Cooper Island
"There were fourteen mooring balls in Manchioneel Bay and I wanted every single one of them."
Cooper Island is the kind of place that doesn’t reveal itself in photographs. The photographs show a small bay, some boats at anchor, green hills, the usual BVI light doing its usual thing with turquoise water. What the photographs can’t communicate is the specific quality of quiet that settles over the island by nine in the evening, when the generators go down and the stars come out in the kind of density you only encounter far from city light, and you sit on the deck with a rum and listen to the water move against the hull and feel, more precisely than you usually do, that you are somewhere far away from everything you normally worry about.
Manchioneel Bay is the anchorage, a semicircle of protected water with a mooring field and a small dock leading up to the Cooper Island Beach Club — which sounds grander than it is, and I mean this as a compliment. It’s a small restaurant and bar with good rum (their own-label selection runs to several dozen Caribbean rums, organized by island of origin and displayed on a wall-length rack that I spent a long time in front of), a beach, and the particular atmosphere of somewhere that knows exactly what it is and has no ambitions to be anything else. The rum bar alone would justify the stop.
The reef on the south side of the bay offers the best snorkeling I found in the southern BVI — elkhorn and staghorn coral in good health, nurse sharks resting under ledges, a hawksbill turtle that appeared and disappeared with the particular indifference of a creature with better things to do. Cooper Island has no roads because there are no cars because there is nowhere to drive — the island is small enough that you reach everywhere on foot through scrub paths that smell of sea lavender and hot rock. The hiking trail to the ridge takes thirty minutes and opens a view across the Sir Francis Drake Channel that I stood at for longer than I intended.
When to go: Year-round, though the mooring field fills quickly in the Christmas and New Year’s week — book mooring reservations through the Beach Club in advance during the high season. Cooper Island is a natural overnight stop on any southern loop through the BVI, positioned well between The Bight at Norman Island and the Salt Island passage.