Small Plane from Miami to Treasure Cay

The strip runs 14/32 and measures 7,001 feet by 151 of asphalt, which is more runway than anything we would put on this route needs. From the air it looks like a proper airport because it is one, and from the seat it is an ordinary landing. The terminal is a single building. Customs and immigration are inside it, which is the fact that shapes this whole route: the Bahamian customs authority lists Treasure Cay among its ports of entry, so you clear where you land rather than somewhere along the way. Expect the formalities to take minutes rather than an hour. The crew has filed everything before departure and the desk keeps daytime hours, which is the one reason an early slot is worth more than a late one on a crossing this long. Say at the enquiry if anyone is travelling on a passport other than a United States one.

The dock the Green Turtle Cay ferry runs from sits next to the airport, which is the piece of geography that makes this field worth more than its runway. A few minutes from the apron to the water, then a boat of about the same again. New Plymouth on the far side is a loyalist settlement of clapboard houses and narrow lanes, and the cay is small enough to see on foot and by cart. The ferry runs through the day and it is informal about it. This is the connection people book the flight for as often as they book it for the beach. Say at the enquiry if the day is built around the crossing and the ground side is timed to the boat rather than to the aircraft.

Three and a half miles of white sand in a long shallow curve, and it is what the name means to most people. It has been on best-beach lists for decades and the length of it is the point: there is room to be a long way from anybody else. From the aircraft it is about seven miles by road, so the bags, the cooler and the clubs go straight from the apron to the sand without a boat in between. That is the difference a runway makes to a beach day rather than to the flight. The water off it is shallow and sheltered, so it works with small children and why the snorkelling starts a few yards out. What there is to do once you are there is the island's own subject and the Treasure Cay destination page covers it properly.

Great Abaco is a mainland rather than a cay, so the airport opens a road as well as a shoreline. Marsh Harbour is about thirty miles and half an hour south, and from its ferry docks the southern cays are twenty minutes of water away. That puts Hope Town and its candy-striped lighthouse on Elbow Cay, the boatbuilding lanes of Man-O-War Cay and the beach bars of Great Guana Cay inside a day from Treasure Cay, by car and then by boat. If the southern cays are where you are actually staying, the better arrival is Marsh Harbour itself and we file for that instead. A small plane to Marsh Harbour is the same aircraft on the same crossing, thirty miles further down the island.

A few minutes from the field the ground opens into a blue hole that is said to run about 254 feet deep, a mix of fresh and salt water with ropes hung from the trees around the rim. It is not a dive site in the usual sense and it does not need to be: people swim in it, jump into it and stand at the edge looking down at water that changes colour with the light. Because it is inland it is one of the things a wheeled arrival reaches easily and a water arrival does not.

Treasure Cay carries a golf course and a marina within a few minutes of each other and of the beach, which is unusual for a settlement this size and is the reason it draws the same families back. The marina is the jumping-off point for the deep water offshore, where the billfish are, and the flats on the sound side are bonefish ground. A flats day or a fishing day by air is arranged with the flight rather than after you land. Clubs and rods travel on the aircraft as weight rather than as awkward shapes, which is the practical version of the same point the runway keeps making.

This is the part of the day 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, particularly over a leg this long. 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 and that is island logistics rather than a charter with extra bags.

Treasure Cay works as the first leg rather than the whole day and clearing in here is what makes that easy: once you are through the desk, every leg after it is domestic. The same airframe carries on down the chain and across to Harbour Island, Nassau, Grand Bahama or further south to Staniel Cay and the Exumas. That is what turns one island into island hopping or a wider Bahamas day. Where the next cay has no strip of its own, that leg switches aircraft rather than cancelling the plan. The packaged version of a single day is the Treasure Cay getaway day trip and the rest of the chain is on the Bahamas destinations page.