Small Plane from Miami to Abaco Bahamas

The strip runs east to west across the middle of Great Abaco, 6,100 feet of asphalt and a hundred wide. It was rebuilt to take regional jets, so for a small small plane it is generous by a long way and the landing is an ordinary one. The terminal is one modern building with customs and immigration inside it, which shapes this whole route: Marsh Harbour Airport is a port of entry for Abaco, so you clear where you land. Expect the formalities to take minutes rather than an hour. The crew has filed everything before departure and the desk keeps daytime hours, so an early boarding time is worth more than a late one. Say at the enquiry if anyone travels on a passport other than a United States one, worth flagging before the day.

Marsh Harbour is the third largest town in the Bahamas and the practical centre of the chain: the harbour, the ferry dock, the shops where a house on a cay gets provisioned and the road that runs the length of Great Abaco. That is not a drawback for a day trip, it is the reason the arrival is calm. There is no crowd at the strip and no queue for the boat. A golf cart or a car can be waiting when you land through ground transport and the Marsh Harbour page covers the town itself.

Thirty miles north of Marsh Harbour, about half an hour of road, Treasure Cay has 7,001 feet of asphalt of its own on runway 14/32. It is on the same ports of entry list, so a flight can clear there instead and never see the middle of the island at all. The reason to choose it is the northern end of the chain. The long crescent beach is here, the marina is here and the ferry dock for Green Turtle Cay is beside the airport rather than half an island away. If the day is about that end, we plan the runway around it. The Treasure Cay page covers what is there.

The ferry to Green Turtle Cay leaves from the dock next to the Treasure Cay strip, which makes it the shortest airport to cay transfer in the Abacos and the reason the northern runway is worth planning for. The cay itself is two harbours and a settlement of clapboard houses in colours that have not changed in a century, with ocean beaches a walk or a cart ride away. Nothing on it is far from anything else. The Green Turtle Cay page covers what is there and anything you want set up before you land goes on the same quote as the flight.

From Marsh Harbour the ferry across to Hope Town on Elbow Cay runs about twenty minutes over sheltered water, several times a day. It is the busiest of the crossings and the one most day trips are built around. Hope Town is a harbour ringed by pastel houses with a lighthouse standing over it. The Elbow Reef light is one of the last hand-wound, kerosene-fuelled lighthouses still working anywhere in the world, which sounds like a brochure line until you are standing under it. Golf carts are the transport and cars are largely absent. What there is to do once you are across is the cay's own subject rather than the flight's. The Elbow Cay page and the Hope Town page cover it properly, and anything outside the usual list goes to custom requests.

Both are reached from the same Marsh Harbour dock and both are quieter than Hope Town, in opposite ways. Man-O-War Cay is the boatbuilding settlement, dry, tidy and still turning out wooden hulls and canvas work by hand. Great Guana Cay is the other direction entirely: seven miles of ocean beach with the reef close in front of it and a bar at the end of the sand that half the Abacos ends up at on a Sunday. Neither has a runway, so on this aircraft both are a ferry from the main island, and a seaplane is the version that skips the boat.

This is the part of the day a runway changes most, and on a chain of islands it changes more than usual. 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. Golf clubs, dive tanks, rods, 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. Say what is coming at the enquiry rather than at the ramp 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. A house on a cay gets its parts, its provisions and its building materials through Marsh Harbour, and that is island logistics rather than a charter with extra bags.

This is the top of the Bahamian chain rather than the whole of it, and clearing in here is what makes the rest easy: once you are through the desk, every leg after it is domestic. The same airframe carries on south to Harbour Island, Nassau, Andros or Staniel Cay and the Exumas. That is what turns one group of cays 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. The packaged version of a single day is the Abaco getaway day trip and the rest of the chain is on the Bahamas destinations page.