Little Bay

The directions to Little Bay are almost comically simple and yet most people do not follow them: drive to the cliff above the north coast, find the rope, descend. That is it. The rope is an actual rope tied to a rock, and the descent is perhaps eight or ten meters of scrambling over limestone that has been worn smooth by enough previous hands and feet to suggest this is not a pioneering act but a modest rite of passage. I climbed down holding a dry bag and my shoes, barefoot on the rock, and felt the temperature drop a degree or two as I entered the shade of the cliff. Then I turned around and there it was.

Little Bay is enclosed on three sides by dark limestone walls that rise twenty meters from the water, draped in vegetation where any soil has managed to accumulate. The cove is small — perhaps a hundred meters across — and protected enough from the Atlantic swells to run genuinely flat on most days. The water inside is a color I do not have a useful name for: not turquoise exactly, but something greener and more concentrated, like turquoise distilled. There were four other people on the beach when I arrived. In an hour, two of them left by kayak and two arrived by boat and the numbers stayed roughly constant.

The snorkeling inside the cove is remarkable in the way that snorkeling is remarkable when you have not traveled far to get there and the reef turns out to be healthy and full. The rocks at the base of the cliff on the eastern side are covered in sea fans and coral, and the fish — parrotfish, blue tang, a solitary barracuda who hovered in the mid-water with the bearing of a security guard — had clearly decided this was a place worth inhabiting. I spent forty minutes underwater and came up each time surprised by the silence that replaced the underwater noise.

You can also reach Little Bay by boat from Sandy Ground, and this is the practical option if you have luggage or are with children or have any concern about rope-climbing competence. The boat ride takes ten minutes and the operators are informal about scheduling — you go when you go. But arriving by water gives you a different relationship to the cove; you see the cliff wall from outside, the shape of the hidden beach visible only as a white sliver before you round the point. Arriving by rope gives you the memory of the descent, the scraped palms, the moment you reached the sand and understood why it was worth doing.

There are no facilities at Little Bay. No bar, no chairs, no shade structure. The walls of the cliff provide shade on both sides for a few hours each day as the sun moves, which requires some repositioning on the beach. Bring water, sunscreen, and more time than you think you need.

When to go: Little Bay is best in the calm season — December through April — when the Atlantic side of the island is less exposed to swells. On rough days the water inside the cove can still be swimmable, but the boat taxis from Sandy Ground may not be running. Midweek mornings you are likely to have the cove largely to yourself.