Fish Bay is one of those smaller overlooked anchorages that if cruisers looked a little closer they just might fall in love with the best kept secret around!
In St. John, there are tons of very notable anchorages, each extremely gorgeous in it’s own right and many of which are chock full of easy-to-use National Park Service mooring balls. Fish Bay, however, is kind of off the radar.
We spent our first three nights in St. John at Fish Bay, where most of the bay lies just barely outside the National Park boundary. As such, you are actually allowed to anchor here. This is pretty awesome considering many of the other “anchorages” do not allow anchoring and have hefty $15 daily price tags tied to their lovely moorings.
Fish Bay is a bit on the small side with no public access or dinghy dock since most of the bay is surrounded by private residences, vacation rentals, that sort of thing. (Side note, those private residences supplied us with some pretty decent open wifi. Just saying.)
We found a small beach that was perfect to land the dinghy and let Oliver use. Funny thing though about that beach is that it turned out to be home to a bevy of wild animals at night!
Seriously.
It had us packing multiple flashlights along with a machete on night two after being accosted by a group of beady neon eyes on our first night trip to shore for Oliver. We were taken aback (and totally unprepared) to say the least when we were met with several sets of glowing eyes staring back at us the first night we took Oliver to land (surprisingly we haven’t had that happen yet — that we know of at least).
After racing back to the dinghy and skipping Oliver’s potty break altogether on night one, we busted out some extra gear and even spotlighted the beach from the boat before heading to shore again. Turns out, those eyes were connected to several deer who made repeat appearances every night of our stay.
I did a quick Google search and, turns out, St. John is home to lots of deer, donkey, and even mongoose! So random. Jereme actually spotted a mongoose over at Great Lameshur Bay, but we have yet to see any donkeys.
It sure was a nice change of pace to find ourselves as the only cruisers/boaters in the anchorage all three nights we spent tucked in this great little harbor.
Our days were spent paddle boarding around the bay. Scoping out tons of baby sharks and other random fish. Watching TONS of turtles pop their heads out of the water literally all day long. And we snorkeled some pretty nice rocks along the outside of the bay that were home to lots of pretty fish and coral.
Fish Bay was definitely one of our favorite anchorages so far in the USVI.
>>Thanks for visiting LAHOWIND sailing blog! We’d love for you to get to know us and follow our story as we attempt to navigate a whole new world of sailing, as we cruise the Caribbean. …Learn more about us and our sailing + cruising adventures.
Seriously, we are going there! As always a beautiful post!