Palm Jumeirah boat and yacht tours

The lagoon is the part you cannot reach any other way

The Palm's crescent is eleven kilometres of rock breakwater, and its job is to take the swell out of the water behind it. The practical result is a stretch of sea that stays flat almost every day of the year while the open Gulf outside it is choppy, and that water is not reachable from land at any point.

This is where charters anchor. Twenty-five minutes from the Marina berth, the engines go off, the ladder goes down, and the difference is startling: no traffic, no noise, and on a weekday frequently no other boat in sight. Almost everyone describes this part of the day afterwards and almost nobody books for it.

It is also the reason a three-hour charter is worth AED 750 more than a two-hour one. Two hours reaches the Palm and turns round. Three anchors there for forty minutes, of which about twenty is actually in the water once the anchor is set and recovered.

What you see on the way round

The route runs out past Bluewaters and along the JBR frontage, then across to the crescent tip and along the outside of it. Atlantis and the Royal Atlantis sit roughly halfway, close enough from the water to pick out people on the balconies, and they are the frontage everybody photographs.

What you will not see is the palm shape. Nobody does from sea level, and it is worth setting that expectation before you book: the fronds are private residential, gated, and invisible behind the crescent. The shape needs altitude, which means a seaplane, a helicopter or The View at the Palm observation deck. What the water gives you instead is scale, which no photograph conveys.

Palm charter or Palm monorail

The monorail costs AED 15 and runs the trunk to Atlantis in about ten minutes, and it is genuinely useful transport. As sightseeing it is poor: it is elevated by only a few storeys and runs between residential towers, so you travel the length of the Palm and see almost none of it.

A boat gives you the crescent, the Atlantis frontage and the lagoon. A shared RIB tour covers the first two in ninety minutes from about AED 220 a head and is the cheapest way to see the Palm properly. A private charter from AED 2,250 for three hours adds the thing neither of the others has, which is an hour anchored in flat water with the ladder down.