Small Plane Flights from Miami to Pig Island

They are wild animals living on an uninhabited cay, not an attraction with opening hours. The boat noses onto the sand, they come down the beach and into shin-deep water to meet it, and the whole thing happens in water clear enough to watch their feet. Nobody can tell you honestly how they got there.

The stories about shipwrecked sailors and abandoned livestock are legends and the sources contradict each other, so we do not repeat them as fact. What is certain is that the cay has fresh water, which is the part that explains how anything survives on it. The island page covers the island itself properly.

Whatever you want to give them travels with you from the aircraft. Nobody sells anything on the island, because nobody lives on it.

The asphalt is 3,031 feet by 75, one runway, identifiers TYM and MYES. It is the closest hard surface to the pigs and the reason a land aircraft can do this trip at all. There is no terminal to speak of and no queue to stand in.

The village around it is small and worth an hour if the day has one spare: a yacht club dock, a couple of places to eat and a lot of boats. Staniel Cay as a destination in its own right has its own page and its own flight, because it is a different trip from this one.

The walk from the apron to the dock takes about two minutes. That walk is the only ground transport a Pig Island day actually needs.

Nurse sharks gather along the marina dock at Compass Cay and people get in with them. They are docile, slow and entirely used to the attention, and the water at the dock is shallow enough to stand in. It is roughly eight minutes by boat from the pigs, so almost every party that comes for one asks about the other on the same morning.

Tell us at the enquiry if you want both and the boat is booked for the hours rather than for a single stop. It is the stop guests most often add after the pigs, and it costs the day almost nothing, because it lies on the way back to the strip anyway.

A limestone cave off Staniel Cay with holes in the roof, so at the right hour the light comes down in shafts and the fish inside turn silver in it. It takes its name from the 1965 Bond film that was shot there.

Entry is a swim through a low opening, so it is a slack-water job rather than an any-time one. The tide decides, not the schedule, which is another reason the departure hour out of Miami is worth thinking about before you fix it.

Bitter Guana Cay has a population of Northern Bahamian rock iguanas, an endangered species that lives nowhere else in any numbers. They come down onto the sand and they are entirely unbothered by people. It is a quieter stop than the pigs and it tends to be the one guests remember as the surprise.

Because the animals are protected, what you may and may not do there is not up to us or to the boat, and the crew will say so on the day. They are also why this cay carries a second name in the search results, which confuses more visitors than it ought to.

There is a small wrecked aircraft lying in about six feet of water near Staniel Cay, shallow enough that you can see the whole of it from the surface with a mask. It takes ten minutes and no equipment beyond that.

It is worth naming what it is not: the famous drug-running Curtiss that appears in every documentary is at Norman's Cay, much further north up the chain, and is a different stop on a different day. This one is a ten-minute stop rather than an outing. Most parties take it on the way to somewhere else and are glad they did.

Pipe Creek is the maze of small cays and channels just north of the anchorage. At low water the sandbars come up out of it and you can stand in the middle of what was open sea an hour earlier, with nothing on the horizon in any direction.

This is the part of the day nobody plans and everybody photographs. It only works around the tide, so if you want it, say so at the enquiry and the departure hour is chosen with it in mind rather than against it. A packaged version of the whole day is the day trip to the island.

Bare feet, no shoes, nothing to carry. It is the cheapest part of the day and the one that ends up on the wall at home.

Because you cleared into the Bahamas on the way in, everything after Staniel Cay is a domestic leg. The same airframe carries on down the Exumas or across to another island the same afternoon, without anybody swapping aircraft or clearing anything a second time. That is the practical argument for wheels on this route.

Freight and provisions ride the same runway under island logistics, larger loads go as cargo, and the rest of the chain is on the Bahamas destinations page. Guests who want two islands in one day say so at the enquiry. It changes the fuel plan and the hour, and almost nothing else.