American Yacht Harbor (St Thomas, USVI)

Where Red Hook actually puts you

American Yacht Harbor sits on the north shore of Red Hook Bay, on the East End of St Thomas, about as far from the island's cruise-ship centre of Charlotte Amalie as St Thomas gets. This is the working end of the island rather than the postcard end: a marina, a ferry terminal, a strip of shops and restaurants and a hillside of villas climbing behind it, built around sport fishing and the daily traffic to St John and the British Virgin Islands rather than around superyacht show docks. The basin sits opposite Vessup Point on the bay's south side, protected enough that forum regulars comparing the two sides consistently call this the calmer, quieter berth of the two.

Even the marina's own coordinates do not agree with each other across sources. IGY's website lists 18.3251836, -64.8706824 for American Yacht Harbor; Waterway Guide and Dockwalk, an independent superyacht directory, both give 18 degrees 19.498 minutes north, 64 degrees 51.128 minutes west, a position roughly a mile and a half to the east of IGY's own figure. Neither is obviously the typo; Yotters could not resolve which is right and would treat both as approximate until the office confirms one on the radio.

The owner nobody put on the sign

Andrew Farkas, a New York real estate financier, bought American Yacht Harbor in 2007 through Island Global Yachting, the marina company he founded in 2005 and later built into a network that included Yacht Haven Grande a few miles away in Charlotte Amalie. A few months after the purchase, Jeffrey Epstein took a 50 per cent stake in this specific property, structured as what Farkas's representatives later called a passive investment. At the time, per Bloomberg's reporting, Farkas wrote to Epstein that they were now in contract to buy the marina where you keep your tenders, which places Epstein using the property before he had any ownership in it at all.

That stake stayed out of public view until a 2018 deposition surfaced it, and it became widely reported only after Epstein's 2019 arrest, when the Virgin Islands Daily News and outlets including The Real Deal and the San Juan Daily Star confirmed the arrangement from court filings and subpoenaed correspondence. Epstein kept an office on St Thomas from roughly 2013 to 2019. His estate is reported to have exited the position around 2021, the same broad window in which Farkas sold Island Global Yachting to MarineMax for a reported 480 to 580 million dollars. Nothing in the reporting Yotters reviewed suggests Farkas was implicated in Epstein's crimes, and the marina today operates as one property in MarineMax's IGY network with no operational trace of either man's name on it. A buyer doing diligence on the corporate history of this address, rather than on the berth itself, will still want to know it.

In 2007 Andrew Farkas wrote to Jeffrey Epstein that they were in contract to buy American Yacht Harbor. Epstein's 50 per cent stake in it stayed off the public record for the next eleven years.

What the marina says about itself, twice

IGY's own specification sheet for American Yacht Harbor gives 123 total berths, including 4 megayacht berths, a maximum length of 120 ft (36 m), a maximum beam of 40 ft (12.2 m) and a maximum draught of 10 ft (3 m). Dockwalk's superport listing and the Superyacht Services Guide both give the same 123 berths and the same 3 m draught, which is reassuring, but both cap maximum length at 110 ft (33.5 m) and beam at 12 m, ten feet and several feet short of what IGY itself claims for its own megayacht berths. Older sources compound the confusion: a 2013 All At Sea feature put the berth count at 126, and current aggregator sites such as Lake.com and GetMyBoat list 128.

None of these are enormous discrepancies by the standard of a place like this, but they matter to the exact owner who is deciding whether his boat fits. A 115 ft yacht reads as within range on IGY's own numbers and over the limit on Dockwalk's. The honest position, absent a fourth source to break the tie, is to treat 123 berths and a maximum somewhere between 110 and 120 ft as the working range and to get a specific slip confirmed in writing rather than relying on any published maximum. Contract categories are not detailed publicly either; the marina's language throughout is built around transient and seasonal dockage for a working sport-fishing fleet rather than the multi-year annual contracts a chain like ACI in Croatia sells by the printed page.

Arriving by sea and getting a slip

Call the marina on VHF channel 11, which it monitors continuously; the office also answers on 16 for boats that raise it there first. The approach runs through a buoyed channel along the north side of Red Hook Bay, with the marina centrally placed on that shore facing Vessup Point across the water. There is no dramatic pilotage here compared with a rock-bound Adriatic entrance, but there is a genuinely busy one: the Red Hook ferry terminal sits immediately alongside the marina, running three scheduled departures a day each way to St John's Cruz Bay and three each way to West End and Road Town in Tortola, on top of a steady flow of day-charter catamarans, dive boats and sport-fishing convertibles working in and out of their own slips.

IGY states plainly that it cannot guarantee a berth to a boat arriving without a reservation, so the practical sequence is to book ahead by phone or email, not to rely on a radio call finding space. Standard check-in is 2:00 pm and check-out 11:00 am. Winter groundswell rolling into the bay is reported by more than one forum regular to make the outer docks bounce, which is worth asking about specifically if a stay falls between November and March.

Fuel, power and a dock that rebuilt itself after Irma

Hurricane Irma tore through the Virgin Islands in September 2017 and destroyed the fuel dock building at the end of A dock, one of the more concrete, publicly documented pieces of storm damage at this marina. Rather than patch it, IGY demolished the structure and rebuilt larger: a 220 sq ft building finished by early 2020 that sells fuel alongside beverages, beer, wine, ice, snacks and IGY-branded merchandise. General manager Beth DiDomenico credited dockmaster Gary Hodge, on the job more than 31 years by that point, and his crew with keeping fuelling running through the rebuild. A Tripadvisor reviewer visiting in January 2019, mid-rebuild, specifically praised the visible pace of the recovery work.

Shore power comes as 30 amp or 50 amp service, with no published per-kWh consumption rate, water available dockside, and waste disposal on site. What is missing from the public record is any statement of what happens to a boat here when the next named storm is forecast: whether AYH requires tenants to leave, has a haul-out arrangement with a neighbour, or simply expects an owner to manage his own hurricane plan. Given the marina's own 2017 history, that omission is the kind of question worth putting to the office directly rather than assuming.

Built by marlin, not by megayachts

All At Sea has called American Yacht Harbor the Best Sports Fishing Destination Marina in the World, and the claim rests on real geography: the North Drop, a drop-off roughly 30 miles north of St Thomas, has produced close to 30 IGFA world records, including Larry Martin's 1,282 lb blue marlin taken in 1977 and Herbert Willog's 1,194 lb fish in 1980. A dock at the marina has displayed a replica of Maudie Lopez's 1,073 lb blue marlin, caught nearby in 1982. General manager Lee Hicks put the pitch plainly: this is the closest marina to where some of the world's largest marlin swim.

The Virgin Islands Game Fishing Club runs its tournament calendar from this marina continuously. The July Open Billfish Tournament, timed to the July full moon and tracing back to 1963, marked its 50th running in 2013 and its 52nd in 2015, and benefits the Boys and Girls Club of the Virgin Islands on an all-release format. The USVI Open/Atlantic Blue Marlin Tournament follows on the August full moon, describes itself as the Super Bowl of sport fishing, and benefits the Boy Scouts. VIGFC's own published 2025 calendar shows the pattern still running: a Dolphin Derby on 13 April, a Billfish Shootout on 2 August, a Kids Tournament on 4 October and a Wahoo Windup on 2 November, all fished from American Yacht Harbor. Yotters could not find a published 2026 date for either marquee event at the time of writing.

Clearing into the United States from a foreign flag

The US Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico are domestic US ports in law, not foreign ones, so a boat sailing here from the mainland or hopping over from St John does not clear in as a foreign arrival. The practical complication sits one ferry ride away: the British Virgin Islands, 30 minutes across the Sir Francis Drake Channel and served by the same Red Hook terminal beside this marina, is genuinely foreign territory, and a yacht coming back from a week in the BVI has to report to US Customs and Border Protection on return.

CBP's ROAM app, which lets many pleasure boaters report an arrival from a phone rather than call in, explicitly does not cover non-US and non-Canadian flagged vessels, so a foreign-flagged yacht returning from the BVI must instead call 1-800-432-1216 or present in person. Red Hook has had a dedicated CBP office at the Urman V Fredericks Marine Terminal since 2019, a short walk from the marina gate, which makes the in-person route genuinely convenient here even though it is not the automated one. It is a paperwork asymmetry worth knowing before planning a BVI loop out of this particular berth: the ferry passengers walking past the boat clear in minutes, the yacht itself does not.

Where to eat, after dark, and what is wrong with it

All At Sea counts nine bars and restaurants on the property, spanning breakfast rooms to full seafood and Caribbean menus, plus a chandlery, a dive centre, a bait and tackle shop and boat rental counters, all within the same short block as the slips. Molly Malone's is the dockside Irish pub inside the marina itself; Duffy's Love Shack, an open-air tiki bar set up in the parking lot of the shopping centre directly across the street, is the Red Hook institution for evening drinks, live DJs and what regulars call the parking lot party. A supermarket, a bank and a laundromat sit within the same walk, which covers a genuine turnaround without a taxi.

The honest weaknesses cluster around price and polish rather than safety. Reviewers on Tripadvisor and Yelp call the marina expensive next to comparable Caribbean bases and note fuel sold across the street runs 60 to 80 cents a gallon cheaper than the dock pump; one account describes a busy period with the docks short-staffed and trash left to pile up. Winter groundswell is reported to bounce the outer berths, and both sides of Red Hook Bay are described as capable of getting loud at night. None of that is unusual for a working charter and sport-fishing hub rather than a curated superyacht address, which is a fair description of what this place actually is. What is unusual is a marina this well known for its fishing pedigree publishing no price list at all, and a corporate history that kept one of its two founding owners off the record for over a decade.

Who it is for: A sport-fishing owner or captain who wants to be based at the acknowledged home port of the North Drop and inside the daily bustle of Red Hook's ferries and restaurants, and who is willing to phone for a price rather than read one online; not an owner who wants a published tariff, an unambiguous maximum LOA, or a corporate history free of an eleven-year undisclosed ownership stake.