Water Island is a mile and a half long and three-quarters of a mile wide, located about a half-mile southwest of Charlotte Amalie’s harbor. It has no bridges and no ferries on a fixed schedule and roughly 160 permanent residents. Most people visiting St. Thomas have no idea it exists. This is Water Island’s main advantage.
I stumbled across it because someone at a bar in Charlotte Amalie mentioned Honeymoon Beach and said it was the best beach on St. Thomas that nobody visits. I pointed out that Water Island is technically not St. Thomas. They shrugged and said close enough. They were right about the beach.
Getting There
A water taxi operates between the Crown Bay Marina on St. Thomas and the Water Island dock — the schedule is informal and the boat is small. You call, you wait, you go. The crossing takes about ten minutes across a stretch of harbor that still shows the hulls of ships sunk during World War II in shallow water below you. The island was a US Army base during the war and there are remnants of fortifications visible in the vegetation if you look.
The only way around the island is on foot or by golf cart. Residents drive golf carts. Visitors mostly walk. This is fine — the distances are small and the roads are shaded.
Honeymoon Beach
Honeymoon Beach is on the island’s northwest side, a fifteen-minute walk from the dock through residential streets where chickens wander in the road and someone is always doing something unhurried in their yard. The beach is a protected cove with calm water, a wooden dock, and a small beach bar called Dinghy’s that serves rum drinks and grilled things at prices that are fair by Virgin Islands standards. There’s a dock where local kids jump into the water all afternoon. The snorkeling on the rocky edges of the cove is good — healthy coral, sergeant majors in large schools, the occasional spotted eagle ray in the deeper water beyond.
I spent most of an afternoon there on a Tuesday in February. Total people on the beach: eleven, including the two people working at Dinghy’s. From the beach you can see the cruise ships in the Charlotte Amalie harbor in the distance — enormous white structures moving slowly past each other — which makes the contrast with your immediate surroundings particularly satisfying.
The Rest of the Island
There isn’t much rest of the island, which is the point. A road loops around the interior past a small community of houses, many of them the kind of lovingly maintained Caribbean wooden structures that you don’t often see anymore. There’s a salt pond in the interior that attracts shore birds. The highest point offers views back toward St. Thomas and south toward St. Croix on a clear day. An old hotel complex on the island was partially developed and then abandoned, the buildings gradually dissolving back into the vegetation — there’s something genuinely melancholy about the unfinished pool, the rusted scaffolding, the bougainvillea growing through the windows.
The Specific Value of Doing Nothing Here
Lia read most of a book while I walked the loop road and swam twice and ate a sandwich at the beach bar and fell asleep in a plastic chair for forty minutes. We took the water taxi back to St. Thomas in the late afternoon feeling the particular satisfaction of a day spent in uncomplicated simplicity. Water Island asks nothing of you. You return the favor.
When to go: Any dry-season month works — December through April. The beach bar at Honeymoon Beach is the operational heart of the island; check that it’s open before you go (it occasionally takes days off). Avoid arriving on the same day a cruise ship is in port in Charlotte Amalie — some passengers make it over, and the beach is small enough that even a few dozen extra people changes the character entirely.