Helicopter from Miami to Sand Key

Almost everybody comes for the water first. Sand Key is a spur and groove reef, ridges of coral with lanes of clean sand between them, and that shape is why it reads so well from just under the surface.

The spurs come up to around five feet and the grooves run to twenty, so a snorkeller and a diver in the same party are looking at the same reef from different depths. Further out the south side steps down to sixty five feet and to ninety in spots, which is what the dive groups come for.

Fire coral runs through several sections of it, and the north west side is coral heads and broken rubble close to the lagoon. Worth knowing on a first visit, before anybody picks a lane to swim.

Masks, fins and tanks travel with the party, within the payload for the day, so say how many are swimming and who is on tanks when you send the date. Nobody is put in a group with strangers and nobody waits for a second boatload.

The light is the only thing standing above water out here, and it is older than most of Key West. A sixty foot brick tower went up in 1827; the Great Havana Hurricane of 1846 took the tower, the keeper's house and most of the island with it.

What replaced it in 1853 is what you see now: a square iron skeleton on screwpiles, red with black trim, built open so the sea goes through it instead of against it. It carried the first Fresnel lens of its order in Florida and it was automated in 1938. Pieces of the original brick tower still lie in the shallows underneath.

It is not open to the public and there is nothing to visit on it, which is exactly why it photographs better from the air than from a boat deck.

The Spanish called it Cayos Arena, Sand Island, and the name is the honest one: the shape of the place moves with the weather. On the right tide there is open sand in the middle of the sea, and on the wrong one there is none.

That is the single part of a day out here set by the sea rather than by the aircraft, so it decides the hour rather than the other way round. Tell us at the enquiry if the sand is the point and the departure time gets built around the water instead of your morning.

Add water toys if the party wants the afternoon on the water rather than standing in it, or a boat pickup if something is meeting you out there.

There is no bar, no dock and no shade out here, which is the appeal and also the thing to plan for. A beach picnic goes out with the party rather than being found on arrival.

Parties who want a table rather than a hull book a fly and dine day back up the line instead, and anything outside the usual list goes to custom requests. Either way it is settled with the flight, because nothing can be arranged once you are seven miles offshore.

Sand Key sits inside a Sanctuary Preservation Area, so the rules here are narrower than in open water: mooring buoys instead of anchoring, no collecting, and nobody standing on the coral, living or dead.

Fishing is closed in these zones with one exception, and Sand Key is that exception: catch and release trolling is allowed here and in only a handful of the seventeen protected areas along the tract. Anything else with a rod belongs on the flats behind the chain, which is a bonefishing and flats day or a full fishing day rather than an afternoon on the reef.

Sand Key is the outermost of three protected reefs sitting almost in a row, and the other two are close enough to take in on the same circuit. Rock Key lies just inside it and Eastern Dry Rocks just beyond that, both shallower and both quieter.

From the air the three read as one reef line with channels cut through it, and the channels are what the names come from. Parties who have already done Sand Key usually ask for one of the other two on the second visit rather than a different part of the Keys.

The nearest town is seven miles back up the line, and it is the reason a half day out here turns into a whole one. Key West holds the harbour, Old Town, Duval Street and the Southernmost Point, and the airport sits on the ocean side of it.

Most parties treat the two as one day: the reef in the morning while the light is behind them, then the town for the afternoon. The Key West escape is the packaged version of exactly that, and Key West by helicopter is the route if the town is the whole point.

Helicopter rides Miami Sand Key also work as the first half rather than the whole day. The Dry Tortugas lie about seventy miles further west with Fort Jefferson standing on Garden Key, and the same aircraft carries on to Little Palm Island or Marathon on the way home.

That is what turns one reef into island hopping or a wider Florida Keys day. What goes in the back is weighed with the party rather than counted against a rule, and the baggage guidance sets out how that works. Anything larger than luggage is a different service altogether, and that is island logistics.

The full guide to the place sits on the Sand Key destination page, the packaged version is the Sand Key day trip and the rest of the chain is on the Florida Keys destinations page.