A Minted Location day guide
Dock & Dine in Eleuthera & Harbour Island
Eleuthera's dock-and-dine answer is the marinas', and on Harbour Island the berth is genuinely the destination.
Valentines publishes restaurants on its own marina property — The Rooster Tail Bar and The Boathouse Restaurant — alongside indoor and outdoor dining, a coffee shop and a retail shop, in the same operator material that publishes the slip count and the draft. It also publishes room service and on-board dining, which for a boat in the slip is a more useful line than any restaurant's address: you can eat aboard without leaving the dock, and the arrangement is the marina's to make.
Cape Eleuthera publishes dining on the property too, at the other end of the island — a resort with 47 slips, 12 ft of controlling entry depth and food, provisioning and excursions on the same 4,500 acres. For an owner who wants the boat deep and the shore sorted in one stop, that is the trade the operator publishes.
Beyond the marinas, dining here works the way it always has: take a berth, then walk or take a cart. No restaurant on Eleuthera or Harbour Island runs a guest dock or patron moorage. Dunmore Town's famous strip is a walking and golf-cart town, and its waterfront is worked by the ferry from Three Island Dock and by the government dock, neither of which is a place to leave a tender and forget about it.
So the working instruction for this district is: berth at a marina, then walk. Dunmore Town is roughly three miles long and half a mile wide by the local marina's own description, which puts every restaurant on the island inside a golf-cart ride of every slip. The chart below runs the island south to north — Cape Eleuthera and the deep water, up past the ports of entry, across to Spanish Wells and over the Devil's Backbone into Harbour Island — because that is the sequence a boat actually works.
The stops, as their own docks describe them
| Spot | Where | Arriving by boat |
|---|---|---|
| Valentines — The Boathouse and The Rooster Tail, on the marinaThe district's practical dock-and-dine, and it works because the berth and the table belong to the same operator. Valentines publishes The Boathouse Restaurant and The Rooster Tail Bar on its marina property, alongside indoor and outdoor dining, a coffee shop and a retail shop — and it also publishes room service and on-board dining, which is the more useful line for a boat in the slip. You are not tying up at a restaurant here; you are tying up at a marina that happens to feed you. | Dunmore Town, Harbour Island | 51 transient slips; 33 over 80 ft at 7 ft draft; VHF 16, 07:00–19:00 |
| Cape Eleuthera — dining at the deep-water endThe alternative for a boat that cannot make Harbour Island's seven feet: the resort publishes dining, provisioning and excursions on the same property as the marina, across nearly 4,500 acres at the island's south-west tip. Sixty-odd miles from Dunmore Town and a completely different depth proposition — this is the berth you choose when draft, not fashion, is the constraint. | Powell Pointe, southern Eleuthera | 47 slips to 200 ft over a published 12 ft controlling entry depth |
| Dunmore Town — berth, then walkDining on Harbour Island works the way it always has: take a berth at one of the marinas, then walk or take a cart. No restaurant in Dunmore Town runs a guest dock or patron moorage, and the waterfront is worked by the ferry from Three Island Dock and by the government dock, neither of which is a place to leave a tender unattended. By the local marina's own description the island is "Only three miles long and half mile wide", which puts every table on it within a golf-cart ride of every slip. | Harbour Island | Berth at a marina and walk in |
Dockage notes are what each restaurant publishes on its own site — space is first-come and dinner-hour rafting is real, so hail ahead. Where a venue states nothing about docking, we say so rather than guess.
Planning more than lunch?
We represent buyers wherever the right boat sits — shortlisting, surveying and sea-trialing on the buyer's side of the table. Tell us the mission and we'll tell you which boat, and which berth, it calls for.