Buck Island is just north of St Croix and is a designated marine sanctuary. It had been closed since the hurricanes but we got doubly lucky because the National Park Service re-opened it a week before we arrived and a ranger was kind enough to approve our permit in 24 hours (normally takes 5 days). With a permit, you can anchor on the west end of the island overnight. Most people don’t go through the effort so we had the anchorage to ourselves for two blissful nights.

The west end of the island is a beautiful beach and good swimming, while the east end is the marine sanctuary. You can take boats over to the east end but it’s really shallow so we opted to go by dinghy and hook up to one of the mooring balls.

Like other snorkeling experiences here, the coral is in rough shape – not from the storms but from sea temperature rise over the last several years. It’s starting to grow back, you can see brain coral and local scientists are transplanting elkhorn coral, but it’s going to be a long haul. But the fish are absolutely amazing. A huge school of blue tangs followed us around for a while and made our afternoon.

Squalls in the distance

When we got back to the boat the day trippers from the beach were gone. Some nasty storm fronts passed by us to the north and we were lucky enough to watch from a distance.

The second day there were a few more day trippers. We went back to the marine sanctuary and this time explored the ‘grotto’. Once upon a time there was an entire underwater trail complete with placards buried in the seabed. Unfortunately there’s a lot of growth that’s moved in and things need to be cleaned up, but again the fish were fun to watch.