Fort Montagu has stood on the eastern lip of Nassau Harbour since 1741, the oldest of the island's three forts and the one built to watch for ships coming from the open sea. For most of the year it does exactly what a 285 year old limestone fort should do: nothing much. A few worn cannons face the water. The grass gets cut. Someone eats lunch on the wall.
Then the first week of December arrives, and the water in front of it fills with wooden sailboats carrying more human ballast than cargo.
The bay's other job
Ask anyone who lives east of downtown what Montagu Beach is for, and the honest answer is: lunch. It's a small stretch of sand, smaller than Cable Beach or Love Beach, and the appeal was never really the swimming. It's the fact that you can leave an office on East Bay Street, walk five minutes, and eat a sandwich looking at Nassau Harbour instead of a parking lot. Locals treat it as a picnic spot and a place to let kids run before dinner, not a destination anyone plans a trip around.
Fort Montagu sits right beside it, and the two function as one piece of ground. The fort has its own quiet claim to history: it's the site of the United States Marine Corps' first military action, when eight ships arrived in 1776 hoping to seize a stockpile of British gunpowder that, as it turned out, wasn't actually there. The Bahamian militia withdrew and the fort fell without a shot. It's a good story to tell a visiting cousin. It is not, on an ordinary Tuesday, a reason to leave the house.
Then, once a year, this exact stretch of shoreline becomes the busiest square mile in the country.
What actually happens in early December
The event is called the Best of the Best Regatta, and it's sailed entirely off Montagu Beach. The most recent edition ran December 3 through 9, 2025, and it drew 94 registered boats, the largest fleet the race has seen since it started in 2016. That's not a modest year over year bump. It's the biggest field the event has drawn in its nine seasons, and it happened on a beach most guidebooks describe as one of Nassau's smaller ones.
The boats are traditional Bahamian wooden sloops, raced in four size classes:
| Class | Length | Typical crew |
|---|---|---|
| A-Class | 28 feet | up to 15, several riding pry boards |
| B-Class | 21 feet | smaller crew, still heavily crewed |
| C-Class | 17 feet | lean crew |
| E-Class | 12 feet | often a single sailor or small team |
A-Class crews are the ones worth watching from the fort wall. Up to fifteen people pack onto a 28 foot hull, several of them out on pry boards, planks bolted to the deck with long steel staples and extended out over the water so a person can lie flat along them as counterweight against the wind. It looks less like sailing and more like a controlled argument with physics, and it's staged close enough to shore that you don't need binoculars.
The wind doesn't care that half the crew is standing on a plank. It cares whether the plank is long enough. That's the whole sport.
Conditions during the most recent race were about as forgiving as Nassau gets in December: air in the high 70s, water warm enough to sail barefoot, wind in the 5 to 15 knot range. Good weather for spectators lining the shore near the fort, and good weather for the currents that make this particular stretch of water tricky. The Nassau Channel is known among sailors for exactly that: strong currents that shift through the day as water moves between the deep, dark blue on the western side and the shallow, clear turquoise to the east, sometimes just a few feet deep. Reading that shift correctly, and not a moment late, is what separates the boats that win from the ones that just finish.
The fleet's growth is coming from the driveways, not the docks
Here's the part that changes how you should read those 94 boats. Roughly half of them were E-Class, the 12 foot boats originally built for junior sailors and later opened to all ages once the class took off. The E-Class is the reason the overall fleet keeps growing. It's not tourism inflating the numbers and it's not older sailors returning to a nostalgic hobby. It's teenagers building and racing their own boats, and more of them being built right now than at any point in the regatta's run.
This matters for anyone who thinks of Montagu Bay as a quiet, mostly ceremonial waterfront. It isn't just holding onto tradition. It's actively recruiting the next generation of it, one 12 foot hull at a time, in a way that's visibly reshaping who shows up on race day. The Bahamas runs 17 major regattas a year, government funded and spread across the islands, but most of them require a boat trip or a flight to a Family Island beach. Best of the Best is the one that happens on a stretch of shoreline that residents of eastern New Providence already pass on the way to work.
The one-mile loop
None of this replaces the ordinary rhythm of the neighborhood. It layers on top of it. The walk from downtown Nassau out to Fort Montagu runs about an hour along East Bay Street, past Rawson Square and Parliament Square, with the Rum Cake Factory and the Potters Cay fish fry as reasonable excuses to stop along the way. It's the kind of walk you do because you live close enough that it's easier than parking.
The other end of that loop is Harbour Bay Shopping Plaza, sitting on East Bay Street directly across from the Nassau Harbour Club marina. It's not a lifestyle center built for a brochure. It's the plaza people actually use for errands, and the tenant list reads like a checklist for a normal week rather than a resort amenity page:
- A full supermarket and a drug store
- Starbucks, Domino's, and Dairy Queen
- Levi's and Nine West
- A bank, a dry cleaner, and a laundromat
- Aliv mobile service
- Dentist, doctor, and veterinary clinics
- A cycle and sports shop
That combination, a working plaza on one end and a fort with a beach on the other, is what actually defines this stretch of East Bay Street. It isn't dressed up as a destination for anyone else. It's just where the people who live here already are, most weeks for coffee and prescriptions, one week in December for pry boards and fifteen person crews.
If the growth pattern holds, the fleet coming back to Montagu Beach this December will look even younger than last year's, and the fort will have another season of quietly hosting a sport it's watched grow up in front of it.
For residents thinking about what comes next in eastern New Providence, from Montagu Bay out toward Palm Cay, the team at Bond Bahamas tracks this stretch of coastline closely, from the everyday plaza runs to the December weekend when the whole neighborhood turns toward the water. Reach out when you're ready to talk about what's happening on your street, not just what's on the market.
