Mystery Beach

Yesterday, I saw the beach just west of Annaly Bay and Annaly Cove on St Croix. It’s in the Maroon Ridge slave hideout area that almost no one seems to know anything about. I’ve never seen pictures of it. I don’t think it even has a name. Here’s a brief account.

The beach is mostly a 500-foot-long raised coral shelf with extremely sharp dog’s teeth. The eastern half looks like it has partly collapsed into the sea, so the back side juts up on an angle to about 15 feet high. It’s in many layers. Behind it are two large tidal pools, each 100 feet long and about 20- to 30-feet wide. The one to the east is very deep. I couldn’t see the bottom near the center. Water enters under a land bridge. The other is only a few feet deep and more crescent shaped. Both are almost totally still because the high coral flat protects them from the waves. I think it’s by far the most beautiful beach I’ve seen on St. Croix, but there’s something eerie about it. Two towering, rocky sea cliffs jut out at either end, and immediately behind the beach, there rises a steep mountain. It has a closed-in, isolated feel.

I hadn’t planned on seeing the area, so I had to leave my wallet and cell phone at the base of the cliff to the west in order to enter the water. I waded and swam in a dozen small pools to the west of the beach. There were fish in some. One has a hole in the bottom where water gets sucked down after a wave fills the pool. You could get pulled down on a very windy day. I heard but didn’t see another underground hole. As the waves went in and out, it sounded like someone snoring.

I didn’t go any farther west, but could see many more pools. About a quarter mile farther, I could see many fallen boulders the size of houses piled on top of one another on the shore.

Has anyone seen this beach? If you want to go there, there are a couple of tricky spots in scaling the sea cliffs from Annaly Bay. For the most part, you can stay down low near the water line where it‘s safer, but of course, watch out for the occasional big wave. It would probably be best to go with a group. I plan to go back and go farther west and maybe find the slave hideout cave after my cuts and pulled muscles heal. Haha!