Atlantic Ocean

13 records — the Bahamas, Turks and Caicos, and one Florida cay — and the shelf that dominates here is Island Societies rather than resorts. This is the water of the private cay held by owners: Pine Cay with thirty-seven homeowners since the 1970s, Ambergris Cay with its own aircraft, Fowl Cay with a powerboat handed to each villa.

The Exumas are the particular case. Several hundred cays, shallow banks clear enough to see the bottom from the air, and a culture of self-driven boats that exists almost nowhere else in this register. What is bought in the Bahamas is rarely service; it is a chart, a hull and three hundred empty islands.

The register files these waters as Atlantic rather than Caribbean, which is geographically correct and commercially unfashionable. The distinction matters in winter, when Atlantic swell and wind reach the Bahamas and leave the southern Caribbean alone.