USA · Florida & the Caribbean · Bayside & Sea Isle Marina
Four marinas send boats onto Biscayne Bay, up to twenty kilometres apart. The one printed on your voucher decides whether you get a narrated skyline loop, a raccoon island or a sandbar with a bar on it.
Quick answer
Eight well-reviewed boats leave Miami on a normal day, and the cheapest of them — the Biscayne Bay millionaires' homes cruise at $20 for ninety minutes — is also the most booked in the city, with 9,167 reviews behind it. Above it sit the half-days that actually put you ashore, like the Raccoon Island run at $74, and a private yacht at $242 for the hull rather than the seat.
They do not share a dock. Sightseeing boats load at Miamarina inside Bayside Marketplace; the island and sandbar trips mostly load a mile north at 1635 N Bayshore Drive — signed Venetian Marina & Yacht Club, still called Sea Isle Marina by half the operators who use it; Beach-side charters run from Miami Beach Marina on Alton Road. Which pier is which is the first thing to settle, because the garage under Bayside will take $50 off you for a day if you guess wrong.
The city also runs a boat that costs nothing. The Miami Beach water taxi crosses the same bay free on weekdays, and it ties up at the very marina several of these tours leave from — the arithmetic is below, along with what the free ride does not give you.
Compare
The five shapes a day on Biscayne Bay takes, each represented by the cheapest well-reviewed boat of its kind on this page. Durations and prices are the operators' own, taken from the listings below and re-checked in September 2026; the last column is what actually decides it.
| Kind of trip | Time out | Do you get ashore? | From | What decides it | Book |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Narrated skyline loop | 1.5 hours | No | $20 | Cheapest hour afloat, no stops | Details |
| City tour plus bay cruise | 6 hours | On the coach half | $45 | Mainland sights as well as the bay | Details |
| Raccoon Island half day | 4 hours | Island walk and floats | $74 | The only trip here that lands you | Details |
| Sunset cruise | 2 hours | No | $59 | Downtown lit up, back for dinner | Details |
| Private hull | 2 – 4 hours | Sandbar, if you ask | $242 | Splits four or six ways, route yours | Details |
The boats
Every boat below is bookable now and carries its operator's own rating and review count. Prices are per person unless the entry says the boat is private, in which case the figure buys the whole hull and splits between everyone aboard. Re-checked in September 2026.
4.5★ (9167 reviews) · 1.5 hours · from $20
4.9★ (721 reviews) · 4 hours · from $74
4.6★ (496 reviews) · 6 hours · from $45
4.9★ (245 reviews) · 1 - 5 hours · from $106
4.4★ (212 reviews) · 3 hours · from $120
4.8★ (152 reviews) · 2 - 4 hours · from $242
4.4★ (44 reviews) · 1 hour · from $59
4.8★ (25 reviews) · 2 hours · from $59
The piers
Miami has no single tour harbour. Four separate marinas send boats onto Biscayne Bay, the two downtown ones sit a mile apart on the same boulevard, and one of them answers to two names.
Miamarina at Bayside, 401 Biscayne Boulevard, is the city-owned marina inside Bayside Marketplace and the one most people mean by "the Miami boat tour": 125 slips at the west end of Government Cut, with the sightseeing operators loading from the promenade beside the shops. It is also the easiest pier to reach without a car — the free Metromover's College/Bayside station is one block west.
1635 North Bayshore Drive, a mile north towards the Venetian Causeway, takes most of the island and sandbar trips. The signs and the dock staff say Venetian Marina & Yacht Club, the name Integra Marinas gave it; half the listings still say Sea Isle Marina, which is what it was called for decades. Same water, same gate; check-in is at Pier 1, forty-five minutes ahead.
Miami Beach Marina, 300 Alton Road, sits across the causeway at the southern tip of South Beach: 400 slips, small charters and dive boats, walking distance from the Art Deco district. Parking is the city's pay-to-park scheme, not the marina's, and it fills by midday.
Haulover, sixteen kilometres north, is a Miami-Dade County park holding Bill Bird Marina and the Haulover Marine Center. No tour on this page leaves from it, but its ramp is where you go if you rent rather than book, and the sandbar off it is the one a captain may mean by "the sandbar".
| Marina | What loads there | Getting there without a car | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Miamarina at Bayside | Narrated skyline and mansion cruises | Free Metromover, one block | Check in on the promenade, not in the shops |
| 1635 N Bayshore Dr | Raccoon Island and sandbar boats, charters | Free weekday water taxi | Signed Venetian Marina; vouchers say Sea Isle |
| Miami Beach Marina | Beach-side sightseeing, dive and charter boats | South Beach trolley | City pay-to-park, usually full by midday |
| Haulover, Bill Bird Marina | Rentals and the ramp; no tours here | Bus along Collins Avenue | Lots close an hour before sunset |
The arithmetic
The City of Miami Beach runs a water taxi between Maurice Gibb Memorial Park on Purdy Avenue and the marina at 1635 North Bayshore Drive. It carries up to 55 people on 40-foot boats, takes about twenty minutes, and it is free.
It runs Monday to Friday: roughly hourly from seven in the morning until half past four, then every half hour until half past seven, with no weekend or holiday sailings. At the downtown end you are standing on the dock the Raccoon Island boats use.
So the sum for two people who simply want to be on Biscayne Bay: the free water taxi plus the free Metromover costs nothing, both ways, on a weekday. The cheapest narrated cruise is $20 a head, so $40 for the pair, plus whatever the Bayside garage takes — $7 for the first weekday hour, $20 for two to four hours, $50 if the day runs away with you.
What the free boat does not do: go near Star Island, slow for the mansion shoreline, tell you whose house that is, or exist in the evening when the skyline is worth photographing. It crosses; it does not tour. The same arithmetic runs up the scale — the private yacht at $242 is about $40 a head with six aboard, less than a $74 Raccoon Island seat and with the route in your hands.
Prices
Three bands, drawn from the eight listings on this page rather than an average of the market. The gap between them is not boat quality — it is whether you get off the boat.
The ninety-minute skyline and mansions cruise at $20 and the six-hour city-and-bay combination at $45. Neither puts you in the water. The $20 boat is the busiest on the bay — 4.5★ across 9,167 reviews, a strong number for the cheapest hull in the city.
The sunset run at $59 buys the two hours everyone wants and rates 4.8★. The Raccoon Island trip at $74 is the highest-rated boat here, 4.9★ over 721 reviews, and the only one that lands you. The Beach-side boat at $106 and the DJ party boat at $120 top the band and are two different afternoons.
The hour-long private ride at $59 and the yacht at $242 buy the hull. The hour is genuinely an hour: allow for the idle-speed zones and it is one loop of the near islands. The yacht repays a group, and it is where a sandbar stop becomes a conversation with the captain.
The mansion loop
Almost every boat out of Bayside sells the same circuit. Worth knowing what is on it, because two of the best-known stops are not what the narration implies.
The loop leaves Miamarina, runs south past the cruise terminals of the Port of Miami and Fisher Island, then turns north up the chain of dredged islands Carl Fisher and his contemporaries built out of the bay: Star Island, then Palm and Hibiscus, then the Venetian Islands back to downtown. Between them stands Flagler Monument Island, an obelisk ringed by four large figures, raised by Fisher for Henry Flagler and now a City of Miami Beach park reachable only by boat. That one is exactly what the guide says it is.
Two others need an asterisk. Guides habitually point out Al Capone's villa on Palm Island. Capone did buy 93 Palm Avenue and did die there, but the house is gone — Miami Beach's preservation process could not stop the demolition. You are photographing the site, not the building. The Scarface mansion, sold on more than one Miami boat, is not on Biscayne Bay at all: Tony Montana's exteriors were shot at El Fureidís, in Montecito, California.
Star Island is real enough, and Shaquille O'Neal's former house and the Estefans' are fixtures of the narration — but no guide can tell you who is behind the hedge today, and the good ones say so. The houses sit well back, the hedges are tall, and what makes the shoreline spectacular is the scale of the seawalls and the yachts tied to them. Ninety narrated minutes of bay, port and skyline for $20 is the best value here; a guaranteed sighting of a named roof is not what you are buying.
Why it is slow
First-time passengers regularly complain that a ninety-minute cruise covers very little water. That is the law, not the operator.
Biscayne Bay and its causeway approaches are threaded with boating-restricted areas. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission sets manatee protection zones under Chapter 68C-22 of the Florida Administrative Code, some year-round and some seasonal; Miami-Dade County adds its own under section 7-26 of the county code, where the Miami River runs idle speed, no wake along its whole length. The county may also impose idle-speed zones within 300 feet of any lock or bridge fender system, on a bay crossed by four causeways.
Idle speed, no wake is the slowest speed that keeps a boat steering, throwing no wake at all; slow speed, minimum wake is fully off plane, hull settled. Either way you pass the shoreline you came to see at walking pace — which is why the mansion narration takes as long as it does, and why an hour-long private booking is one loop rather than a tour. FWC officers patrol the zones.
The upside is the wildlife: manatees use the bay year-round, dolphins work the channel edges, and a boat crawling at idle sees animals a boat on plane never would.
Season
Sea temperatures are the long-term monthly averages for the Miami coast published by seatemperature.info; the notes are what the season does to the timetable here. Nothing shuts for winter, which is unusual for this site.
Two patterns cancel boats here. The first is routine: from roughly May to October the sea breezes off the Atlantic and the Gulf collide inland every afternoon and fire thunderstorms that drift back over the coast — frequent, violent, short, and arriving at about the same hour each day. This is why the morning sailing is the one that sails in summer. Where an operator runs the trip three times a day, book the first.
The second is the season proper. The Atlantic hurricane season runs from June 1 to November 30, peaks around September 10, and carries roughly 85 per cent of its activity in August, September and October, per NOAA's tropical cyclone climatology. A storm need not make landfall to end a booking: swell from a system hundreds of kilometres offshore keeps small boats at the dock for days — which is why September is the cheapest month on this bay.
The defence is dull and it works: free cancellation, the earliest departure, and the boat booked for the start of your stay so a cancelled trip has somewhere to move to.
| Month | Sea | Busy? | What it means on the water |
|---|---|---|---|
| January | 24.4 °C (75.9 °F) | Peak | Driest air of the year, fewest cancellations |
| February | 24.3 °C (75.7 °F) | Peak | Coolest water, still swimmable; boat-show week clogs the marinas |
| March | 24.8 °C (76.6 °F) | Spring break | Sandbar trips sell out at weekends; brisk Atlantic wind |
| April | 25.9 °C (78.6 °F) | Easing | The best month: warm and dry, before the storms |
| May | 27.4 °C (81.3 °F) | Quieter | Wet season begins; afternoon build-ups appear |
| June | 28.8 °C (83.8 °F) | Low | Hurricane season opens; clear mornings, stormy afternoons |
| July | 29.8 °C (85.6 °F) | Low | Hot and humid; take the earliest sailing |
| August | 30.2 °C (86.4 °F) | Low | Warmest water of the year; tropical window opens |
| September | 29.7 °C (85.5 °F) | Quietest | Peak hurricane month: cheapest boats, likeliest cancellation |
| October | 28.4 °C (83.1 °F) | Filling | Storm risk falls away; water still warm |
| November | 26.8 °C (80.2 °F) | Busy | Season closes at month's end; dry air returns |
| December | 25.5 °C (77.9 °F) | Peak | Holiday prices; skyline at its best in clear evening air |
Extras
Miami collects almost nothing at the gangway — there is no marine-reserve ticket and no port tax on a bay cruise. The money goes on parking, and it goes fast.
| Item | Amount | Who collects it | When it applies |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bayside Marketplace garage | $7 first weekday hour, $20 for 2–4 hours, $50 daily max; from $10 an hour Friday evening to Sunday | The Bayside garage | Every downtown departure if you drive |
| Biscayne Boulevard meters | About $3 an hour, varies by zone | City of Miami parking | Cheaper than the garage, if you find a space |
| South Beach parking | $4 an hour on-street, $2 in city lots, enforced 9am–3am | City of Miami Beach pay-to-park | Departures from Miami Beach Marina |
| Haulover Park | $7 weekdays, $10 Fridays to Sundays for a car; $20 and $30 for a trailer | Miami-Dade Parks, Recreation and Open Spaces | Only if you launch or rent your own boat |
| Drinks beyond the included round | Boat prices, at the bar | The operator | "Drinks included" usually means one or two |
On the water
The two downtown marinas sit a mile apart on the same boulevard and send out different boats; Miami Beach Marina is across the causeway, and Sandspur Island — Raccoon Island on every voucher — is well to the north of all three.
Questions
It depends on the boat. Narrated sightseeing cruises load at Miamarina at Bayside, 401 Biscayne Boulevard. Island and sandbar trips such as the Raccoon Island run load a mile north at 1635 North Bayshore Drive — signed Venetian Marina & Yacht Club, but written as Sea Isle Marina on plenty of vouchers, because that was its name for decades. Beach-side charters go from Miami Beach Marina, 300 Alton Road. Those addresses are not walking distance from each other, so read the confirmation email.
Yes, and it is a proper crossing rather than a novelty. The City of Miami Beach runs a free water taxi between Maurice Gibb Memorial Park on Purdy Avenue and the marina at 1635 North Bayshore Drive, about twenty minutes each way on 40-foot boats carrying up to 55. It runs weekdays only, roughly hourly from seven to half past four and every half hour until half past seven. It crosses the bay; it does not tour it — no narration, no Star Island, no evening sailings.
By rating, the Raccoon Island adventure at $74, holding 4.9★ across 721 reviews, and the Beach-side mansions and raccoons boat at $106, also 4.9★ over 245. The sunset cruise at $59 rates 4.8★ on a much smaller count. The $20 cruise rates 4.5★, which across 9,167 reviews is a strong number for the cheapest boat in the city.
From $20 for ninety narrated minutes out of Bayside to $242 for a private yacht. The useful middle is $59 to $120: a sunset cruise, a half day that lands you on an island, or a party boat with drinks included. Add parking if you drive — the Bayside garage runs $7 for the first weekday hour to a $50 daily maximum — or nothing if you arrive on the free Metromover.
Yes, in two shapes. The one-hour private ride at $59 is the cheap end and is honestly one loop of the near islands, because the idle-speed zones eat the time. The private yacht at $242 covers two to four hours with the route agreed with the captain. Both buy the boat rather than the seat, so with four aboard the yacht undercuts most group boats here.
Its chart name is Sandspur Island: fifteen acres of dredge spoil thrown up in the 1970s during work on the Intracoastal Waterway, now the largest spoil island in the Biscayne Bay Aquatic Preserve. Between forty and sixty wild raccoons live there, active in daylight, and how they arrived is genuinely unknown. The $74 trip is built around an island walk and float time; the $106 Beach-side boat includes it on its longer versions.
Because most of the interesting shoreline sits inside a boating-restricted area. The FWC sets manatee protection zones under Chapter 68C-22 of the Florida Administrative Code, and Miami-Dade adds its own under section 7-26 of the county code, including idle-speed zones near bridge fenders and along the whole Miami River. Idle speed means no wake at all; slow speed means fully off plane. Past the mansions you are doing walking pace by law — which is also why the wildlife shows itself.
They run all season and most days they sail. The Atlantic hurricane season is June 1 to November 30, peaking around September 10, with roughly 85 per cent of activity in August, September and October per NOAA's climatology — and a storm well offshore can put enough swell into the bay to keep small boats tied up. Separately, from May to October the sea breeze fires thunderstorms most afternoons, which is why summer morning departures sail and afternoon ones are the gamble.
April, then November. April gives a 25.9 °C sea, dry air and the gap between spring break and the summer storms. November brings the dry season back as the hurricane season closes, water still at 26.8 °C. January and February have the clearest air and the coolest water of the year, about 24 °C, which in Miami still means swimming. September is the cheapest month and the least reliable.
Nearby
Or browse every boat tour and day cruise by port.
Forty minutes north: canal cruises through the Intracoastal instead of an open bay
Skyline & sightseeing ▸ Key WestUSAThe far end of the Overseas Highway, where the boats go for reef and sunset sails
Sunset & reef sailing ▸ NassauBahamasThe Bahamian side of the same water, and the harbour most Miami cruise ships call at
Catamaran & reef sailing ▸