5 Under-Explored Destinations Accessible By Private Yacht From Mumbai And Goa

Beyond Grand Island and the Gateway of India lie the stretches of India's west coast a yacht is built for. For nearly a century, the roughly 720 km of coastline between Mumbai and Goa answered to the Maratha Navy rather than any European trading company. The fleet was founded under Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj in the 1650s, and from 1698 it was commanded by Kanhoji Angre. His ships operated out of a chain of island and headland forts, strong enough to extract passage fees from Portuguese, Dutch, British and Siddi vessels alike for decades. Long after the forts fell silent and the fleet was disbanded, the coastline they once controlled quietly returned to what it had always also been: fishing grounds, submerged reefs and a scatter of islands that never made it onto a standard travel itinerary. Think submerged coral plateaus, forgotten Maratha sea forts, and archipelagos that see more fishing boats than tourists. Below is a list of five that reward the extra hours of sailing.

Roughly 120 km offshore from Vijaydurg, Angria Bank is India's largest submerged coral reef, a basalt plateau spanning 650 sq km that formed after the Holocene sea-level rise and now supports coral communities dated to 240 years. The bank takes its name from Kanhoji Angre, the Maratha Navy's first admiral, who used its shallow, treacherous shoals as a natural battleground against enemy ships in the 18th century; its edges plunge from as little as 20 metres to over 400 feet, which is precisely what made it so effective a trap then and so rich a dive site now. A 2019 Wildlife Conservation Society expedition found coral here that had not bleached, unusual for Indian waters, and recorded over 1,000 fish species on an earlier government survey. There are still no dive centres operating out of Angria Bank itself, and the Maharashtra government has proposed declaring over 2,000 sq km of it a protected marine area. Reachable by a roughly four-hour high-speed run from either Mumbai or Goa, though a liveaboard is the only way to properly explore it.

A cluster of some 20 bare basalt rocks scattered eight kilometres off Vengurla, on Maharashtra's southern Konkan coast, the Vengurla archipelago was named Ilheos Queimados, or Burnt Islands, by the Portuguese for its scorched, treeless look. The tallest rock rises nearly 200 feet and carries two lighthouses, one built in the 1800s and now submerged during monsoon swells, and a replacement erected in 1931 by chief inspector of lighthouses John Oswald that still operates today. The real draw for a private charter is Burnt Island's sea caves, home to India's largest known colony of Indian swiftlets, a bird species that builds its nest almost entirely from hardened saliva; an ongoing Salim Ali Centre for Ornithology study has recorded 21 invertebrate species in these caves alone. The rocks sit roughly midway between Goa and the Konkan coast, making them an easy detour on either a northbound or southbound charter.

Built by the Adil Shahi dynasty and fortified by Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj in 1660, Suvarnadurg, meaning Golden Fort, was later headquartered by Kanhoji Angre and remained an Angre family naval stronghold for generations before passing to the Peshwas and, in 1818, the British. Its 24 bastions still stand along the island's rocky shore, connected by walls that once linked to a shipbuilding yard, and the fort's twin, the smaller Kanakadurga, sits directly opposite on the mainland headland at Harnai, itself worth the detour for its own lighthouse and ruins. There is no jetty and no regular ferry; the only way in is by fishing boat or private charter from Harnai port, and the surrounding waters are known for regular dolphin sightings and small coral formations rarely mentioned in Konkan's more popular coastal itineraries.

Off the coast of Malpe in coastal Karnataka lies a four-islet archipelago built entirely of hexagonal basalt columns, formed roughly 88 million years ago when Madagascar rifted away from the Indian landmass, a geological process also responsible for Northern Ireland's Giant's Causeway and parts of Iceland. Vasco da Gama is said to have landed here in 1498 on his voyage to Kozhikode, naming one island in dedication to St Mary, and the site was declared a National Geological Monument in 2001. Public ferries run only to Coconut Island, the largest of the four; the other three, North Island, South Island, and Dariya Bahadurgarh, see almost no visitors at all and are reachable only by private boat, making this one of the rare cases where a yacht doesn't just add comfort but genuine access.

Roughly 19 km off Murudeshwar and shaped, from above, unmistakably like a heart, Netrani is a former Indian Navy target-practice range, and old bomb craters are still visible on parts of the island today. What draws private charters now is what lies beneath: coral reefs with underwater visibility running 15 to 30 metres, among the clearest on India's west coast, home to close to 90 recorded species of reef fish, moray eels, and, on rarer occasions, whale sharks and orcas. The island itself is uninhabited and too rocky to land on comfortably, which is exactly the point, since the diving and snorkelling happen entirely from the boat. It sits roughly 212 km south of Goa by sea, positioning it as the furthest and least crowded stop on a longer Konkan-to-Karnataka charter route.