Nanny Cay Marina (Tortola)

The largest boatyard in the BVI, not just a marina

Most BVI marinas exist to hand a charter guest a boat and take it back a week later. Nanny Cay does that too, but it also runs the yard behind it: dry storage for around 310 boats including 70 catamarans, a 50-tonne Travelift that handles monohulls to 68 feet and 10 feet of draft, and a wide-body 70-tonne Travelift built specifically for catamarans up to 32 feet of beam, backed by two hydraulic trailers for moving hulls around the yard. That is meaningfully more infrastructure than the average charter-fleet dock in the islands, and it is why boat owners, not just bareboat charterers, use Nanny Cay as a home base.

The marina itself splits into an inner and outer basin. The outer marina holds monohulls and a handful of motor yachts under 100 feet; the inner marina, better sheltered, takes the larger craft, up to a single 150-foot motor yacht berth at the top end. Two fuel docks, 120/220V shore power throughout, a reverse-osmosis water plant and site-wide backup power round out a facility built to keep running through exactly the kind of event that nearly ended it in 2017. Not every published account agrees on the current total: at least one third-party travel guide still quotes an older figure of around 180 berths, which reads as a pre-rebuild or partial count rather than the marina's own post-2019 total, and this page follows the roughly 320 figure that both Nanny Cay's own site and independent post-storm reporting converge on.

What Hurricane Irma actually did here, and what the rebuild says

Irma crossed Tortola as a Category 5 storm and tore through the inner marina in particular, which took the worst of the damage of anywhere on the property. Independent photojournalism from the following months - wrecked hulls piled against seawalls, masts down across the yard - documented a marina that looked, for a while, finished. Nanny Cay's own response inside the first week was to restore power, water and septic systems and reopen the Beach Bar, a sequencing that put basic services back before the docks themselves were rebuilt.

The rebuild that followed replaced the old pontoons with new Walcon docks, brought the outer marina back with 100 slips (60 for dockage, 40 leased to MarineMax) ahead of the inner marina, and reached full operation with roughly 320 total berths by April 2019 - genuinely more capacity than the pre-storm 220, not merely a repair back to the old number. For an owner deciding where to leave a boat through a BVI hurricane season, that rebuild record is itself a data point: this is a marina that has been tested at the worst case and came back larger.

Hurricane Irma wiped out three in every four slips here in one afternoon in 2017, and the marina came back bigger than it was before.

A marina that outlasted Guinness and a 12-year bank receivership

The site did not start as one piece of land. UK developer Gary Turpin approached local landowners in 1961 to build road access to what were then three distinct cays, Big Cay, Little Cay and Miss Peggy Cay, and the marina and resort now sitting on a single consolidated landmass only took that combined shape through work done across the 1970s. That origin as three separate, joined-up parcels is part of why the property reads as sprawling rather than a single planned marina basin.

Ownership since has been anything but stable on paper, even though the yard has kept operating through it: a period under Guinness's ownership was followed by what independent BVI property reporting describes as a 12-year receivership under Barclays Bank, an unusually long stretch for any resort property to sit in the hands of a lender rather than an operator. The current owners, Cameron McColl, John McCoach and Graeme Scott, bought the property out of that receivership, and under their ownership the marina is the base for at least one BVI bareboat operator, Horizon Yacht Charters, alongside the independent owners who keep boats there year-round.

Getting a boat serviced, not just docked

The 6,000-item Nanny Cay Chandlery, alongside an electronics store and sail loft, mean a genuine mechanical or rigging problem does not necessarily mean a flight to St Thomas or Puerto Rico for parts, which is a real practical advantage over a smaller charter-only base. Haul-out and storage pricing is not published on Nanny Cay's own site or on the third-party marina directories checked for this research - what is published is the shape of the yard's long-stay incentive: commit to five months or more in dry storage and the yard includes five free haul-and-launches over that period, plus a discounted marina rate once the boat is back afloat.

What is not published, and worth asking about directly, is a current per-foot dry storage rate and current haul-out pricing outside that long-stay package - neither turned up in marina directories, aggregator sites, or Nanny Cay's own published rate information during this research, which puts Nanny Cay in the same position as most Caribbean yards: get a quote for your specific boat and dates rather than expecting a public price list. A used-boat buyer inspecting anything that spent time in this yard should also ask specifically whether it was hauled or afloat during Irma, since a boat that rode out that storm in the water has a materially different history than one that was already ashore.

What is next door, and what you still have to do before you arrive

Customs and immigration for the BVI are handled at a short list of recognised ports - Road Town, West End, the airport, and outposts on Virgin Gorda and Jost van Dyke - and Nanny Cay is not one of them. Every vessel needs to submit an arrival notification on sailclear.com up to 72 hours ahead and physically clear at one of those ports before heading to the marina itself, a sequencing point that catches out owners used to a marina that also functions as a port of entry.

Once alongside, the property covers the basics without a taxi: Peg Leg's Landing serves Caribbean and West Indian fusion food with a view down the Sir Francis Drake Channel, Omar's (formerly the Genaker Cafe) runs breakfast through dinner seven days a week, and Captain Mulligan's is the sports bar for whatever is on. For provisioning, a small Riteway convenience store sits beside Omar's for anything forgotten on a bigger shopping run, and Relish offers curated specialty foods from the UK, US and South Africa for a more finished galley than a bareboat charter usually gets.

Why the whole Sir Francis Drake Channel is a day sail from the dock

The British Virgin Islands work as a charter ground precisely because the legs are short: Norman Island, reputed inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, sits about 5 nautical miles south of Nanny Cay, Peter Island another 5 miles past that, and Cooper Island 6 miles beyond Peter, before the run up to Virgin Gorda and the granite boulders of The Baths adds roughly 10 more. A boat leaving Nanny Cay in the morning can be anchored off a different island for lunch and a third for the night, which is the whole logic of the BVI as a cruising ground rather than a single long-distance destination.

That geography is also why Nanny Cay works as a fleet base for operators like Horizon Yacht Charters rather than only a private owners' marina: a week-long bareboat or crewed itinerary can start and end at the same dock while covering most of the territory's signature anchorages in between, without the multi-day passages that a base further from the main channel would require.

Who it is for: A bareboat or crewed charter operator basing a fleet in the BVI, or an owner who wants a real boatyard, not just a dock, within reach of the Sir Francis Drake Channel.