Helicopter from Miami to Staniel Cay

This is what most parties come for. The pigs live on Big Major Cay, which is uninhabited and has nowhere to put an aircraft down, so there is no version of the day where you arrive next to them. You come in at Staniel Cay and a boat covers the rest in a few minutes. They are not folklore either. The accepted account is that people from Staniel Cay put them on the next cay over in the early 1990s, when this was a farming community and the smell was a complaint rather than an attraction. That is the whole reason they live where they live. Say at the enquiry that the day is about the pigs. It changes nothing about the flight and everything about the morning, because the boat is then booked to meet the aircraft instead of found on the dock. A beach picnic on one of the sandbars afterwards is the usual second half.

The grotto is a limestone cave standing in the water off the cay, open to the sky through holes in its roof, and it is why a good part of the world knows this name at all. The Bond crew shot Thunderball here in 1964 and the yacht club put them up while they did it. You swim in. That is worth knowing before the date is fixed, because the entrance works at slack water rather than whenever the boat turns up, and the current through it decides the hour. It is the one item on the day that the sea schedules instead of you. Anybody who can snorkel can do it, so it runs together with the pigs on a single trip out from the dock. Add water toys if the afternoon is meant to stay on the water.

Compass Cay lies about eight miles north, roughly midway up the Exuma chain, and the nurse sharks at its marina dock are the second best known encounter in these islands after the pigs. Eight miles is the number that matters. It turns a stop into half a day, so a party that wants the sharks as well as the grotto plans the boat around them rather than adding them on at the end. Nurse sharks are harmless to swimmers and the water at the dock is shallow, so children end up in it more often than anyone expects. It is also where a single boat day starts to run long. If the sharks are the reason for the trip, say so, and the hour the helicopter lifts off again is planned against the tide and the light instead of against a wish.

The yacht club opened in 1956 and it is the reason this became a place people go rather than a place people pass. It runs 14 seaside bungalows and a marina of 18 slips, with a clubhouse and bar that has been the island's front room for close to seventy years. The village around it is small enough to cross on foot and most people take a golf cart anyway. There is no cash machine here. US dollars are taken everywhere and cards work at the club with a fee on top, so the practical answer is to arrive with cash for the day. For a party coming in by air this is the argument for finishing on the water rather than where you landed: the marina is where the boats are. Ask for ground transport at the enquiry and a cart is waiting when the door opens. A boat lying off gets met directly instead, on a yacht transfer.

The cay is uninhabited and holds a protected colony of Bahamian rock iguanas, which come down to the beach as boats arrive. It is a short run south and it is the quiet third item on most boat days out here. The cay is protected, so this is a look rather than a handling encounter, and the pale cliffs behind the beach are why it photographs the way it does. Parties with children usually rate it above the sharks. It lies in the opposite direction from Compass Cay, which is the practical point: north and south are two different boat days out of the same dock rather than one long one. Which of them your hours ashore allow is worth settling before the date is fixed.

There is a small aircraft lying in clear shallow water a short way from where you come in. It went down during the drug running years of the 1970s and it has been sitting on white sand in a few feet of water ever since. It is a five minute stop rather than an outing, and it is the one that surprises people, because the water is clear enough that the wreck reads from the surface without a mask. On a day already built around the grotto it costs nothing to include, and the chain has more than one of them: the best known lies further north off Norman's Cay.

Pipe Creek is the run of shallow water and small cays north of here, and its sandbars are the reason the Exumas look the way they do from the air. At low water the sand comes up out of the shallows and you can stand a long way from anything. Low water decides the hour, not the one you would prefer. It moves through the month, so a day built around the sandbars is planned against the tide rather than against a clock. The grotto has the same constraint and the two do not always fall on the same afternoon. From the air this is also the best stretch of the whole crossing, and it is the last thing you see before the door opens. A beach picnic out here is the usual way parties spend the middle of the day, and water toys turn it into an afternoon.

Helicopter rides Miami Staniel Cay also work as the middle of a longer day, not the whole of it. The cay sits halfway down the chain, so the aircraft carries on north to Nassau, Harbour Island and Andros, or further down the chain into Exuma. That turns one cay into island hopping or a wider Bahamas day. Staying over changes the baggage, not the route, and the bungalows at the yacht club are why many of these flights turn into two days. The baggage guidance sets out what goes in the back. A date that has to look like something is where the catering on board and the extras come in. Anything larger than luggage is island logistics. The full island guide is on the Staniel Cay destination page, the packaged version is the Staniel Cay getaway day trip and the chain is on the Bahamas destinations page.