There’s a beach on the far southwest end of St. Croix that’s bigger and emptier than anywhere else on the island, costs nothing to visit, and for five months a year is locked behind a gate you are not getting through. This is Sandy Point, St. Croix’s largest and emptiest beach, and it has opinions about when you may come.
When Sandy Point, St. Croix is open
Sandy Point opens to the public on weekends only — Saturday and Sunday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. — and only from September 1 through March 31. The rest of the year the gate stays shut. You can plan around a lot of things on St. Croix; you cannot plan around this. Show up at the gate on a perfect Tuesday in July, cooler in hand, and you’ll find yourself reading a sign that has no interest in your vacation.
From April through August, the beach belongs to the turtles — and they did not ask for your input.
Why it closes
The reason is better than most beach rules. Sandy Point is the most important nesting beach in the United States for the leatherback sea turtle — a creature the size of a small sofa that has been doing this since long before there were beaches with rules. Every spring and summer the females haul themselves ashore in the dark, dig, lay, and leave, and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service — plus a small army of biologists and volunteers running on coffee and bug spray — tags them, counts the nests, and moves eggs clear of the erosion line.
Closing the beach is how they get room to work. I’ve run a kitchen on a Saturday night, and I know exactly what it looks like when the people doing the real job need everyone else to step back and let it happen. This is that, with flippers.
What it’s actually like
There is nothing out there. No lifeguard, no snack bar, no rental anything, no shade the sea-grape scrub didn’t volunteer on its own. What you get instead is a long, open run of pale sand, water that works its way through every shade of blue, and the kind of quiet most beaches gave up a long time ago. Bring water, reef-safe sunscreen, and a bag for whatever you carry in — because you’ll be carrying it back out. Admission is free, which on an island where “free” usually comes with an asterisk is its own small miracle.
So if you’re on St. Croix between fall and early spring, give Sandy Point a Saturday. Get there when the gate opens, walk until the footprints run out, and keep in mind that the same rule keeping you off the sand half the year is the reason there’s still something here worth walking to. Some places earn your patience. This is one of the few that puts it right on the schedule.
Photo: Turn685 / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
