Private Jet from Miami to Treasure Cay

The beach is why the name travels. It runs roughly three and a half miles along the northeastern shore in one long shallow curve, and it lands on regional best beach lists often enough that parties arrive braced for a crowd that is not there. The water off it stays ankle deep a long way out, which makes it a different proposition from a dive island: a party with small children in it is looking at the same water as everyone else. Add water toys if the afternoon stays wet, or a beach picnic if it comes ashore. For a jet this is the easiest kind of day to plan, because the field is a few miles behind the sand and nothing else stands between them. A party that lifts off in the morning is on the beach with the whole afternoon still in front of it, and the car is booked with the flight.

Green Turtle Cay lies about eight miles up the coast and cannot be driven to. The ferry goes from a dock beside the airport, which is the single reason so many Abaco itineraries route through here at all. It is the older half of this corner of the Bahamas: a Loyalist settlement from the 1780s, clapboard houses at New Plymouth, and the turtles that named it still in the shallows around it. A day that starts on the beach and ends over there is an ordinary day rather than an expedition. The cay has its own private jet route from Miami, and it lands on this same field and takes the ferry after. Which of the two a week is built around is a question of where the house is, not of how the flight runs.

South of here the sheltered water runs down to Elbow Cay and the candy striped lighthouse at Hope Town, the most photographed thing in the Abacos and still hand wound with a kerosene burner. It is a different island and a different day, reached by boat from Marsh Harbour around thirty miles south, or by air. Parties who want both ends of the Sea of Abaco in one visit are really asking for two days, and that answer comes back with the quote rather than after the deposit. Both ends have their own jet routes from Miami, Elbow Cay by private jet and Hope Town by private jet, and each of those days ends with a boat still to come. From this field the trip is already over.

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 beach and the marina. That proximity is the whole point of 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 travel with you. Bags on a charter are weighed rather than counted, so say how many sets are coming when you send the date, and the baggage guidance explains why it is a weight and not a number.

Two more cays sit between here and Hope Town and they pull in opposite directions. Man-O-War Cay is the boatbuilding one, quiet and dry, where the Abaco dinghy was developed and where the sail lofts still work. Great Guana Cay is the opposite: seven miles of ocean beach on the Atlantic side and a beach bar that is the reason a lot of boats cross the Sea of Abaco on a Sunday. Both are short legs from the marina here. That is what turns one arrival into island hopping without a second flight. Each has its own page and its own way in; from Treasure Cay they are a boat afternoon, booked with the flight rather than found on the dock.

Not everything here is at the shoreline. There is an inland blue hole in the pine forest behind the settlement, a limestone shaft of dark fresh water in the middle of the trees, around two hundred and fifty feet deep. It is a short drive rather than a boat trip. At the north end of the settlement lie the ruins of the older village, from the Loyalist period that shaped this whole corner of the Bahamas after the American Revolution. Both 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 they are the part of a Treasure Cay day that ground transport actually changes. It is arranged with the flight, and a meet and greet puts the driver at the aircraft rather than at a desk.

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 a place 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 hour instead of fitting around it. On a charter the return hour is yours to move, which is exactly the day this suits. If a boat is meeting you, a dock pickup puts the party alongside instead of at a pier. North and west of the island the water goes the other way and turns to shallow flats, the quiet half of the fishing here and the half that suits a shorter day. Parties book bonefishing and flats access for that, and a yacht transfer covers the run out to something bigger.

A private jet from Miami to Treasure Cay can be the first leg rather than the whole trip. That same aircraft can go on to Grand Bahama, Nassau, Andros or Staniel Cay and the Exumas, which turns one island into a wider Bahamas day. Parties that fly on usually spend a night or two here first, settled and unhurried, and then take the aircraft south. They have cleared the border already, so everything after this is a domestic leg. The full guide sits on the Treasure Cay destination page, the packaged version is the Treasure Cay getaway day trip, the whole island group is the Abacos and the rest of the chain is on the Bahamas destinations page.