Helicopter from Miami to Rum Cay

Divers know this island because of a British warship. HMS Conqueror carried a hundred and one guns, came out of a Devon yard in 1855 and went onto Sumner Point Reef six years later. Nobody moved her.

She lies in around thirty feet, which is the useful part: the snorkellers in the party and the divers in it are looking at the same wreck from different depths rather than splitting into two days. Guns, chain and the shaft are still there to make out. She belongs to the Bahamian government, so everything stays where it is and comes home as photographs.

Say when you send the date whether anyone is on tanks. On an island this size the boat is arranged long before the morning it is needed.

The island sits on the lip of the shelf. Northeast of it the bottom goes from wadeable to something near three thousand feet, and that edge is the second reason people come.

The wall the island is known for is called the Grand Canyon: a sixty foot face close enough to the surface to work on one tank, with tunnels and steep breaks along the same run of reef.

What brings divers back is the visibility rather than any single thing to look at. From the air the same edge is a line in the colour, and the approach runs along it. It is the part of the crossing people photograph without being told to.

One place on Rum Cay is inhabited and nearly everybody is in it. Port Nelson is a short grid of houses under coconut palms with two shops, a couple of restaurants and street signs cut into the outline of the island itself. Its square carries the name of Sir Milo Butler, the first Bahamian Governor-General, who was born here.

That is the measure of what this island used to be: more than a thousand people in the eighteen hundreds, shipping salt, pineapples and sisal to England and Canada, until the hurricane of 1926 took the salt ponds out and the pineapple trade with them. Most of the island left for Nassau and never came back.

What is left is a kind of quiet that is getting hard to find in the Bahamas. Parties who want a table rather than a boat book a fly and dine day and anything outside the usual list goes to custom requests.

Long before any European name, the Lucayans called this island Mamana, and their work is still on the rock at Hartford Cave in the northwest. It is described as perhaps the largest display of Lucayan-Arawak carving anywhere in the Bahamas.

Columbus gave the island the name Santa Maria de la Concepcion and it is widely held to be where he came ashore the second time in 1492, the day after San Salvador. The name it answers to now is younger and a good deal less grand: a ship is said to have put a cargo of rum onto the reef here.

The north coast takes Atlantic swell that most of these islands never see, and it puts it onto beaches with nobody standing on them. Surf is not what the Bahamas are for, which is exactly why the people who know about this coast keep coming back to it.

It depends on what the ocean is doing that week, so it belongs in the message with the date rather than in a question on arrival. A board travels like any other bag: it is weighed with the party on the day rather than counted against an allowance.

The pond that once paid for this island is a bonefish flat now. The cement walls of its old entrance are still lying inside it where the 1926 hurricane put them, which tells you as much about that storm as any account of it.

Parties book bonefishing and flats access here or a full fishing day, and the deep water off the northeast corner is close enough that one day can hold both ends of it. Rods and gear travel, within what the aircraft is carrying that day.

Conception Island lies about twenty nautical miles west and nobody lives there. It is a national park, and it is the island people have in mind when they say the Bahamas still has empty places left.

From Rum Cay it is a boat morning rather than a second flight, and it is where a beach picnic goes. Add water toys if the afternoon belongs on the water rather than on the sand, or a dock pickup if a boat is meeting the party off Port Nelson.

Helicopter rides Miami Rum Cay also work as one leg rather than the whole trip. The same aircraft carries on to San Salvador, Long Island, Cat Island, Crooked Island or Acklins. That is what turns one island into island hopping or a wider Bahamas day.

A night ashore changes the baggage rather than the route, and on a crossing this long it is worth raising early. A date that has to look like something is where the catering on board and the rest of the extras come in, and what goes in the back is weighed with the party rather than counted against a rule. The baggage guidance sets out how that works.

If a yacht is meeting you, that is a yacht transfer and it is arranged with the flight rather than found on the day. It matters more here than most places: the marina at Sumner Point has not been in service since it was damaged around 2010.

Anything larger than luggage is a different service altogether, and that is island logistics. The full island guide sits on the Rum Cay destination page, the packaged version is the Rum Cay getaway day trip and the rest of the chain is on the Bahamas destinations page.