Staniel Cay
"The pig swam right up to the dinghy and looked at me like I was the strange one in this situation."
Big Major’s Spot is a small uninhabited island near Staniel Cay with a beach where a family of pigs lives. When your dinghy approaches, they wade into the water and then, without any apparent decision, begin swimming out to meet you — full-grown pigs, ears flat, legs churning the turquoise water with a steady, unhurried confidence that suggests they have done this many times and find it unremarkable. What they want is food. What I had in the dinghy was a bag of apples and a complete absence of mental preparation for a large pig pressing its snout against the gunwale and huffing at me with the expectation of a paying customer. I gave it an apple. It ate the apple and looked at me with continuing expectation. We reached an understanding.
The pigs are the famous thing, the Instagram thing, the thing that brings the day-charter boats from George Town and Nassau, and they are genuinely worth seeing — not because a swimming pig is majestic exactly, but because it is perfectly, inexplicably itself. But Staniel Cay the settlement is worth more than the animals. The village is tiny: a generator that cuts out at ten pm, a small grocery store with a limited and wonderful inventory, a boat ramp, and Happy People Marina, which has a bar where the sailing community ends up in the evenings. The charts get spread on tables, the cruising gossip circulates, someone plays guitar. The VHF radio behind the bar crackles with weather. There is a specific contentment to a place organized entirely around the sea and its rhythms, where everyone you meet arrived by water and will leave by water, and the only credential that matters is whether you can read the weather.
Thunderball Grotto is a five-minute dinghy ride from Staniel Cay, a sea cave that sits in a rocky formation just above the waterline. At low tide you can swim through the entrance tunnel into a cathedral chamber hung with coral, where shafts of light come through holes in the ceiling and fall into water so clear the coral appears illuminated from within. The cave was used for two James Bond films — Thunderball and Never Say Never Again — and its fame has made it a stop on every charter itinerary, but at seven in the morning before the day boats arrive it is quiet, and the fish inside — schools of snapper, the odd reef shark moving through the passage — are numerous enough to make you feel like an intruder in someone else’s architecture.
When to go: November through April. The anchorage at Staniel Cay gets crowded over the Christmas–New Year period and during spring regatta season (April). For quieter access to Thunderball Grotto, come on a weekday and arrive at the cave by 7am before the charter boats. The swimming pigs are present year-round.