Helicopter from Miami to Acklins

Fishing is why almost everybody comes and on Acklins it is very nearly the only reason anybody has ever built a week around. The flats inside the lagoon run for miles and they are among the least worked water of their kind anywhere in the Bahamas. The scale is the whole argument.

You can wade a long way out and still be in water no deeper than your knees, so a skiff is a way of covering ground rather than a way of reaching fish. Anglers who have fished the better known islands come this far for water nobody has walked over that week.

Guides work out of the settlements along the inner shore. Say how many are fishing and whether anyone is walking rather than poling when you send the dates, and name the rods with the rest of the bags: they travel within the payload for the aircraft on the day. The booked version is bonefishing and flats access or a full fishing day.

Acklins, Long Cay, Castle Island and Crooked Island curve around one lagoon, and that lagoon is the Bight of Acklins. The water in it stays around knee height even five miles from any shore. Coming in low is the way to see it.

From a few hundred feet the bight reads as one pale sheet with the darker channels cut through it and the banks standing dry where the tide has left them, and that is the part of this route people photograph out of the window.

From a boat the same water is slow going, which is a large part of why the islands around it have stayed as quiet as they have.

The tide decides the hour here rather than the aircraft. At low water the banks stand dry in the middle of the lagoon and the channels read as dark lines drawn between them, and a boat afternoon is planned around that rather than around lunch. It is the one part of an Acklins day that is set by the sea.

Acklins is one of the small group of southeastern Bahamian islands where cascarilla grows. The bark has been cut here and shipped out since the early 1900s and it goes to Italy, where it flavours Campari. The United Kingdom, France, Germany and the United States take it too.

It is the one thing on the island that is genuinely hard to find anywhere else, and it is still cut by hand by families in the settlements. Ask about it while you are there rather than looking for somewhere to be shown it: there is no visitor centre and there never has been.

The trade is the reason the island reads the way it does from the air. The cut tracks run back off the settlements into low scrub rather than into anything built, and what looks like empty bush from a few hundred feet is working ground that has paid for itself for a hundred years.

Around six hundred and ninety people live on a hundred and fifty square miles. Spring Point is the administrative centre, Salina Point sits at the southern end and is the larger of the two, and between them lie Snug Corner, Chesters, Delectable Bay, Masons Bay, Hard Hill and Lovely Bay, most of them a handful of families each.

There is no resort strip and no supermarket to drive to. What there is, is a few small lodges, somewhere to eat in most settlements and people who know exactly where the fish were this week.

Ground transport on an island this shape means a vehicle arranged in advance rather than one waiting at a rank, and provisions are worth naming when you book: catering and a private chef both travel with the aircraft.

The lighthouse stands on Castle Island off the southern tip of Acklins, about five miles from Salina Point, and it went up in the 1860s to mark the passage below the island. Before that the cay was a useful place to sit and watch the shipping that came through it, and it was used for exactly that.

It is unmanned now and reaching it means a boat rather than a road, which is a short run from the southern settlements and one of the few fixed things on the island to go out and look at.

The passage it marks is the reason it is there. Shipping has used the water below Acklins for as long as there has been shipping in this part of the Bahamas, and the tower still stands over the same line. Ask for a boat with the extras and it is a morning rather than an expedition.

The beach at Pompey Bay, south of Spring Point, carries one of the largest Lucayan settlement sites in the Bahamas. The people who lived there were on this island long before the cotton and long before the bark, and the sites have been dug over by archaeologists rather than built on. The written history after that is short and hard.

American Loyalists arrived in the late 1780s and set up more than forty cotton plantations worked by over a thousand enslaved people. When cotton failed the island lived on sponge diving, and when synthetic sponge arrived it lived on the sea and on small farms, which is roughly where it still is.

What that leaves is an island with almost nothing built on it and a great deal of shoreline. The beach itself is long, pale and usually empty, and a beach picnic here is genuinely a beach nobody else is on rather than a quiet corner of a busy one.

East of Acklins lie the Plana Cays, uninhabited and protected as a reserve for endangered iguanas and for hutias, the only land mammal native to the Bahamas. Nobody lives there and nothing is built there. They are minutes away by air and a real undertaking by boat, which is the shape of most things at this end of the country.

A beach picnic on an empty shore is arranged with the flight, a party that wants the afternoon on the water adds water toys, and if a boat is meeting you a dock pickup is set up the same way. Anything outside the usual list goes to custom requests.

Nothing on the cays is landed on and nothing is disturbed: they are a reserve and they are treated as one. What they are worth is the look at them on the way past, which is a reason to fly the long way round rather than the direct line, and the crew will if you ask.

A helicopter down here also works as one leg rather than the whole trip. Crooked Island lies twenty two nautical miles across the bight and the same aircraft carries on to Long Island, Rum Cay, San Salvador, Cat Island or Great Inagua in the far south.

That is what turns one island into island hopping, and helicopter rides Miami Acklins are usually booked exactly that way: two or three of the southern islands in one trip rather than one of them twice.

Extra nights change the baggage rather than the routing, and what goes in the back is weighed with the party rather than counted against a rule, as the baggage guidance sets out.

If a yacht is meeting you, that is a yacht transfer and it is arranged with the flight rather than found on the day. Anything larger than luggage is a different service altogether, and that is island logistics.

The full island guide sits on the Acklins destination page, the packaged version is the Acklins getaway and the rest of the chain is on the Bahamas destinations page.