Seaplane from Miami to West Palm Beach

The island is a separate town from the city on the mainland and the distance between them is a bridge rather than a drive. That is the single thing most guests get wrong before they come. Worth Avenue runs four blocks from the lagoon to the ocean, with the vias running off it, small courtyards behind archways that most people walk past without noticing. Via Mizner, laid out by Addison Mizner in 1923, is the best known. At the north end of the island stands Whitehall, the house Henry Flagler finished in 1902 and now the Flagler Museum, which is the reason the railway and the resort town exist at all. The ocean beaches are on the far side of the island and the lagoon side carries the docks. Guests who want a table rather than a boat book a fly and dine day and anything outside the usual list goes to custom requests.

The Lake Worth Lagoon is an estuary about twenty miles long, held between the mainland and the barrier island and open to the Atlantic at the Palm Beach Inlet. It is the sheltered water that makes a float arrival sensible here. Peanut Island sits in the middle of that opening: 79 acres of spoil left over from cutting the inlet in 1918, with a swimming beach and a snorkel lagoon on the lee side. Under the trees is the fallout shelter the Navy built for President Kennedy at the height of the Cold War, a buried hut behind a forty foot tunnel, either the oddest thing on the island or the only thing worth walking to. Boats anchor off the sand bar on the south side at the weekend. That is where a beach picnic goes and where water toys earn their place, or a dock pickup if a boat is meeting you at the marina.

The mainland side is a working downtown rather than a resort strip, so a day here can be a meeting in the morning and a table in the evening without either one feeling out of place. Clematis Street runs five blocks inland from Flagler Drive to Rosemary Avenue and Rosemary Square sits just south of that far end. Flagler Drive follows the lagoon the whole length of the city, so the water is in sight from most of it and the Norton Museum of Art is a short ride south of the centre. Ground is the part worth arranging in advance rather than at the dock. A car waiting or a meet and greet turns a set-down into an arrival and catering on board covers the leg itself.

The best known piece of water in the county is not offshore. It is the shallow ground under the Blue Heron Bridge at Phil Foster Park in Riviera Beach, at the north end of the lagoon. More than 300 species have been recorded there and most of it is in a few feet of water, so divers with a lifetime of reef behind them keep coming back to a snorkel trail beside a road bridge. The catch is the tide: it is worth doing within about an hour either side of high water and close to unusable outside that window. That is a real constraint on a day trip rather than a detail, because the high water falls about fifty minutes later each day and will not negotiate with your boarding time. Say if the party wants it and the departure is built around the water .

Manatees do not tolerate cold water. When the lagoon drops below about 68 degrees they crowd into the warm outflow of the power station on the Riviera Beach side, sometimes in the hundreds. The viewing centre on North Flagler Drive is built for exactly that and it is free. The season runs from the middle of November to the end of March and the animals turn up on the cold days rather than the pretty ones, which is the opposite of how most people plan a Florida trip. It is a short ride from the water and it pairs with the bridge at the other end of the same lagoon, so a winter morning can honestly hold both.

The continental shelf is narrower off Palm Beach County than anywhere else on the North American coast, so the Gulf Stream runs closer to the mainland here than it does anywhere north or south of it. That is why the diving off this stretch is drift diving: you go in, the current carries you along the reef line and the boat follows the bubbles. It is also why the fishing grounds are a short run out rather than an hour. Grand Bahama lies almost due east of here rather than to the south east, so the crossing to that island is shorter from here than it is from Miami. For Bimini it is the other way round. Gear travels within the payload for the aircraft on the day, the same way it does on a fishing day by seaplane.

Sixteen miles inland at Wellington the winter equestrian season runs about thirteen weeks from the turn of the year to the end of March and it fills the county's hotels for the whole of it. The boat show on Flagler Drive lands at the end of the same window, in late March, on the waterfront in the middle of town. Those are the weeks when the road up from Miami is at its worst and when a flight is worth the most it is ever worth on this route. They are also the weeks when the aircraft has to be held early rather than asked for late. A milestone or a proposal planned inside that window is worth naming when you send the date.

The Lake Trail is a paved path along the lagoon shore, about five and a half miles of it and it is the best thing on the island that costs nothing. It starts at Lakeside Park beside the town docks, runs north past the backs of the houses and the Flagler Museum and finishes just beyond the Sailfish Club at the top of the island. The water is on your left the whole way and the city on the mainland is on the other side of it. Bicycles are rented on the island rather than carried on the aircraft. Most parties ride it one way and take a car back, which is worth arranging before you land rather than at the dock.

A seaplane charter Miami to West Palm Beach also works as the first leg, not the whole day. The same aircraft carries on east to Harbour Island and the rest of the Bahamas and south to Key West. That turns one coastal hop into island hopping or a wider Bahamas day. A second leg across the Gulf Stream turns a domestic day into an international one, so it is named when the date is sent. If a yacht is meeting you, the aircraft can set the party down alongside instead of at a pier. That is a yacht transfer, on this coast the reason a good number of these flights happen. The full city guide is on the West Palm Beach destination page, the packaged version is the West Palm Beach getaway day trip and the flights that start there rather than end there are on the seaplane charter from West Palm Beach page.