Private Jet from Miami to Key Largo

Most parties come for the water before anything else. The only living barrier coral reef in the continental United States lies a few miles off the ocean side, and in places it is shallow enough that somebody with a mask sees as much as a diver does. John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park covers about seventy nautical square miles of it and opened in 1963 as the first undersea park in the country. Molasses Reef, southeast of the island, is a sanctuary preservation area and one of the most visited stretches of coral in the Upper Keys. The boats leave on a schedule of their own, and that is the one part of the day a charter does not bend. Say how many are swimming when you send the date and the flight is planned around the departure rather than the other way round.

The other half of the diving reputation here sits well below snorkelling depth. The Spiegel Grove, a naval landing ship, was put down off Key Largo in 2002 as an artificial reef and was at the time the largest vessel ever deliberately sunk for the purpose. She lies in seventy to a hundred and thirty feet, which makes her a certified diver's day rather than a stop on a snorkel trip. Hurricane Dennis rolled her upright in 2005 and she has sat that way since. That is the practical difference between the two halves of the diving. The reef is a morning anyone can join; the wreck is a certification, a briefing and a plan. A party that wants both in one day says so with the date rather than at the dock.

Turn the other way and the water goes shallow and still. Blackwater Sound and Buttonwood Sound sit behind the island, and beyond them is the mangrove edge of the Everglades. This is the half people miss entirely when they drive down, because the highway keeps the ocean on one side and the bay behind a wall of mangrove. It is also the calm side when the ocean is running a chop, which matters to a boat day rather than to the flight. It is worked by skiff and it is slow: water a shallow boat would take three hours to cross. Which half of the island your day is on is worth saying at the enquiry, because it decides the hour the aircraft should land.

Key Largo has two fisheries within a few minutes of each other: the flats and channels of Florida Bay on the back side, blue water off the reef on the front. That is why parties book bonefishing and flats access and a full offshore day from the same arrival rather than choosing between them. Rods and gear travel within the payload for the aircraft on the day, and they are weighed with the party rather than counted against a rule. Naming them at the enquiry is what makes them easy to plan for. Further down the chain the reputation gets louder still, and Islamorada is twenty miles south by road, which on this route means it is already on the way in from the airfield.

Not everything here is under water. The African Queen, the 1912 steam launch from the Bogart film, is moored at mile marker 100 and still runs canal cruises under her own steam. She has been on the National Register of Historic Places since February 1992, which makes her one of the few boats in the country listed the way a building is. The cruises run about an hour and a half out through the Port Largo canals and into the sound, which makes them the one thing on this island that needs no gear at all. Mile marker 100 is also the middle of the island's own strip of bars and fish houses, and it is the address most guests give when they want the car standing there. It is the number the drive up from the airfield is measured to.

The top of Key Largo is a private club with its own harbour, its own village and its own airfield, and it is reached by Card Sound Road rather than by the Eighteen Mile Stretch. That airfield is the reason this route works the way it does. It is the only runway on the island, it is not open to general use, and so the aircraft everybody else arrives on lands at Marathon instead. Nothing about that is promised differently here. The north end also feels like a separate place from the rest of the island, and a party staying up there can lose forty minutes to the drive from anywhere else on Key Largo. Tell us where you are staying and the ground leg is built to it rather than to the middle.

Key Largo carries everything from adults only all inclusive properties to family resorts and marina hotels, spread along both shores between mile marker 107 and 91. Which side you are on decides the day more than the name over the door: sunrise and the reef on the ocean side, sunset and flat water on the bay side. Most of them sit on their own water, so a resort transfer is the same flight with a different arrangement at the end of it. A room on the bay side and a dive booked on the ocean side is a normal enough combination, and it is the kind of thing worth saying with the date: it moves where the car goes, not whether it is there.

Landing at Marathon puts you in the middle of the chain rather than at the top of the road, which is why a Key Largo arrival and a run further down are the same flight. Islamorada is on the way in, and Key West is the far end of the same highway. Two or three islands in one booking is island hopping, and the wider chain is set out across the Florida Keys jet routes. An overnight changes the baggage rather than the route. Freight moves the same way on island logistics. The Key Largo destination page sets out the island itself, and the Key Largo getaway day trip is the same hours put together as one booking. Anything else goes to custom requests.