Sandy Hill Bay

The taxi driver who took me to Sandy Hill Bay on my third day told me, unprompted, that he brought his own family there on Sundays. Not to Shoal Bay, not to Meads Bay. Here. I asked him why and he said the water was calm for the children and parking was easy and it was not full of tourists, which he said without any suggestion that I was excluded from this assessment, just that it was a relevant fact about the place. He dropped me off at the end of a dirt track and pointed toward the water and drove away.

Sandy Hill Bay sits on the southeast coast, protected from the Atlantic swells by a reef that runs just offshore, and the water inside the bay is uncommonly flat — on the morning I was there, it was glassy, barely disturbed, the kind of still water that invites you to look through it rather than at it. The beach is smaller and less dramatic than the famous beaches on the north and west sides of the island, more curved and intimate, with sea grape trees providing genuine shade at the eastern end. There were six or seven families there, spread well apart on the sand, and a small group of teenage boys who had waded out to a sandbar about a hundred meters from shore and were standing in knee-deep water with the contentment of people who have found the ideal place to be on a Saturday morning.

I swam out to the reef line and looked back at the bay from the water. From there you can see the low hills behind the beach — the eastern end of Anguilla is slightly more elevated than the flat center of the island — and the colors are different: more green in the vegetation, the soil a reddish-brown where the limestone has decomposed. A man was fishing from the rocks at the southern point, casting a long line with the practiced motion of someone who has done this since childhood and sees no reason to vary the technique.

What I noticed most about Sandy Hill Bay — and this is the thing the taxi driver could not quite articulate but somehow communicated through his choice to come here — is that the place does not perform for visitors. There are no menus, no sunbed rentals, no speakers playing. The sounds are water, children, wind through the sea grape leaves, a radio somewhere faint and indistinct. Someone had a small cooler with cold drinks and was not selling them but was, I noticed, handing them to people in a way that suggested this arrangement was understood by everyone present except me. I sat nearby and read a book for two hours and felt something settle in me that I had not realized was unsettled.

There is no restaurant or bar at Sandy Hill Bay. The nearest food is in the village just up the road — a rum shop that also sells cold drinks and packets of crackers and, if you arrive at the right time, fried fish from a pot on a propane burner that smells so good I stood in the doorway for a moment collecting myself before ordering. The fish was fresh and the crackers were perfect with it and the whole thing cost three dollars.

When to go: Sandy Hill Bay is good year-round, but it is best on weekend mornings from December through April when the local families come and the bay takes on its proper social character. Arrive early for the calmest water and the best shade spots under the sea grapes.