IGY Simpson Bay Marina (St Maarten)

Location

Simpson Bay Lagoon, Dutch Sint Maarten, immediately inside the Simpson Bay bridge, at about 18.032 N 063.095 W

Operator

IGY Marinas, owned by MarineMax since the USD 480 million cash acquisition announced 9 August 2022

Berths

122 slips quoted by IGY, of which 20 are megayacht berths. Marinalife lists 120

Vessel range

to 190 ft / 57.5 m LOA, 34 ft / 10.4 m beam, 13 ft / 4.0 m draught

The bridge

opening 17.0 m wide, controlling depth 6.0 m, clearance about 2.4 m when closed and tide dependent. It is a cable-stayed swing bridge and turns horizontally clear of the channel, so there is no air draught limit when open

Bridge schedule

seven openings a day, one direction each. 08:30 out, 09:30 in, 10:30 out, 11:30 in, 14:00 in, 16:00 out, 17:00 in

Bridge fees, USD, read 2026

7 up to 39 ft, 21 to 49 ft, 42 to 59 ft, 120 to 72 ft, 200 to 92 ft, 300 to 118 ft, 500 above that. One payment against the visit, not one each way; the Marine Trade Association says it is payable on clearing out of the lagoon

Shore power

30 A and 50 A single phase, with 100 A single phase and 100 A three phase on the larger berths

VHF

marina on 16 and 79A. The bridge and the Lagoon Authority on 12

Customs

not on site. Customs and Immigration share the police station on the canal beside the bridge, with a separate Lagoon Authority office west of it

Duty status

Sint Maarten sits outside the EU customs and VAT territory and operates as a duty-free port, so parts and provisions land without duty or broker fee

Sister marina

IGY Yacht Club Isle de Sol, 40 megayacht berths, 80 ft to 320 ft / 97 m, 50 ft beam, 18 ft draught, ISPS, in-water superyacht shipyard

Not an IGY marina

The Yacht Club at Port de Plaisance at Cole Bay trades as a BluWater Destination, 90-plus slips, 40 to 260 ft, draught to 16 ft

The lagoon

about 1,250 hectares, maximum depth about 6 m, the Dutch and French border running through the middle. No swell in any conditions

Airport

Princess Juliana (SXM) on the same lagoon, one runway 2,300 m by 45 m, about 1.8 million passengers in 2025 against about 1.6 million in 2024, direct to Amsterdam and Paris

Fixed date

the St Maarten Heineken Regatta, 47th edition 4 to 7 March 2027, with its regatta office at the Simpson Bay bridge

The lagoon, and why every berth on the island is inside it

Simpson Bay Lagoon covers about 1,250 hectares, roughly 3,100 acres, with a maximum depth of about 6 metres. The border between French Saint-Martin and Dutch Sint Maarten runs across the middle of it, so one sheet of flat water is shared by two jurisdictions with two sets of paperwork. Almost the whole yachting industry of the island sits on its shores: IGY Simpson Bay Marina and IGY Yacht Club Isle de Sol on the Dutch side just inside the bridge, The Yacht Club at Port de Plaisance at Cole Bay, Porto Cupecoy on the French side, and the chandleries, riggers and repair yards strung along the Dutch shoreline between them. The lagoon's marine industry is put at 12.5 per cent of the island economy.

What the lagoon gives you is stillness. There is no swell inside it in any conditions, the fetch is short in every direction, and it has been the region's hurricane refuge for decades, which is a strength and, as 2017 proved, also a concentration of risk. What it costs you is that the water is enclosed in every sense. You get in and out only through a bridge on somebody else's timetable, and the same absence of flushing that keeps the surface flat also keeps whatever goes into the water from leaving it. Both of those facts run through the rest of this page, and an owner who understands them before he books has understood St Maarten.

The bridge, which is the fact that decides everything

The Simpson Bay Bridge on the Dutch side is the main way in and out. It is run by the Simpson Bay Lagoon Authority Corporation, worked on VHF channel 12, and it opens seven times a day on a fixed schedule with traffic in one direction only per opening: 08:30 outbound, 09:30 inbound, 10:30 outbound, 11:30 inbound, 14:00 inbound, 16:00 outbound and 17:00 inbound. Two independent bridge listings read in August 2026, Marina Fort Louis on the French side and About SXM, carry the same seven slots, and neither publishes a seasonal variation. You are asked to be on station 15 to 30 minutes before the opening. The operator does not wait, and a boat that misses the 17:00 inbound lies outside until 08:30 the next morning.

The dimensions are the part to memorise. The opening is 17.0 metres wide, about 55 to 56 feet, and the controlling depth through the cut is 6.0 metres. It is not a lifting bridge. Hollandia, the Dutch contractor that designed, fabricated and shipped the 68 metre span of roughly 450 tonnes, calls it a cable-stayed swing bridge with the rotation point in the middle, and it turns horizontally out of the way rather than rising. Because the span swings clear of the channel there is no mast height limit whatsoever when it is open, which is the opposite of what most European owners expect from a lagoon entrance. Closed, the clearance is about 2.4 metres and tide dependent, split by one cruising listing into about 2.6 metres in the port channel and about 2.4 in the starboard, which is a tender and nothing more. The limit that bites is beam: a yacht wider than 17 metres does not enter Simpson Bay Lagoon whatever her length, wide-beam vessels are asked to take a pilot for the transit, and the rule catches large multihulls as readily as it catches the top of the motor-yacht fleet. The Lagoon Authority's published rule is a 5 mph limit in the bridge channel, the fairways and the lagoon, with the anchorage zones and the marinas designated no-wake zones rather than the whole lagoon. A 2026 cruising guide gives the same restriction as a 5 knot no-wake limit once inside, and one older listing carries 3 mph for the access channel, so take 5 mph as the rule and slower as the manners.

The span swings clear, so there is no mast limit at all: the number that decides whether you can use this island is 17.0 metres of beam.

What the marina itself holds

IGY quotes 122 slips at Simpson Bay Marina of which 20 are megayacht berths, a maximum length of 190 feet or 57.5 metres, a maximum beam of 34 feet or 10.4 metres, and a maximum draught of 13 feet or 4 metres. Marinalife's listing for the same marina says 120 slips taking up to 200 feet, so treat the headline figures as approximate and confirm your own position with the berthing office rather than with an aggregator. Shore power runs 30 and 50 amp single phase, with 100 amp single phase and 100 amp three phase on the larger berths. The office works VHF 16 and 79A, is open 07:30 to 18:30 seven days a week, and check-in is quoted at 16:30 against a 10:30 check-out.

The 13 foot draught limit is what sorts the fleet inside the lagoon. It is comfortable for the 30 to 50 metre motor yacht and for almost any sailing yacht up to around 60 feet, and it rules out a deep-drafted sailing superyacht, which goes next door to Isle de Sol at 18 feet or across the water to Port de Plaisance at 16 feet. Ashore, the marina sits inside Plaza del Lago, which is a working plaza of shops, offices, restaurants and yacht-agency front doors rather than a resort promenade. The chandlery, crew facilities and 24 hour security are on site, and berth holders get the run of the amenities at Isle de Sol, the resort pool, the tennis courts and the Anchor Bar, on the private island a few hundred metres away.

IGY, MarineMax, and who actually runs the other two yacht clubs

IGY Marinas, originally Island Global Yachting, was bought by MarineMax in a deal announced on 9 August 2022 at USD 480 million in cash with an earnout of up to a further USD 100 million two years after closing, expected to complete in the first half of MarineMax's 2023 financial year. IGY's founder and former chairman Andrew Farkas published an open letter to MarineMax shareholders in July 2024 saying the acquisition had not worked out as expected and that he wanted to buy the business back. The offer was not taken up and MarineMax still owns IGY. For an owner the practical consequence is a network account: IGY runs a curated group of marinas across the Americas, the Caribbean and Europe, and a berth here is booked through the same desk as the rest of the group.

In Sint Maarten IGY runs two of the three yacht clubs, not three, and the trade press regularly gets this wrong. Simpson Bay Marina is one. IGY Yacht Club Isle de Sol, on its own island a short walk away, is the other: 40 megayacht berths, a minimum length of 80 feet and a maximum of 320 feet or 97 metres, maximum beam 50 feet, maximum draught 18 feet, power up to 480 volt 100 amp three phase, ISPS accreditation, in-slip fuelling and an in-water superyacht shipyard on the site. The Yacht Club at Port de Plaisance at Cole Bay is often listed alongside them as an IGY property and it is not: it trades as a BluWater Destination, with more than 90 slips taking 40 to 260 feet and draughts to 16 feet, and roughly half its alongside and Mediterranean-moor berths configured for megayachts. If somebody has told you the island's big three are all IGY, they are working from old information.

Duty free, and the parts trade behind it

Sint Maarten is an autonomous constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and sits outside the European Union's customs and VAT territory, and the island operates as a duty-free port. Goods are imported without duty, which also means without a customs broker's fee stacked on top, and that is the commercial reason the Caribbean's spare parts trade concentrates here rather than anywhere further down the chain. Parts ship in from both the United States and Europe, and freight-only services from the US carry the large items and the hazardous goods that a passenger aircraft will not take. For a yacht that has broken something in the Grenadines or the Virgins, the practical answer is usually to get the part to St Maarten and then get the boat to it.

The service industry has followed the freight. BWA Yachting runs its Caribbean headquarters out of Plaza del Lago at Simpson Bay Marina, and the yacht agents on the island handle clearance, berth booking across the whole region, bunkering on credit terms, chandlery and uniform supply, freight handling and storage. Island Water World is on the lagoon. Provisioning is genuinely better than anywhere else in the Eastern Caribbean, because the island is fed by two supply chains, Dutch and French, and carries European product that does not reach the rest of the arc at all. Refit and repair sit here for the same reason as everything else: the parts are already on the island, and the labour has stayed where the parts are.

Clearing in, and the border in the middle of the water

Dutch Sint Maarten has two ports of entry, Simpson Bay and Great Bay at Philipsburg. At Simpson Bay, Customs and Immigration share a building with walk-up windows side by side on the first floor of the police station on the canal beside the bridge. A cruising guide updated in 2026 gives Customs 08:00 to 19:00 and Immigration 07:00 to 16:00, seven days, and it is the only current source for the clock: the Marine Trade Association's clearance page carries the ports of entry and the fees but no office hours at all, and the maritime information page that used to carry them now returns a 404. Reckon on half an hour to an hour depending on traffic. You clear separately with the Lagoon Authority collection office at the police station west of the bridge, and the bridge fee is one payment against the visit rather than one in each direction. The Marine Trade Association says it is payable on clearing out of the lagoon; the Lagoon Authority's own long-standing wording requires a vessel to clear in at the collection office immediately on arrival and pay the bridge, harbour and clearance fees due. The two positions square if the fee is assessed against the visit and collected at the office, but budget for it once, not twice. Bring paper, because digital documents are accepted inconsistently on the Dutch side, and note that the police dock is for clearance access only and may not be left unattended. All arrivals now also complete Sint Maarten's online embarkation and disembarkation form.

The French side is a different country in practice as well as on paper. Clearance for Saint-Martin is done online through the French government's demarche.numerique.gouv.fr portal with no wet stamp required. It is not free: the St Maarten Marine Trade Association puts French clearance fees at EUR 5 to 15, payable on completing the declaration. The chandleries and Marina Fort Louis at Marigot will also do it for you for a small fee if the site defeats you, which it sometimes does from a non-French IP address. The border runs across the middle of the lagoon, so a yacht at anchor can shift jurisdiction in ten minutes. Nobody stops you crossing the water, but the clearance obligations are separate and a commercially registered yacht in particular should know which side she is lying on. The customary stay for a visiting yacht is three months, varying by nationality.

What Irma did, and what is left of it

Hurricane Irma crossed the island on 6 September 2017 as a category 5. A rapid post-storm assessment found 450 to 460 damaged vessels in Dutch Sint Maarten waters, and 139 wrecks had to be lifted out of Simpson Bay Lagoon alone. The salvage ran under the Emergency Debris Management Project, which came onstream in December 2018, was managed by Sint Maarten's National Recovery Program Bureau and funded through the Sint Maarten Trust Fund. Clearing the wrecks cost about USD 15 million within a USD 25 million debris programme, and close to 4,000 tonnes of waste was disposed of. In February 2023 the programme received a further USD 60 million, taking the total to USD 85 million.

The lagoon itself is clear, and that is not the marina saying so. The World Bank's account, published in February 2024, quotes ship inspector Paul Ellinger saying the island now has an exceptionally clean lagoon and can receive visitors again, and coral and other marine life displaced by the salvage were relocated rather than destroyed. The airport took far longer than the water did. Princess Juliana lost its terminal roof and its jetways and had sand and flooding on the runway. It reopened on 10 October 2017 with temporary facilities, ran on temporary arrival and departure halls from December 2018, recovered its upper floor and jet bridges in November 2023, its check-in area in January 2024 and its new arrival hall on 15 October 2024. That is a seven-year rebuild that finished only recently, and an owner who last visited in 2022 has not seen the island as it now is.

The airport at the fence

Princess Juliana International, SXM, sits on the south-west shore of the same lagoon and the marina's address is Airport Road. It is one runway, 10/28, 2,300 metres by 45 metres, handling about 1.8 million passengers in 2025, up from about 1.6 million in 2024, with somewhere between 26 and 30 airlines depending on the season. That is the shortest crew-change and guest-arrival run of any major Caribbean yachting base, and it is also why the parts trade works: the freight comes off an apron that is a few minutes from the boat rather than a ferry ride and an island hop away.

Long-haul is real here, which matters more to an owner than frequency does. KLM flies to Amsterdam, Air France to Paris Charles de Gaulle year round, and Air Caraibes to Paris Orly seasonally. American, Delta, JetBlue and United connect the United States hubs including Miami, New York and Atlanta, so a guest from London or Zurich changes once. SXM is also the regional hub for the short hops to Anguilla, Saba and St Barths, fifteen miles east, which is why charter guests routinely fly into St Maarten to join a boat that is lying somewhere else entirely. For a family arrival, this is the single strongest argument the island has.

The honest weaknesses

The water is the first one and it is not a small point. EPIC's water quality work on the lagoon and its watershed found enterococci above allowable levels in 96 per cent of samples, on a sample size of 26, and found the land-based sites more polluted than the lagoon itself, which points at the ghauts draining into it rather than at the boats lying in it. The Nature Foundation recorded a harmful algal bloom at Cole Bay Corner in February 2019 and attributed it to nutrient loading from sewage and wastewater. The Marine Trade Association has since set out a pattern of discharge incidents: raw sewage near Paradise Plaza in 2015, two leaks in 2019 including one near Kim Sha Beach, the Plaza Puerta del Sol treatment plant in 2021, and wastewater from the Las Brisas building at Cole Bay in December 2025. It said it had received complaints from yacht owners about lagoon water quality. Poor circulation in the urbanised corners makes it worse than the open lagoon.

The rest are structural. There is no published berth rate card of any kind at Simpson Bay Marina and no published fuel price on the island, so every quote is negotiated blind. The bridge constrains the calendar as much as the beam, since seven fixed openings a day in alternating directions is a poor fit with a charter turnaround, and a yacht over 118 feet pays USD 500 to get out. Hurricane season runs June to November and the lagoon is a refuge rather than a guarantee, which is the whole lesson of 2017. And the competitive position is not static: IGY's own head of global marina operations, Brian Deher, has said publicly that the challenge is holding yachts into the shoulder season rather than filling the peak, and that new marina capacity elsewhere in the northeast Caribbean, St Kitts among it, is now competing for a finite fleet.

Для кого: An owner running a 30 to 55 metre yacht who wants a flat-water winter base with the parts, the labour and a long-haul airport all inside one lagoon, and who can live with a bridge timetable; not the owner of a very wide or deep-drafted yacht, who never gets in at all.