Private Plane Charter Miami to Big Major Cay

Almost everyone comes for the swimming pigs, and almost everyone on a scheduled day gets the same forty minutes, because the boat that brought them has another group behind them and a flight to make. On a charter the length of that stop is a number you pick.

An hour if the children have had enough, most of the morning if nobody has. The aircraft is sitting on Staniel Cay with nothing else to do, and the boat is yours rather than shared, so nobody is counting.

What we would say is that the light and the crowd both favour early. Get out there before the day boats from Nassau arrive and the beach is a different place. That is an argument for a particular hour, not for a fixed one, and the hour is still yours.

Big Major Cay is uninhabited. No runway, no pier, no power, and the pigs are the permanent residents. Every visitor arrives on the water whatever brought them across, so the question is only which strip the aircraft uses first. Staniel Cay has one, roughly a mile to the south, and it is the closest thing the chain has to a front door for the pigs.

What the island itself is like, the yacht club, the village, the two settlements, belongs on the Staniel Cay page rather than here. On this route it is the place the wheels touch and the place the boat leaves from.

If your day is built around something other than the pigs, a house, a marina, an onward leg, another strip in the chain may suit it better and the aircraft will use that one instead. It is worth saying so at the enquiry.

The crossing from the strip is minutes rather than a journey, and on a scheduled day it is the part that goes wrong: the flight is late, the boat has gone, and an hour disappears on a dock. Because your landing time is a number we chose rather than one we were given, the boat is booked against it and waits for it.

If the flight moves, the boat moves with it, because both of them were arranged in the same message. It also stays with your party rather than dropping you and leaving. That is what makes a second or third stop possible in the same day.

The nurse sharks at the marina dock on Compass Cay are the second thing parties ask about once the pigs are settled, and they are a short run north in the same boat. On a fixed return there is rarely room for both.

On a charter it is a question of hours: two stops and lunch is a normal day out here, three is possible if you start early. You are not fitting an itinerary around a departure, you are telling us how long the day should be and we set the departure to match.

Send the list of what you want to see when you send the dates. The boat is priced for the time it is out, so knowing the shape of the day in advance is what keeps it from being an afternoon of improvising.

The grotto off Staniel Cay is the cave from the 1965 Bond film of the same name, and it is the one stop on this route that a clock genuinely governs: the water has to be slack to go in comfortably.

That is exactly the kind of thing a chartered aircraft handles well and a schedule handles badly. We can set the departure from Florida so that your boat is there at the right part of the tide rather than at the part that happened to be left over.

Ask for it at the enquiry and the day is built the other way round, from the water back to the take-off. It is the clearest example on this page of what owning the hour is actually worth.

Bitter Guana Cay has a beach full of Northern Bahamian rock iguanas, a protected species, and there is a small aircraft wreck in shallow water off Staniel Cay that most people can snorkel without a tank. Both are near enough to add, and neither is compulsory.

Parties with children usually take the iguanas, parties with a boat crew usually take the wreck, and plenty of parties skip both and stay in the water where they are. There is nobody else in the group to compromise with.

The two of them have pages of their own for what they actually are: Bitter Guana Cay and the wrecks further north at Norman's Cay. Here they are simply two more things the afternoon can hold if you want them.

When the aircraft carries one party, what goes in the back is a conversation about weight rather than a rule about how many bags each person gets. Snorkels and fins for everyone, a cooler for the boat, rods, a case of something for the house: all of it travels, within the payload for the day.

Because nobody else is on board, the trade is between your own passengers and your own load. The baggage guidance sets out how that works. Anything larger than luggage is a different service to the same strip, and that is island logistics rather than a charter with extra bags.

The pigs are often the first stop rather than the whole trip, and clearing in on the way makes that simple: every leg after it is domestic. An aircraft that belongs to you for the day can string those legs together in any order.

George Town and the rest of Exuma, Little Farmer's Cay, Norman's Cay and the strips between them all take the same type, and none of them require going back to a hub first. That is the shape of an island hopping day rather than a return ticket.

If the trip finishes somewhere other than where it started, say so at the enquiry. The aircraft can lift from a different strip than the one it landed on, and a Big Major Cay getaway day trip is often the first half of something longer.