A Minted Location day guide
Dock & Dine in Virgin Gorda
Virgin Gorda publishes something almost no Caribbean market does: a price for tying up for a couple of hours.
Virgin Gorda Yacht Harbour's rate card carries an hourly column — $10.00 an hour for a monohull up to 54 feet, $15.00 an hour for a catamaran up to 54 feet, and $25.00 an hour for anything 55 feet and over. That is a come-ashore-for-lunch tariff, in dollars, on the operator's own document. Spanish Town's shops, chandlery and bank are on the harbour, so the hourly slip is a genuinely useful instrument rather than a curiosity. Note the operator's own condition that dockage and refuelling are by appointment — hail 16 or 11 first.
North Sound is the other answer, and there the mechanism is a mooring rather than a slip. Every operator on the sound publishes a mooring price: Saba Rock $40 a night on one of "18 mooring balls" for boats "up to 80 ft."; Leverick Bay $40 a night, with the marina office open 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. all week; Oil Nut Bay $30 a night to 60 feet and $120 to 120 feet on ten balls in Deep Bay. **Bitter End publishes "72 mooring balls, protected and surge-free", "dinghy docks" and a "complimentary launch service (5 PM)"** — the launch is the island's published shoreside-access arrangement, and it is the club's own boat, not yours.
Beyond those, dining on Virgin Gorda works the way it always has: take a mooring or a berth, and go in by tender. Restaurants here do not run guest docks. The marina, the mooring field and the dinghy are how you arrive, and a short walk or a taxi does the rest.
And at The Baths the honest instruction is stronger than "take the tender" — it is "you have ninety minutes." The National Parks Trust publishes a 90-minute limit on all moorings, first come first served, day use only, "illegal to use them overnight", with blue buoys reserved for dinghy use and the largest buoy in the system capped at 80 ft. Plan the visit as a timed slot from a berth or a mooring elsewhere. There is no version of this where a big boat sits off The Baths and waits.
So the practical instruction for Virgin Gorda is: buy the hour at Spanish Town, or take the mooring in North Sound, and use the tender for the park. The chart below runs the island south-west to north-east — The Baths and Fallen Jerusalem, up past Spanish Town and the yard, round into Gorda Sound and out to Deep Bay — because that is the sequence a boat actually works.
The stops, as their own docks describe them
| Spot | Where | Arriving by boat |
|---|---|---|
| Virgin Gorda Yacht Harbour — dockage by the hourA published price for tying up for a couple of hours rather than for the night, straight off the operator's own rate card. Spanish Town's shops, chandlery, fuel dock and bank are on the harbour, so the hourly slip is a real instrument and not a curiosity. The catamaran hour costs half again as much as the monohull hour below 54 ft, and above 55 ft the two are identical at $25.00. The same card states dockage and refuelling are "available by appointment only" — hail VHF 16 or 11 first. | Spanish Town | Hourly dockage: $10.00 monohull and $15.00 catamaran up to 54 ft · $25.00 at 55 ft and over |
| North SoundThe dock-and-dine mechanism at the north end is a mooring and a tender, and the operators publish the mooring side in full: Saba Rock $40 a night on 18 balls for boats to 80 ft; Leverick Bay $40 a night with the office open 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. all week on VHF 16; Oil Nut Bay $30 a night to 60 ft and $120 to 120 ft on ten balls in Deep Bay; and Bitter End's "72 mooring balls, protected and surge-free" with "dinghy docks" and a "complimentary launch service (5 PM)" — the club's own boat, and the island's published shoreside-access arrangement. Dining here works the way it always has: take a mooring, and go in by tender. And at The Baths the limit is law rather than etiquette — 90 minutes, day use only, and 80 feet on the biggest buoy. | Gorda Sound / North Sound | Moorings $40 a night at Saba Rock and Leverick Bay · $30–$120 at Oil Nut Bay · 72 balls at Bitter End |
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.