Photography and more: July 2014

What: Have you ever seen pigs? Now have you ever seen pigs walking on the beach? And eating lobster head for breakfast? Something I’ve never seen before and probably not many of us have. This trip to the Pig Island is a great once in a life time experience.

When: I married woman on Memorial Day weekend this year 2014. She’s everything a man like me could ever ask for. We headed to Bahamas early June where this Pig Island is close by. But anytime of the year would be just as beautiful except hurricane season which I believe in September on (do your own homework, don’t trust me on this).

Where: The Island you want to be on is Staniel Cay. From there, it’s a 5 min boat ride to Pig Island.

How:

Getting ready:

My first question when I want to get to these pigs was where and how. Like I mentioned above, it’s a 5 minute boat ride to Pig Island from Staniel Cay. But first, if you decide to stay in Paradise Island (Atlantis or Riu Palace, where we stayed), you would need a ride to Staniel Cay. You have few options to get there:

Boat ride: We did not look into this to begin with. I think it’s a 3-4 hour boat ride which we don’t have. As we talk to the local while on Staniel Cay, they do go by boat but air is much faster.
Charter air: If you have a large group, this might be a better option. They will fly on your preferred schedule. The price would work out much better. Since it was only for 2 of us, we picked option 3.
Scheduled air: The only scheduled air service is Flamingo Air. They make 2 round trips per day. 1 at 8:00am from Nassau to Staniel Cay and the afternoon at 3:10pm from Staniel Cay to Nassau. You can book in advance by http://www.flamingoairbah.com/ or email Flamingo Air flamingoair@coralwave.com. The website was down and still is at the time of this post. I didn’t have much success with email even with simple questions. The best way was to call them at 954-839-8688 (from US). They will email you a payment authorization form. I paid $157 for round trip per person from Nassau to Staniel Cay. Here’s the first problem with Flamingo Air. I provided 2 names but only receive 1 confirmation number. Had to keep calling back up and finally got a hold of some one. That person ended up sent me 2 confirmation numbers for my wife. I now have 3 confirmation numbers.

Regarding equipment as I am assuming you are photographer, I took with me:

D800
Nikon 16-35mm f/4
2x32GB SD and 2x8GB CF as backup (have 64GB in body if possible as I ran out of space little after I left the Pig Island)
Underwater housing!!! It’s a must. I got mine from http://www.borrowlenses.com/ . They have AquaTech housing for my setup. Big help.
Another option is to get the point and shoot Panasonic TS4 (I had 1 for underwater but forgot for this trip L). Or just waterproof plastic case for your phone or GoPro if you just want to enjoy the time there instead of use all 40GB of memory card like I did.
SETUP for AquaTech: It’s a bit tricky, I had the camera setup as follow:

Auto ISO
Aperture Priority
Auto focus point
Continuous High at 4-5 frame per second (this will eat up memories but you want to do this as some pigs can get aggressive and keep coming at you. So you want to take as much and as fast as you can. Plus the Auto focus means hit and miss. You can have it locked to manual focus if you want to)
If you want, set shutter button to start and stop movie. I didn’t try but I believe that would mean the autofocus with shutter button is disable and can only focus using AF-ON button.
I experienced cases where ISO is set to 1600+ in day light and Speed would be in the high range 1/4000 +/- . So if you can set ISO to be lower priority on your camera, it would be better.

The Day:

We stayed in Riu (all inclusive). So we packed ourselves with hotdogs, fruits, bread. I have seen the youtube videos and they will only follow the food.
We left Riu at 6am. Taxi ride to airport is about 30-35 min for $35 USD. Very quiet early in the morning but Taxi are always there in front of the hotel. At the counter, we were able to confirm that we had 3 confirmation numbers. As long as on our return flight, use the same confirmation numbers, call the same number when we get back to the US to cancel the unused confirmation. Long story short. I left them a message. Unable to talk to anyone but I have been keeping close monitor on my Credit Card to make sure there are only 2 transactions. Anyway, the airport was busy for morning flights. It took us about 30 min from arrival to the airport to the gate for such a small airport. We waited until about 7:45 am and we boarded. It's a completely different experience. Boarding took less than 10 min and we were off the ground.

Boarding Flamingo Air to Staniel Cay

The flight took about 45 min. We got there and asked the local to get to the Pig island. We were taken to the location as in the image below. The store owner gave us option to either ride the boat ourselves or have a guided tour. Since we didn't know how to ride and had no idea how to get around. We asked to have a guided tour which put us back $175.