Hamilton Island Marina (Whitsundays)

Berths and the Number That Will Not Sit Still

Three first-party or industry sources, three different numbers, none of which cites the others. Hamilton Island's own marina page and Dockwalk both say 45 metres. Superyacht Australia's member listing for the marina says 43 metres and deep-water berths to 4.5 m LAT. The Hamilton Island Race Week site, run by the same resort group, says 42 metres. None of the three is obviously wrong; they most likely reflect the same berths measured, rounded or updated at different times, or a distinction between the longest berth on the plan and the longest one realistically offered to a casual visitor. The honest answer for a 42 to 45 metre yacht is to call the marina office and ask for the specific berth on offer rather than to plan around any one published figure.

Above that, trade coverage complicates things further: Superyachts.com and a SuperyachtNews report on the 2026 Blackstone acquisition both describe the marina as handling yachts up to 60 metres, and one summary attributes 34 berths specifically to superyachts within the 301 total. Nothing on hamiltonisland.com.au confirms a 60 metre wet berth, so this almost certainly means the end-tie positions along the outer arms or the Barge Wharf used for bunkering and Race Week overflow, not a standard walk-ashore berth. Draught tells the same story in miniature: 4.5 m LAT from two sources, 4 metres from Dockwalk. A yacht drawing more than 3.5 metres should confirm the actual depth at its assigned berth on the day, not from any published figure, because none of them agree to the centimetre.

Booking a Berth and What It Actually Costs

Hamilton Island is one of a small number of marinas in this guide that publishes its fee schedule rather than directing every enquiry to a phone call. The current monohull schedule prices berths in length bands from under 8 metres to 36 metres, each with a daily rate, a low-season and high-season weekly rate (December to May and June to November), and a monthly, six-month and annual rate. A 36 metre (118 foot) yacht runs AUD 585 a day in low season, AUD 2,015 to 2,750 a week depending on season, and AUD 6,070 to 8,070 a month. Multihulls carry a separate, slightly higher schedule. A single-berth surcharge of 25 percent applies to boats that need to be berthed alone rather than able to raft, and long-term rates are paid in full in advance with no refund for early departure.

At 40 metres the published table stops and reads only that arrangements will be made in discussion with marina management: there is no rate card for the size bracket that most interests a large private yacht. Casual visitors also have an hourly and day-visit tariff banded by length, from AUD 100 for under 12 metres to AUD 270 for 35 to 40 metres for the first three hours, plus an hourly rate after that; overnight moorings in the same length bands run from AUD 100 to AUD 210. Every berth holder must carry a minimum AUD 10 million in public liability insurance, mobile phone boosters and radar must be switched off before entering the marina, and cats are not permitted aboard a berthed vessel. High-season long-term bookings need a two-month minimum with the first month paid in advance.

The marina's own pages give a standard berth top length as 42, 43 and 45 metres depending on which one you read; nothing over 40 metres is priced, and the arrangement is made in discussion with marina management.

Fuel, Power and the Boatyard

The fuel wharf takes card or cash and bunkering for larger tonnage is arranged through the office; no current diesel or petrol price is published on the marina's own site, and the one figure Yotters could find, AUD 1.38 a litre for diesel from a boater fuel-price aggregator, is dated January 2025 and should not be relied on for a 2026 budget. Shore power is available up to 125 amps on three-phase supply, with additional charges for higher draws and for multiple 15-amp cords sharing a single connection. Water, waste disposal, WiFi and 24/7 security with CCTV and marina concierge patrols are standard across both the northern and southern berthing arms, and there are no locked gates on the marina arms themselves.

The boatyard runs a 50-tonne travel lift with hardstand, and independent contractors on site cover shipwright work, mechanical and electrical repairs, sail and upholstery work, detailing and polishing, plus a chandlery for parts and gas bottle refills. This is a genuine working yard rather than a berth-only marina, which matters on a coast where the nearest comparable refit facilities are well over 1,000 kilometres south around Brisbane and the Gold Coast. Marina Village, the retail strip behind the pontoons, adds a supermarket, pharmacy, bottle shop, bakery, post office and several restaurants and bars, including Boheme's and a fish and chip shop, all within a short walk of the berths.

Getting There: A Fly-In Marina on the Reef

Hamilton Island Airport (HTI, ICAO YBHM) is marketed as Australia's only resort island with its own commercial jet service, and it takes Boeing 737 and Dash 8 aircraft on scheduled domestic routes as well as general aviation, charter and helicopter traffic. There are no scheduled international flights; an owner or guest arriving from overseas connects through Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne or Cairns. Private aviation operators including Blade, Paramount Business Jets and Victor fly charter aircraft in directly, with flight times of roughly two hours from Brisbane, three from Sydney and around four from Melbourne. Everything else on the island, fuel, provisioning, parts, guests and crew changeovers, moves through that one airport or by sea, since there is no vehicular access from the mainland at all.

For a yacht arriving by water, the marina sits inside the Whitsunday Passage, a sheltered cruising ground of 74 islands between the mainland and the outer reef, so a Hamilton Island berth doubles as a base for exploring Whitehaven Beach and the surrounding national park anchorages without a long open-water passage first. The nearest mainland towns, Airlie Beach and Shute Harbour, are about 20 nautical miles away and carry their own marina and provisioning options, including Coral Sea Marina at Airlie Beach, which is the actual customs port of entry for the region rather than Hamilton Island itself.

Race Week and the Rest of the Calendar

The regatta has run since 1984 and added a superyacht division in 2010, with motor yachts joining as spectator and support vessels from 2011, based at the Hamilton Island Yacht Club on the marina's edge. For 2026 the marina gave competing boats free berths from Thursday 14 August to Monday 24 August, with vessels moored as directed by marina management; deeper-keeled boats were warned they might be rafted together or moved to Dent Passage at low tide because of depth restrictions. Ahoy Club, a yacht charter, brokerage and management group, was the official superyacht partner for 2026 and brought its 35 metre Sunseeker Rascal to run spectator cruises on the racecourse in Dent Passage.

Fleet numbers are capped by berth availability and the event regularly sells out: mysailing.com.au reported 194 entries for 2026, up from 145 the year before, spanning maxis, TP52s, multihulls, cruising boats and trailer yachts, with the 100-foot maxi Wild Thing 100 and Hong Kong owner Karl Kwok's Beau Ideal among the notable entries. Outside race week, the marina and yacht club run a normal calendar of resort dining, conferences and reef-cruise departures, and the busiest cruising months in the Whitsundays, per local operators, run roughly from April to November, avoiding both the cyclone season and the worst of the June-to-September trade winds.

The Reef Rules: Anchoring Permits and Where You Clear In

The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority runs a booking system for the Whitsunday Planning Area: vessels of 35 metres and under 70 metres may anchor at a Setting 1 area, at one of 21 superyacht anchorages, at one of 10 other designated anchorages, or outside a setting area, provided the anchorage is booked, and access to the planning area under this system is capped at up to 50 days a year per vessel. Vessels of 70 metres and above are confined to a designated anchorage outside a setting. A commercial operation, including a chartered superyacht providing transport or accommodation for a fee, needs a separate Marine Parks permit, and an international recreational yacht needs an Australian Border Force control permit before it can even apply for online anchorage bookings.

Hamilton Island Marina is not itself a first point of entry for customs and biosecurity. The Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry's list of non-commercial vessel arrival points for Queensland names Coral Sea Marina, Airlie Beach, alongside Brisbane, Bundaberg, Cairns, Gladstone, the Gold Coast Broadwater, Mackay and Townsville; mooring at, or unloading goods at, a port that is not a first point of entry without prior permission from the Director of Biosecurity is an offence. In practice this means an internationally arriving yacht clears in at Airlie Beach or another listed port roughly 20 nautical miles away before it can proceed to Hamilton Island, a step the marina's own booking page does not spell out.

New Owners, Old Cyclone Season

SuperyachtNews reported the USD 1.2 billion sale on 7 January 2026, with Blackstone's real estate funds buying the resort, its five hotels, the commercial airport and the 301-berth marina from the Oatley family, which had owned it for more than two decades. Blackstone described the deal as part of an expanding footprint in marine infrastructure, coming a year after its USD 5.7 billion purchase of Safe Harbor Marinas, the large US marina operator. What that means in practice for berth holders is not yet public: no rate change, refit or expansion has been announced for Hamilton Island specifically as of this research, but a private equity owner with a stated marina-consolidation strategy is a different landlord to a family that ran the resort for 20 years, and it is worth an owner's while to ask the marina office directly about any planned changes before signing a long-term berth agreement.

Separately from ownership, the recurring operational risk is weather. Queensland's cyclone season runs November to April, and Hamilton Island has been directly hit before: Cyclone Debbie crossed as a category 4 system on 28 March 2017 and damaged vegetation and facilities across the island. The resort maintains its own cyclone plan and a marina cyclone plan, and monitors Bureau of Meteorology warnings through its app and control centre, but the practical advice from cruising writers, including the sailing blog Two At Sea, is that only around six weeks of the year offer genuinely settled weather with light winds and no cyclone risk, and that charter and tourism material tends to describe the wet season and the June-to-September trade winds in softer terms than sailors who have actually experienced them use.

Für wen: An owner of a yacht up to around 40 to 45 metres who wants a fly-in home port inside the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, a working boatyard on the same dock, and Australia's biggest offshore regatta on the calendar every August, and who accepts a narrow cyclone-free cruising window, a permit system for reef anchorages, and a marina that will not quote a rate once a yacht is over 40 metres.