Getting a boat out: bridge clearance from the islands

A waterfront house is worth what you can do from its dock, and on the man-made islands that is decided by fixed federal numbers rather than by anything a listing mentions. The east Venetian bridge has five feet of clearance closed. The west one has twelve. Both open only on the hour and half hour for twelve hours a day. Those figures are in the Code of Federal Regulations, they do not move, and a vessel that does not fit under them is a vessel that waits.

Published September 6, 2026

Almost everything written about buying on these islands is about the houses. This page is about the water, because on an island the dock is half the reason the house costs what it does, and what the dock can hold is a question with a published federal answer.

1. What a five-foot closed clearance actually means

Five feet is not a low bridge. It is, for most of what people keep at a house on these islands, a closed door. A center console with a T-top does not pass. A flybridge does not pass. Anything with an arch, a tower or a fixed radar mast does not pass. What passes under five feet without an opening is a small open boat, a tender, a paddleboard.

So for any vessel of consequence east of that bridge, every trip out and every trip home is scheduled around a draw that opens twice an hour for half the day. That is not a defect and it is not a secret. It is a fact about the basin, and it is the difference between a dock you use on impulse and a dock you use by appointment.

The twelve-foot west bridge is a different proposition and rules out less, but it is still a bridge with the same twice-hourly restriction between seven in the morning and seven at night.

2. Why this belongs in the offer, not the survey

A buyer who intends to keep a particular boat at a particular house has a yes-or-no question, and it is answerable before an offer rather than after an inspection. The clearance figures are federal, published and stable. The route from a given basin to open water is a map exercise. Between them they settle whether the property does the thing it is being bought to do.

The failure mode is specific and expensive: a buyer closes on the house, then discovers the boat has to be berthed at a marina somewhere else, which turns a waterfront premium into a waterfront premium plus a slip fee. That is a question of thirty minutes of homework, and almost nobody does it in advance.

3. These particular numbers have an expiry

Miami-Dade County has a Venetian Causeway Bridge Replacement Project. A replacement changes the clearances, the opening schedule, or both, and it will change them by regulation rather than by announcement — the operative document will be a new entry in 33 CFR 117, not a press release.

So treat the figures above as current on the date at the top of this page and check the source before you rely on them. That is the honest position on any number a federal agency can amend, and it is the reason every figure here carries its citation.

4. What this page does not tell you

It covers the Venetian Causeway, because that is where the constraint is sharpest and where the regulation is unambiguous. It does not yet publish the full clearance table for every bridge between every island basin and open water — that table is being assembled from the same source and will name each bridge, its closed clearance and its opening schedule with the CFR section beside it.

It also does not cover what you are permitted to build at the dock, which is a separate question with four agencies in it, or whether the seawall the dock is attached to meets the municipal standard. Both are being written.

• Buying a waterfront home in Miami — the whole due-diligence sequence, and which authority governs each part
• What these houses have sold for — the county record, island by island
• The six kinds of waterfront — why “no fixed bridges” is the phrase that carries the money
• If a condominium is also on the list — 46 towers from the county record
• Send the boat and the basin — the specific vessel and where you want to keep it