Exuma Pig Beach Tours

Big Major Cay is Pig Beach. It is uninhabited, it is about 89 miles southeast of Nassau, and it is where essentially every swimming-pig photograph you have seen was taken. Getting there from Nassau is a full day and close to two hours each way in a fast boat.

Four tours on this site sell an Exuma day. Only three of them go to Big Major Cay.

The four Exuma day trips, and which cay each one reaches

Born Free Charters — $489, rated 4.8 across 47 reviews, and the best-reviewed tour that reaches the real Pig Beach. Allen’s Cay for the rock iguanas, a snorkel on the sunken plane wreck off Norman’s Cay, nurse sharks at Compass Cay, forty minutes at Big Major Cay, a sandbar swim and a buffet lunch ashore. Landing fees and food for the pigs are both included. Shared boat, up to 24 guests. Our breakdown.

Exuma Escapes — $378, the cheapest way from Nassau to Big Major Cay. Same broad route: Allen’s Cay iguanas, the plane wreck viewed from the boat rather than snorkelled, Compass Cay sharks, Pig Beach, and a hot Bahamian lunch at the Exuma Native Restaurant. The rating is 4.1 across 11 reviews, which is a thin record rather than a poor one, and worth knowing before you compare it with the 47 behind Born Free. Our breakdown.

Aqua Shores — $515, the most expensive on the site. Allen’s Cay, Compass Cay, Big Major Cay, a hot lunch and sandbar time, on a luxury powerboat.

Powerboat Adventures — $329, and the one to read carefully. It has 164 reviews at 4.7, more than the other three combined, and it is the cheapest full Exuma day available. It goes to Ship Channel Cay at the northern end of the chain, which is the operator’s own private island, and its listing describes the pigs there as resident. Open bar all day, a lunch buffet, stingrays, a shark feed and a conch salad demonstration. An excellent day out, and not Big Major Cay. Our breakdown.

Cruise passengers: read this before anything else

Two of the four operators — Powerboat Adventures and Born Free — list cruise-ship guests as not suitable, in their own booking conditions. This is not a formality. The day runs from roughly 9am to 4:30pm before you have added transfers at either end, and there is no margin against an all-aboard time if weather slows the crossing.

Exuma Escapes and Aqua Shores do accept cruise guests. It is still an eight-hour day against a port call, so check your ship’s schedule properly rather than optimistically. If you are in port for a standard day, the honest recommendation is the Nassau-area tours from the cruise port, which start at $67 and were built for exactly this.

What the day is actually like

The shape is dictated by the distance and is much the same on all four.

You leave Paradise Island around nine. The first hour is open water. The first stop is not pigs but Allen’s Cay, home to Bahamian rock iguanas — an endangered species that exists on three small islands and nowhere else on earth — which come down the beach to be fed.

South through the cays, past Norman’s Cay, where a drug-running aircraft was ditched in the shallows in the 1980s and now sits in a few metres of clear water. Some itineraries snorkel it; others look at it from the boat.

Compass Cay Marina next, where nurse sharks have been habituated to visitors for years and you wade in off the dock among them. For most people this turns out to be the most memorable forty minutes of the day, which is not what anyone books for.

Then Big Major Cay. Forty minutes on Born Free’s schedule. The pigs swim out to the boats, you feed them, you take the photograph, and then you get back on the boat.

A sandbar stop and lunch ashore, then about seventy minutes back to Nassau.

Is it worth $378 to $515?

Priced by pig, no. Forty minutes is forty minutes wherever you paid to get there, and Rose Island gives you three hours for $67.

Priced as a full guided day across the Exuma Cays — iguanas found nowhere else, sharks you can touch, a wreck, sandbars, lunch, and some of the clearest water in the Caribbean — it is a fair rate, and the pigs are a bonus on top of a trip that would be worth taking without them.

The mistake to avoid is paying Exuma money without meaning to, or paying it and landing on the wrong island. Pig Beach versus Rose Island settles which is which, and our tour-by-tour picks narrow the shortlist. When you are ready, check availability — every tour here cancels free up to 24 hours ahead.