into any transfer that crosses one, and to tell the driver which side of the water the yacht is on so the route is chosen properly rather than by satellite navigation. It matters most going the other way, towards a departing flight. The yacht has the same problem: if she is lying up the New River she may have bridge openings of her own to work around before she can reach the ocean, and where that is the case your arrival time is not a preference but an input to a schedule the crew have already worked out.

Fort Lauderdale is the easiest of our marina pages for vehicle access. The marinas have proper car parks, controlled entrances, internal roads and dock staff, and in an ordinary week a car can set down close to the slip with the crew present and then park properly. Provisioning, laundry, chandlery and contractors run on and off the docks all day, so vehicles are directed and the dock master's office prefers to know who is arriving and when. Give us the slip number and the arrival window and we will pass them on.

America drives on the right and the vehicle likely to be offered is a large black SUV, which is the local convention rather than the exception. If the party would prefer a saloon, or needs a second vehicle for luggage, say so at the enquiry rather than on the day: in show week the good cars and drivers on this coast are spoken for weeks ahead. One further local point. Port Everglades, the cruise and commercial port, sits immediately south of the 17th Street corridor, and on a heavy turnaround day the traffic around the port entrance uses the same roads your transfer does. It is a reason to leave earlier than the map suggests.

The year here turns on the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show, which in 2026 runs from Wednesday 28 October to Sunday 1 November across Bahia Mar, Las Olas Marina, the Hall of Fame Marina, Pier Sixty-Six and the Superyacht Village at Pier Sixty-Six South, with the convention centre inland. For those days the waterfront is a show ground, the docks are closed to normal traffic, rooms and cars across Broward County are committed, and the roads around the beach and the causeway carry far more than they were built for. If you are coming for the show, the transport plan needs to exist in the summer.

Around it, the winter is the season: yachts arrive from the Mediterranean through the autumn, the Caribbean charter fleet passes through, and the city is the natural place to join a yacht heading for the Bahamas or the eastern Caribbean. The Palm Beach International Boat Show in the spring pulls the same crowd forty five miles north. Summer is quiet, hot and humid, and it is hurricane season from June to November, which is why itineraries in those months are written with more flexibility. For the wider region see Miami, and for the mechanics of a charter see how charter works.