Small Plane Flights from Miami to Crooked Island

Colonel Hill is the public field and the island's administrative centre, and the strip runs east to west along the ridge above it: 3,500 feet of asphalt, identifiers CRI and MYCI, a few feet above the sea. The terminal is one building.

What is not inside it is a border desk, and that single fact shapes the whole route: the clearance into the Bahamas has already happened by the time you get here, so the arrival is a domestic one and you are off the apron in minutes.

From here the government offices, the clinic and the shops are a short drive, and so are most of the houses along the north coast.

The northwest tip carries a second strip of about the same length, beside the water at Landrail Point, and for anyone staying at that end of the island it removes an hour of driving. It is a private field rather than a public one, so using it is a question we settle when the flight is planned rather than something you arrange on arrival.

Offshore from it stands the lighthouse on Bird Rock, built in 1876 to mark the northern entrance to the Crooked Island Passage and reachable only by boat. Tell us the address at the enquiry and the aircraft is planned to whichever of the two strips is nearer.

The island runs roughly thirty miles and one route links the settlements along it: Colonel Hill, Cabbage Hill, Church Grove above Turtle Sound, Major's Cay, True Blue and Landrail Point at the far end. There is no rank of cars waiting at either strip, and with a few hundred residents there is no reason there should be.

A vehicle is arranged with the flight and is standing there when the door opens, which is the difference between arriving and waiting. Both ends of the ground movement go on the same quote under ground transport, in Florida as well as here.

Loyalists arrived in 1783 with cotton and by the early nineteenth century there were more than forty plantations on these islands. Two of the ruins they left are national parks now and both are a drive from the strips.

Marine Farm sits on about four and a half acres above the sea at the northwestern end and mixes a plantation with an eighteenth-century fortification, cannon included.

Hope Great House, protected since 2002 and a little over three acres, is the other, inland of Landrail Point. Neither has a ticket office or an opening time. They are the reason a rental car on this island is worth more than a taxi, and the island page has the rest of what is on Crooked Island.

This is the part of the trip a runway changes most. Load on a small aircraft is a weight question rather than a bag count, and a wheeled airframe has more of it to give than floats do.

Rods and reels for a week, dive tanks, a cooler for the boat, a case of something for the house: all of it travels, within the payload for the aircraft on the day.

On an island of a few hundred people the shops are small, so parties routinely bring what they intend to eat. Say what is coming at the enquiry and see the baggage guidance for how the trade between passengers and weight actually works.

Anything larger than luggage is a different service on the same runway, and that is island logistics rather than a charter with extra bags.

The bight enclosed by Crooked Island, Long Cay and Acklins is a shallow lagoon that stays knee-deep for miles offshore, and it is the reason most people know the name at all. Bonefish here average three to four pounds, sixes and sevens are not unusual and double figures happen.

Guides work out of the settlements rather than out of a marina, so a week is booked long before the flight is. Getting there from either strip is a short drive and then a skiff. Guests who would rather be set down on the water itself take the seaplane to Crooked Island instead, and a packaged single day is the Crooked Island getaway.

The alternative to an aircraft is worth knowing, because it explains why this route exists at all. The mail boat leaves Nassau on a Friday and reaches Cove Point after twelve to fourteen hours at sea, and a water taxi runs across to Acklins twice a day.

Both are dependable and neither is a way to arrive on a Saturday morning with a week's fishing booked. A small plane from Florida turns that into a single morning, and the return is set by you rather than by a sailing schedule. That is most of the argument for chartering the whole aircraft on a route this far south.

Crooked Island works as one stop on a longer trip rather than the whole of it, and having cleared into the Bahamas earlier in the day is what makes that easy: every leg after the clearance stop is domestic.

The same airframe crosses the bight to Acklins in minutes, runs north to Long Island, Rum Cay and San Salvador, or carries on to Staniel Cay and the Exumas.

That is what turns one island into island hopping or a wider Bahamas day. Where the next island has no strip of its own, that leg switches aircraft rather than cancelling the plan, and the rest of the chain is on the Bahamas destinations page.