Snorkeling in St Vincent and the Grenadines after Beryl

On the first of July 2024, Hurricane Beryl went through the southern Grenadines as a category four: the worst storm to hit St Vincent and the Grenadines since 1955, damaging nine of every ten buildings on the islands nearest the Tobago Cays.¹ Any snorkeling guide written before that date describes a place that partly no longer exists. I have worked boats through hurricane country for most of my life, and the only way to write about a storm coast is to say what the water did, what people rebuilt, and where your trip fits into that. Here it is.

The short version: the Tobago Cays are open and still the best reason to come. Base on Bequia, which the storm barely touched, and do the Cays by schooner.

What Beryl changed, island by island

The split is geographic and sharp. The northern Grenadines and the St Vincent mainland (Bequia, Mustique, the Kingstown coast) took glancing damage and functioned throughout. The southern Grenadines took the eyewall: about 90% of Union Island’s buildings were damaged or destroyed, Mayreau and Canouan hit nearly as hard, total losses around US$230 million, a fifth of the country’s economy.¹

Two years on, the recovery is real but uneven. The Tobago Cays Marine Park reopened on 24 October 2024 and operates normally.² Union Island is open and asking for visitors, with hotels, the kitesurf school and the Cays day boats all running while Clifton’s rebuild continues around them. On Mayreau, Beryl cut Salt Whistle Bay’s famous palm spit clean through in two places; the government rebuilt it, and the beach bars are trading again on one of the Caribbean’s prettiest anchorages, though the hilltop church that framed every photograph is gone.³ Canouan’s marina lost its breakwaters. The two private-island resorts at the archipelago’s foot, Palm Island and Petit St Vincent, remain closed; they get their own section below.

The Tobago Cays: the park, the fee, the turtles

Five uninhabited cays behind a four-kilometer wrap of Horseshoe Reef, a lagoon the color aviation posters used to promise, and the eastern Caribbean’s most reliable turtle water. The park costs EC$15 a person per 24 hours (about six US dollars, collected boat-to-boat by rangers) and runs on rules that have teeth: nothing taken, nothing touched, five knots in the lagoon, moorings or bare sand for anchors, dive operators registered or absent.²

The snorkeling sorts into two acts. Baradal’s turtle sanctuary is a buoyed, boats-excluded swim zone over seagrass where green turtles graze in numbers you can count into the dozens on a good morning, with hawksbills through the rock. It is the single best reason the park exists. Horseshoe Reef and the channels carry the fish: squadrons of blue tang, snapper over the coral heads, rays on the sand, the odd nurse shark under a ledge.

The coral needs saying straight. The reef was already thinned before the storm (the 2023 and 2024 marine heatwaves put this cell past 17 and then past 22 degree heating weeks, the second deep in mass-mortality territory), and Beryl broke standing coral on top of it; reef scientists are still surveying the damage.⁴ You snorkel the Cays in 2026 for turtles, fish, sand and that lagoon light, and they are worth the trip on those terms. Nobody should sell you coral gardens here.

Lunch is part of the institution: BBQ crews from Union and Mayreau grill on Petit Bateau’s north beach (Alphonso’s, Free Willy, Romeo) at about US$40 a head. Order the lobster only between September and April; May through August is the closed season, and a vendor offering it then is breaking the park’s rules with your money.²

Getting to the Cays

No bridge, no ferry, no airstrip: the Cays are boat-only, and no online marketplace sells the trip, which tells you how local this economy still is. From Bequia, the Friendship Rose — a 1960s island cargo schooner that spent her working life on the Kingstown run — sails a Cays day at US$175 a head with breakfast, lunch and gear. She is the best single day out in this country. From Union, day boats and water taxis make the shortest crossing; from the St Vincent mainland, Fantasea Tours runs the long version: two and a half hours each way, lively in the channels, worth it only if the mainland is your base. The fourth way is the classic one: the Grenadines are the Caribbean’s best charter-yacht water, and a week under sail with the Cays in the middle is the format everything else imitates.

Bequia: the base

Seven square miles, one hour by ferry from Kingstown (about EC$25, several sailings a day), roofs intact — Bequia is where a snorkeling trip to this country should live.⁵ Devil’s Table, the reef off Admiralty Bay’s north arm, works from two to twenty feet: sea fans, squirrelfish, the occasional seahorse for slow lookers, an easy swim from the Lower Bay side. Lower Bay beach snorkels best at its southern rocks; Princess Margaret Beach, reached by the Belmont Walkway boardwalk around the headland, holds fish around the anchored yachts and the cliff base. Two dive shops on the walkway rent gear and run trips. Evenings you drink where the charter crews drink, which in a sailing country is the real review site.

Mayreau and the middle Grenadines

Mayreau earns its stop twice over. Salt Whistle Bay — the rebuilt spit, palms replanted, bars back up — remains the anchorage everyone photographs, with easy grass-and-sand snorkeling inside the hook. Mayreau Gardens, the reef in the channel toward the Cays, is the better water: current-swept coral slopes with the densest fish life outside the park, run as a drift with a boat following. Book it through the dive operators out of Union or with your day-boat skipper; it is not a swim-from-shore site.

The St Vincent mainland: a film set and a fort

Wallilabou Bay is the mainland’s oddest and best shore stop: the decaying Pirates of the Caribbean set still stands on the waterfront, Port Royal’s façades slowly becoming ruins of a fiction, and the snorkeling is genuine: a rock-arch point where the leeward coast drops away through angelfish and morays. Half an hour from Kingstown, free, and best midweek when no ship is in. The Pirates set tour bundles it with Fort Charlotte and the leeward coast road; the Pirates package with a beach swim adds the water time the film crowd usually skips.

Around the airport side, the Villa and Indian Bay shore holds patch reefs in ten to thirty feet against the islet of Fort Duvernette, a 250-step colonial gun rock, where a clear-bottom kayak and snorkel trip makes the easiest half-day on the mainland. Blue Lagoon, next door, shelters one of the healthiest elkhorn stands left in the country, and the Sandals that opened at Buccament in 2024 put an all-inclusive within reach of the leeward sites. On Bequia-bound days, a private island safari pairs the turtle sanctuary at Old Hegg with the forts and the beaches. As for La Soufrière’s 2021 eruption: the ash blew east and settled, and it is a hiking story now, not a snorkeling one.

The closed south, plainly

Palm Island’s resort was destroyed; a US$100 million rebuild was signed in late 2025 with a two-to-three-year construction window, so plan around roughly 2027–28.⁶ Petit St Vincent has been closed since the storm with no announced reopening; its satellite sandbar, Mopion, is effectively charter-yacht-only water now. Canouan is a resort island in mid-repair. Its reef flat has never been surveyed as anything exceptional, and the beaches worth the name sit inside hotel grounds. None of these is a reason to cancel; all three are reasons to point your trip at Bequia and the park instead.

What the water is like now

This cell took 17.8 degree heating weeks in November 2023 and 22.1 in November 2024, deep past the threshold where most coral dies, before 2025 eased to 12 and 2026 has run essentially clean.⁴ Stony coral tissue loss disease is confirmed through the neighboring islands and SVG monitors for it; no public confirmation has been published here. The baseline still stands: 168 square kilometers of reef and more than 400 reef-fish species in the country’s waters, which is why the fish life reads rich even where the coral reads tired.⁷ Sargassum lands on the windward shores (Bequia’s Industry and Spring Bay, Petit Tabac in the park) and leaves the leeward snorkeling alone.

When to go

Late January through April. The dry season is settled, the Christmas-wind chop of December has eased, the BBQ lobster is legal, and you are clear of the storm window. And about that window: Beryl arrived on 1 July as a category four, the earliest storm of that strength the Atlantic has recorded, so treat July through October with real respect.¹ The islands stay open through it; your weather risk just stops being theoretical.

Getting there

JetBlue flies Argyle nonstop from JFK daily, American from Miami five days a week; Delta’s Atlanta run ends in September 2026, so check the map before assuming a route.⁸ From Argyle it is a taxi to the Kingstown ferry dock and an hour to Bequia, or an SVG Air hop to Bequia, Canouan or Union. The southern-Grenadines ferry runs Kingstown to Union in about five hours for around EC$120, the budget route and a scenic half-day if you treat it as part of the trip rather than transport.

St Vincent and the Grenadines snorkeling FAQ

Frequently asked questions

How much does it cost to snorkel the Tobago Cays?+

EC$15 per person per 24 hours, about US$6, collected on the water by park rangers. The rules that come with it: nothing fished or taken, no touching coral, five knots in the lagoon, and no lobster purchases from the BBQ boats between 1 May and 31 August, the closed season.

Can you visit the Tobago Cays without chartering a yacht?+

Yes, three ways. Day boats out of Union Island make the shortest run. The Friendship Rose, a 1960s cargo schooner turned day-tripper, sails from Bequia at US$175 a head with meals. From the St Vincent mainland, Fantasea and similar operators run it as a long day: about two and a half hours each way, rough in the channels.

Is St Vincent and the Grenadines open after Hurricane Beryl?+

Open, with an asterisk on the far south. Bequia, Mustique and the St Vincent mainland were barely touched and never stopped. The Tobago Cays reopened in October 2024. Union Island is back and welcoming visitors while rebuilding continues. Palm Island and Petit St Vincent, the two private-island resorts, remain closed.

Which island should you stay on for snorkeling?+

Bequia. It sits an hour's ferry from Kingstown, kept its roofs through the storm, has shore snorkeling at Devil's Table and Lower Bay, two dive shops, and the schooner that does the Cays as a day trip. Everything else in the Grenadines is easier to reach from Bequia than from anywhere you can fly into directly.

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Resources

Footnotes

1. Hurricane Beryl damage and recovery: ~90% of buildings damaged on Union, US$230M losses (22% of GDP), World Bank; storm record, ReliefWeb. ↩ ↩² ↩³

2. Tobago Cays Marine Park fees and regulations, tobagocays.org; reopening 24 October 2024, St Vincent Times. ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. Salt Whistle Bay breach and EC$2.1M restoration, St Vincent Times. ↩

4. NOAA Coral Reef Watch 5 km Degree Heating Weeks, cell 12.625 N −61.325 W: 17.78 on 2023-11-10, 22.13 on 2024-11-09, 12.20 in 2025, near-zero through 2026-08-14, retrieved 16 August 2026 via PacIOOS ERDDAP; post-Beryl reef surveys, SeaKeepers. ↩ ↩²

5. Bequia ferry schedules and fares, bequiaexpress.com. ↩

6. Palm Island US$100M redevelopment agreement, November 2025, Searchlight; Petit St Vincent status, petitstvincent.com. ↩

7. The Nature Conservancy, St Vincent & the Grenadines Coral Reef Report Card (2016), nature.org. ↩

8. JetBlue JFK–St Vincent daily service, businesswire.com; Delta’s Atlanta route ending 5 September 2026, Travel Market Report. ↩