Helicopter from Miami to Treasure Cay

The beach is why the name travels. It runs about three miles along the north eastern shore in one long shallow curve, and it lands on enough best-of lists in the region that parties arrive braced for crowds. It is not crowded. The water off it stays shin deep a long way out, which makes it a different proposition from a dive island: a group with children in it is looking at the same water as everybody else. Add water toys if the afternoon stays wet, or a beach picnic if it comes ashore. From the air the whole curve is visible on the way in, and it is what people photograph before they have even landed. Say at the enquiry that the day is built around the sand, and the hours are set around the light rather than around a timetable.

Green Turtle Cay lies about eight miles up the coast and no road reaches it. The ferry runs from a dock beside the airport, which is the single reason so many Abaco itineraries pass through here at all. It is the older half of this corner of the Bahamas. New Plymouth is a Loyalist settlement from the 1780s, clapboard houses on a grid, and the turtles the cay is named for are still in the shallows around it. A day that starts on the sand and ends over there is an ordinary day here, not an expedition. From a helicopter on the way in, the cay and the channel between it and the mainland read as one piece of water. If crossing over is part of the plan, say so with the dates: it changes the hours you want rather than the route.

South of here the sheltered water runs down to Elbow Cay and the candy striped lighthouse at Hope Town, the most photographed object in the Abacos and still hand wound, still burning kerosene. It is a different island and a different day, reached by boat from Marsh Harbour or from the air. A party that wants both ends of the Sea of Abaco inside one visit is really asking for two days, and the honest version of that comes back with the quote rather than after the deposit. Where it does fit into a single day is overhead. A scenic flight down the cays covers in twenty minutes what a chain of ferries spends an afternoon on, and from low altitude the reef line outside the cays is the part nobody expects.

The championship course here was laid out by Dick Wilson, the architect behind several of the Florida courses people fly down from. It sits within a few minutes of both the sand and the marina. That closeness is the whole argument for it on a short trip. Nothing has to be arranged between the round and the water, which is unusual in the islands and the reason a golf getaway works here as a day rather than a week. Clubs count against the payload like any other gear, so say how many bags are travelling when you send the date. The baggage guidance explains why it is a weight and not a count.

Two more cays sit between here and Hope Town and they pull in opposite directions. Man-O-War Cay is the boatbuilding one: dry, quiet, the place the Abaco dinghy was developed and where the sail lofts still work. Great Guana Cay goes the other way entirely. Seven miles of ocean beach on the Atlantic side and a beach bar that is the reason a great many boats cross the Sea of Abaco on a Sunday. Neither has its own page here yet, so both are named rather than linked. Both are short legs from Treasure Cay by water or by air, and that is what turns one arrival into island hopping. Staying over changes the baggage rather than the route.

Not everything here is at the shoreline. An inland blue hole sits in the pine forest behind the settlement, a limestone shaft of dark fresh water said to run about two hundred and fifty feet down. It is a short drive rather than a boat trip. At the north end lie the ruins of the older village, from the Loyalist period that shaped this whole corner of the Bahamas after the American Revolution. Between them they are the reason a party that has done the beach twice still finds a third day here. Neither needs a boat and both need a car, so this is the part of an Abaco day that ground transport actually changes. On an island where the settlements sit thirty miles apart, that is worth arranging with the flight.

The marina behind the beach is a deep water basin with well over a hundred slips, big enough to be treated as a base for a week on the water rather than somewhere to tie up for an afternoon. It has held Bahamian blue marlin records. That is a full day on a boat rather than a stop, so it sets the return leg instead of fitting around it. Rods and gear travel within the payload for the aircraft on the day, and where a boat is meeting the party a dock pickup is arranged alongside the flight. North and west of the island the water goes the other way and turns to shallow flats, which is the quiet half of the fishing here and the half that suits a shorter day. Parties book bonefishing and flats access for exactly that reason.

Helicopter rides Miami Treasure Cay also work as a first leg rather than the whole day. Abaco is the northern end of the archipelago, and the same aircraft carries on south and east to Harbour Island, Nassau, Andros or Staniel Cay and the Exumas. That is what turns one island into a wider Bahamas day, or into a fly and dine evening somewhere else entirely. Grand Bahama lies back towards Florida on the way home. The full island guide sits on the Treasure Cay destination page, the rest of the chain is on the Bahamas destinations page, and anything that has to travel without you moves as island logistics.