Helicopter from Miami to Ragged Island

The flats are why almost everybody comes this far. Every account of the Ragged Island Range agrees on the same thing: bonefish over the sand in a concentration that no flat with a road behind it can match, and the same water holding permit and mature tarpon rather than only the small stuff.

Fish of fifteen pounds are on record here, permit over twenty five and tarpon over eighty. The reason is simply that nobody is on it. The whole district counts fewer people than a single hotel further north, and no fleet of skiffs is waiting to be booked when you land.

That is why parties arrange bonefishing and flats access or a full fishing day before they leave Florida. Rods and gear travel within the payload for the aircraft on the day, and on a leg this long that payload is worth naming when you send the date.

Hog Cay lies just north of Ragged Island and is where cruising boats gather. Middle Pen Bay and Lobster Hole Point both shelter from the prevailing easterlies with good holding in sand close in, which in a chain this exposed is the whole reason a boat stops there rather than somewhere else.

On the beach north of Lobster Hole Point there is a covered gathering place with tables, chairs and two fire pits, built and kept up by people from Duncan Town. Every February the island holds a Valentine's Day gathering there, which is about as close as the Ragged Islands come to a season.

If a boat is meeting your party, say so at the enquiry: the rendezvous is planned with the flight rather than worked out on the day. A yacht transfer is the usual shape of that, and water toys travel with you if the afternoon is meant to be spent in the water.

Duncan Town is the only settlement in the Jumentos and the Ragged Islands, named after the man who opened the salt ponds in the late nineteenth century. Salt was the industry here and it peaked in the 1930s, after which people left for islands with more work on them.

What is left is a harbour, a lighthouse and the ponds, and families still cut salt from their own plots. Three denominations share the one church. Nearly every house is placed so that it looks at the sea, which tells you most of what you need to know about the place.

Hurricane Irma came straight over the settlement on 8 September 2017 and the island was evacuated. The rebuild went in a direction nowhere else in the country had gone: a solar field started in December 2019, sized to carry at least ninety percent of the island's power.

The Jumentos and the Ragged Island Range are one crescent of more than a hundred cays running roughly a hundred and ten miles, from below the Exumas down to Little Ragged Island at the bottom. Raccoon Cay, Double-Breasted Cay and Hog Cay are the names that come up most, and almost all of them are empty.

There is essentially nothing built along it: no fuel, no chandlery, no provisioning worth the word. That is why cruising boats treat the chain as an expedition rather than a stop, and it is also why it still looks the way it does.

From the air it is a different proposition, because the hour that a boat spends between two cays is a minute here. That is where a beach picnic goes, on sand that nobody else reached that morning.

Flamingo Cay sits partway up the chain and carries resident birds. The watering holes on it hold the small shrimp that give flamingos their colour in the first place, and it is one of the few names in the Jumentos that people outside the Bahamas recognise.

Getting there by boat from Ragged Island is a run of some hours. In the air it is minutes, which is the whole argument for coming down here by helicopter rather than sailing in: the chain stops being a passage and becomes a set of places you pick from.

Nothing on the cay is set up for visitors, because nobody lives there to set it up. There is no landing stage, no shade built for anyone and no water, so a stop here is planned with what the aircraft carries rather than with what is waiting. That is the trade the whole chain asks for and the reason it still looks like this.

The flats are shallow and the water beside them is not. Grouper, snapper, barracuda, tuna and kingfish are all taken off the Ragged Islands, so a party that wants a rod bent rather than a fish stalked has that inside the same day.

Nothing about it is organised the way it is further north. There is no fleet waiting and no counter to book at, so whatever the day needs is arranged before you leave Florida through custom requests rather than found on arrival.

The two kinds of water sit beside each other here, which is the part that surprises people. A morning stalking fish in a foot of water and an afternoon with a line down in several hundred feet are the same day and the same boat, because the edge of the bank runs the length of the range rather than lying somewhere offshore.

Ragged Islanders build boats. Sloops, booms and masts are made on the island and raced at regattas, which in the Bahamas is serious business rather than a hobby, and it is the other thing the place is known for besides salt and bonefish.

On Pigeon Cay there is a memorial cross to a bishop who died in 1904, which gives some idea of how long people have been working this water. Forty four residents at the last count is a small number to carry that much history.

A regatta is a date rather than an attraction, which makes it one of the few fixed points in the year down here. If that is what the trip is built around, the date decides the flight rather than the other way round, and it is worth naming at the enquiry: beds on the island are counted in handfuls and they go first.

A helicopter charter Miami to Ragged Island also works as one leg of something longer rather than as the whole trip. North of the Jumentos the same aircraft reaches George Town, Long Island, Black Point and Staniel Cay and the Exumas, and further south again Great Inagua.

That is what turns one island into island hopping or a wider Bahamas trip. Because the clearance stop is already in the plan on the way down, adding a night in the Exumas usually costs less time than it sounds.

The full island guide sits on the Ragged Island destination page and the rest of the chain is on the Bahamas destinations page.