Bluefields Bay is the large natural lagoon that the town looks out over — several kilometres of open water enclosed by low-lying jungle coast, with Rama Cay and other islands scattered in it. The bay is not a beach destination in the conventional sense: the town waterfront is a working dock area rather than a swimming beach, and the lagoon water itself is murky from river sediment. What the bay offers is a working Caribbean waterscape — fishing boats, water taxis heading to Rama Cay and Pearl Lagoon, the occasional coastal freighter — and the particular sensation of a town that has its back to the land and its face to the water.
Boat trips on the bay are available from the main dock and from smaller jetties along the waterfront. The trip to Rama Cay takes about 30 minutes; Pearl Lagoon, further north, is an hour or more. For swimming and beaches, the Corn Islands (accessed by plane or boat) are the better option, but the bay itself is where Bluefields life happens — market boats, music drifting across the water, pelicans working the surface at dawn. The town is named after the Dutch pirate Blauwveld, who sheltered in this bay in the 17th century; the sheltering quality of the water is as obvious now as it would have been then.