A palm-lined beach on St. Croix's north shore where the reef runs out from the sand and, about 200 yards offshore, drops away into the deep — the Cane Bay Wall, which divers reach by walking in from the beach. A dive shop and a bar sit across the road and another bar on the rocks at the east end; there is no gate and nothing to pay.
Skip today DPNR water test failed — unsafe for swimming (advisory of Oct 16).
| Day | The call | Why | Best time | Cruise guests here | Sea at the beach | Rain |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Today | Skip today | DPNR water test failed — unsafe for swimming (advisory of Oct 16) | — | None | Some chop · 2.3 ft | 99% |
| Tomorrow | Skip today | Thunderstorms in the forecast · Sargassum offshore | 8 am–11 am | None | Some chop · 2.4 ft | Thunder |
| Sun, Nov 8 | Skip today | Sargassum offshore · Choppy — NW swell into the bay | 8 am–11 am | None | Some chop · 2.3 ft | 82% |
| Mon, Nov 9 | Skip today | Sargassum offshore · Choppy — NNE swell into the bay | 8 am–11 am | ~250, 10 am–3 pm | Gentle · 1.9 ft | 91% |
| Tue, Nov 10 | Skip today | Sargassum offshore · Choppy — NE swell into the bay | 8 am–11 am | ~250, 10 am–3 pm | Gentle · 1.9 ft | 74% |
The call is the same one our beach report makes, refreshed every half hour: the swell reaching the bay (Open-Meteo's marine forecast at the beach's offshore point), the cruise passengers our crowd model puts on the sand, NOAA's sargassum satellite and the rain forecast. When DPNR's latest weekly bacteria test fails the beach, the call is Skip today and names the advisory. It reads the beach, not the dive: a calm call is not a dive report, and the dive shops have the last word on conditions at the Wall. The bars under each call are the hours from 8 am to 5 pm. Today's beach report
Taxi fares from the airport and Christiansted, the ships at Frederiksted, today's beach, dive and weather reads and the island around it — each one opens the full page.
Cane Bay from OpenStreetMap: the sand, Cane Bay Road (Route 80) running along the shore, and the two bars where OpenStreetMap's mappers put them. The dive shop, behind The Landing, and The Waves, along the shore east of Off the Wall, are not on OpenStreetMap. Tap a pin for its section.
Cane Bay is on St. Croix's north shore, on Cane Bay Road (Route 80), which runs along the water past the beach. The airport is on the south coast, Christiansted further east along the north shore, and the cruise pier at Frederiksted on the west end. There is no bus to the beach.
Most visitors come in a rental car — The Waves, the hotel at Cane Bay, advises renting one, and says taxis run by booking, with no Uber or Lyft on the island. Taxis charge the official fares in the table from the airport and Christiansted; the Taxicab Commission posts no fare from the Frederiksted pier to Cane Bay, so agree one before you set off.
| From | 1–2 passengers (flat) | 3+ (each) | Drive |
|---|---|---|---|
| Airport (STX) | $30 | $15 | 20 min · 11.8 km |
| Christiansted | $36 | $17 | 26 min · 17.2 km |
One way: a flat fare for one or two riders, then per person from the third: fares set by the VI Taxicab Commission (rates revised October 24, 2022); night, luggage and waiting surcharges apply. Drive times are Google's for an ordinary day. Fare calculator for any two stops
Ships at Frederiksted today · Rent or take taxis? · The St. Croix guide
There is no gate at Cane Bay and nothing to pay to use the beach: it is a public beach with no park authority, no attendant and no posted hours. What costs money is the gear and the guides. The prices and hours below are the businesses' own, as listed in October 2026.
| The beach | Free |
| Snorkel set, 24 hours (Sweet Bottom) | $20 |
| Snorkel set, a day (Cane Bay Dive Shop) | $18 |
| Scuba set with tank and weights, a day (Cane Bay Dive Shop) | $45 |
| Guided shore dive at Cane Bay (Cane Bay Dive Shop) | $95 |
| Two-tank boat dive (Cane Bay Dive Shop) | $148 |
Sweet Bottom publishes its snorkel price but not its dive prices — ask on (340) 773-3483. Cane Bay Dive Shop's dive prices are from its online booking and its gear rates from its rental page (a second tank the same day is $10); it adds no service charge and says tipping is customary.
| The beach | Open access |
| Sweet Bottom Dive Center | 8:30 am – 5 pm daily |
| Shore dives (Cane Bay Dive Shop) | Tue–Sat, 1:30 pm |
| The Landing Beach Bar | 11 am – 8 pm; Sun to 5; closed Tue |
| AMA at Cane Bay | Tue–Sat, 5 – 9 pm |
The Landing's own site gives Sunday as 11 am to 5 pm in its hours and 10 am to 6 pm in its footer. Sweet Bottom's Discover Scuba runs daily at 9 am and 1 pm by reservation. Off the Wall and The Waves' Sunset Bar publish no hours we could find.
Checked October 14, 2026 against Sweet Bottom Dive Center, Cane Bay Dive Shop's tours and gear rates, The Landing Beach Bar, AMA at Cane Bay, DPNR's beach advisory of October 16, 2026, of October 9, 2026, of August 14, 2026 and the St. Croix Source on the sunscreen law. Prices and hours change: call the shop or the bar before you plan round them. DPNR tests the beach each week and posts the result as a beach advisory; (340) 773-1082 on St. Croix.
Everything is along a few hundred yards of Cane Bay Road: the sand on the water side, the bar and the dive shop across the road, the bar on the rocks at the east end and the hotel beyond it. Prices are the businesses' own, as listed in October 2026.
A strip of sand under palms between the road and the water, with rocks and coral along much of the waterline. Divers and snorkellers go in over sand beside the concrete boat ramp, Sweet Bottom says; sea urchins and fire coral live in the rocks either side, so watch your feet. We found no lifeguard service listed for Cane Bay: swim with someone.
Photo: Clark Anderson - Aquaimages at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 2.5The dive shop at the beach, across the road behind The Landing, open 8:30 am to 5 pm every day. It dives from shore and has no boat: guided dives on the Wall in small groups (one guide to one to four divers on average, it says), Discover Scuba for first-timers 10 and up daily at 9 am and 1 pm — a pool session, then the house reef to 40 ft — night dives at the Frederiksted pier or the Davis Bay wall, gear by the day and air and nitrox fills. A snorkel set is $20 for 24 hours.
The bar and restaurant across the road from the sand: American bar food with a seafood lean and vegetarian and vegan dishes, and Leatherback, the beer brewed on St. Croix. Open 11 am to 8 pm on Monday and Wednesday to Saturday, 11 to 5 on Sunday, closed on Tuesday; burgers are $12 on Mondays and eight wings $12 on Wednesdays. The Waves says it has live music.
The bar on the rocks at the east end of the beach. The Waves, next door, lists it for pizza and burgers and bingo on Tuesday nights; it publishes no hours or menu of its own — its website says only "coming soon" — so check before you plan a meal round it.
Photo: Prayitno, CC BY 2.0Despite its name, Cane Bay Dive Shop has worked from its shop across from the Frederiksted pier since Hurricane Maria. It still dives here: guided shore dives on the Wall Tuesday to Saturday at 1:30 pm for certified divers 10 and up, at most six to a tour, $95 a diver; snorkel tours at Cane Bay; and two-tank boat dives along the north-shore wall from Salt River Marina at 8:30 am, $148. Getting to the boat is up to you. Its shop also runs guided dives and snorkel tours at the Frederiksted pier.
Photo: Clark Anderson - Aquaimages at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 2.5Swim out from the boat ramp over the reef. Coral starts in a few feet of water, and about 200 yards out the bottom falls away — from about 40 ft, the territory's tourism department and Sweet Bottom say, steepening to near-vertical past 80 ft and on down past 13,000 ft. Sweet Bottom's dive notes put the drop at 200 to 250 yards out, past old anchors crusted in coral. Snorkellers get the shallow reef; divers walk in from the sand with a guide or rented tanks. Reef sharks, turtles and schools of reef fish are the common sightings, the shop says. Cane Bay is not inside one of the territory's marine protected areas, so the reef's care is down to the people on it.
Photo: Sean Linehan, NOAA, Public domainTwo bays west, Davis Bay sits below the Carambola resort with a wall of its own: the top at about 25 ft and 75 yards out, Sweet Bottom says, sloping to about 180 ft before it drops away. The entry is across the resort's land, and Sweet Bottom's night dives go there or to the Frederiksted pier. Ask the shop how to get in before you go.
Photo: Kborer, Public domainA few miles east along the coast: a national historical park and ecological preserve round a sheltered, mangrove-lined bay, with an archaeological site the National Park Service counts among the most important in the Virgin Islands, and the place of the 1493 encounter with Columbus. Cane Bay Dive Shop's boat leaves from its marina for the north-shore wall, and kayak tours paddle the bay, some at night for its bioluminescence.
The St. Croix Scenic 50, a 50 km ultramarathon and relay over road, single track and jeep trail, starts and finishes on Cane Bay beach each January — the next is on January 17, 2027. In September the Wall2Wall sprint triathlon and Try-a-Tri gather at Cane Bay: an 800 m swim, a 14-mile ride and a 3-mile run, or half that for the Try-a-Tri. The 2026 race was on September 20.
Cane Bay has two bars on the beach front and a restaurant a few minutes' walk east. The Landing, across the road from the sand, serves lunch and dinner six days a week; Off the Wall is the bar on the rocks at the east end; and The Waves hotel has AMA, a seafood restaurant open for dinner Tuesday to Saturday, and its Sunset Bar.
For more choice, Christiansted's restaurants are the other side of the island.
Warm all year: highs in the mid-80s °F and a steady easterly trade wind, with short tropical showers rather than all-day rain. December to April is the dry, busy season. June to November is hurricane season, with the peak from mid-August to mid-October.
Cane Bay faces north across deep water toward St. Thomas, and the entry is gentle most of the year — Sweet Bottom calls the waves usually timid. The exception is winter: swells from storms far out in the North Atlantic reach the north shore and can make the entry rough for a day or two. The call at the top of this page reads the swell every half hour.
| Day | Sky | High / low | Rain | Wind | Seas offshore |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Today | Showers | 84° / 76°F | 96% | SW 14 mph, gusts 29 | 2.4 ft |
| Tomorrow | Thunderstorms | 82° / 76°F | 96% | SW 14 mph, gusts 31 | 3.1 ft |
| Sun, Nov 8 | Drizzle | 84° / 78°F | 75% | WSW 9 mph, gusts 21 | 2.8 ft |
| Mon, Nov 9 | Drizzle | 86° / 79°F | 90% | SW 4 mph, gusts 12 | 2 ft |
| Tue, Nov 10 | Drizzle | 83° / 79°F | 81% | ENE 9 mph, gusts 18 | 2.1 ft |
| Wed, Nov 11 | Drizzle | 86° / 79°F | 75% | E 10 mph, gusts 23 | 2.2 ft |
| Thu, Nov 12 | Drizzle | 87° / 80°F | 53% | ESE 8 mph, gusts 21 | 2.4 ft |
Open-Meteo forecast for St. Croix, refreshed every half hour. The seas are offshore; how much of it reaches the sand is the call above. NWS alerts & marine forecast · North swell season
Daily-mean sea-surface temperature off St. Croix, averaged 2021–2024 (Open-Meteo marine reanalysis): warmest in Oct (86.5°F), coolest in Feb (80.2°F).
Cruise ships call at the Frederiksted pier, on the west end, and Cane Bay is one of the beaches their excursions and taxis reach. It is a long way from the pier, and our crowd model sends only a small share of each ship's passengers this far; the days below are that model's.
13 of the next 31 days have a ship in Frederiksted. The busiest at Cane Bay, by our model:
Our crowd model, not a head count: it puts about 12% of each ship's passengers on Cane Bay, starting about 75 minutes after the ship is alongside and gone 90 minutes before it sails; past 700 on the sand we call it packed. The same model makes the call at the top of the page and on our beach report.
No — there is no public live webcam at Cane Bay that we can embed, and no embeddable camera anywhere on St. Croix at the moment. We would rather say so than show a still photo dressed up as live. The nearest live cameras are on St. Thomas and Water Island, about 40 miles north.
Estate Cane Bay, behind the beach, is an 18th-century sugar plantation; its ruins along the North Shore road are well preserved and extensive, the St. Croix Landmarks Society said when historian George Tyson led a walk through them in March 2004.
The estate is in the Danish land register as Cane Bay, in the North Side B quarter; the list of estate names also gives a later name for it, Lucky Bottom.
After Hurricane Hugo, Hal Rosbach starts diving the Wall straight from the beach instead of by the long boat ride from Christiansted, and the Cane Bay Dive Shop grows out of it.
After the storm the Cane Bay Dive Shop works from its shop across from the Frederiksted pier. Sweet Bottom Dive Center, whose base at the Carambola resort is closed by the damage, opens a new shop across the road from Cane Bay beach.
Sources: Danish National Archives: estate names on St. Croix · VI Source, 2004 · Cane Bay Dive Shop: about · Go To St. Croix: Sweet Bottom at Cane Bay · Sweet Bottom Dive Center: diving
Taxis on St. Croix run by booking and there is no ride-hailing app, The Waves says. Agree a pick-up time when you book the ride out, or rent a car.
The U.S. Virgin Islands ban the sale of sunscreens with oxybenzone, octinoxate or octocrylene. Bring a mineral (zinc or titanium) one — the coral starts a few feet from the sand.
The waterline is rock and coral in places, with urchins in the shallows. Go in by the boat ramp, and wear something on your feet until you are swimming.
DPNR tests Cane Bay for bacteria every week. After heavy rain, stay out of the water where runoff comes down, as DPNR advises.
From about November to March a north swell can make the entry rough for a day or two. The call at the top of the page reads the swell every half hour, and the dive shops know the day's conditions.
The Landing is closed on Tuesdays, and AMA serves dinner only Tuesday to Saturday. Bring food and water if you are staying all day.
Think twice todaySt. CroixBuck IslandSargassum offshore · Choppy — SSW swell into the bay
Skip today todaySt. CroixProtestant CayDPNR water test failed — unsafe for swimming (advisory of Oct 16)
Skip today todaySt. CroixRainbow BeachSargassum offshore · Choppy — NW swell into the bay
Good todaySt. CroixFrederiksted BeachNo cruise crowd today · Choppy — SSW swell into the bay
St. CroixSandy PointWild & empty · Sea turtles · Check opening days
The island guideSt. CroixGetting from St. Thomas to St. Croix by seaplane or ferry, the airport, taxi fares, Buck Island, Christiansted, Frederiksted and every main beach on a true map.Yes. Cane Bay is a public beach with no gate, no attendant and no entry fee. What costs money is the gear and the guides: Sweet Bottom Dive Center rents a snorkel set for $20 for 24 hours, and Cane Bay Dive Shop's guided shore dive at Cane Bay is $95 a diver, as listed in October 2026.
About 200 yards from the beach. The territory's tourism department and Sweet Bottom Dive Center say the drop-off starts in about 40 feet of water and falls to more than 13,000 feet; Sweet Bottom's dive notes put the drop at 200 to 250 yards out, near-vertical by about 80 feet. Coral starts in a few feet of water much closer in.
Yes. Coral starts in a few feet of water off the beach, and on a calm day snorkellers can swim out over the reef toward the drop-off. Go in beside the concrete boat ramp, watch for sea urchins and fire coral in the shallow rocks, and do not touch the coral. Sweet Bottom Dive Center, across the road, rents snorkel sets for $20 for 24 hours.
Yes — Sweet Bottom Dive Center, across the road from the beach behind The Landing, open 8:30 am to 5 pm every day. It dives from shore and has no boat. Despite its name, Cane Bay Dive Shop is in Frederiksted, across from the pier; it runs guided shore dives at Cane Bay Tuesday to Saturday at 1:30 pm.
By rental car or a booked taxi: there is no bus to the beach and no Uber or Lyft on St. Croix. It is about 20 minutes (11.8 km) by road from the airport and 26 minutes (17.2 km) from Christiansted. The official taxi fare from the airport is $30 for one or two, $15 each for three or more; from Christiansted $36 for one or two, $17 each for three or more. St. Croix fares are a flat rate for one or two riders, then per person from the third.
Yes, but plan it. Ships dock at Frederiksted, on the west end, and the Taxicab Commission's rate sheet has no fare from the pier to Cane Bay, so agree the fare and a pick-up time with the driver before you set off, and keep the all-aboard time in mind. Cane Bay Dive Shop, across from the pier, runs guided shore dives at Cane Bay Tuesday to Saturday at 1:30 pm.
The Landing Beach Bar, across the road from the sand, is open 11 am to 8 pm Monday and Wednesday to Saturday and 11 am to 5 pm on Sunday, and closed on Tuesday. Off the Wall is the bar on the rocks at the east end. At The Waves, a short walk east, AMA serves seafood dinners Tuesday to Saturday, 5 to 9 pm, and the hotel has its Sunset Bar.
DPNR tests Cane Bay for bacteria every week. In its advisory of October 16, 2026 the beach failed the territory's standard for the week of October 12–16 and DPNR called the water unsafe for swimming or fishing; it passed for October 5–9 and failed for August 10–14. While the latest test is a fail, the call at the top of this page is Skip today. Check the latest advisory and stay out of storm runoff after heavy rain, as DPNR advises.
We found no lifeguard service listed for Cane Bay. Treat it as an unguarded beach: swim with someone, go in by the boat ramp, and stay out when a winter north swell is breaking on the reef.
No. Cane Bay is outside the territory's marine protected areas: DPNR's St. Croix park, the St. Croix East End Marine Park, is on the island's East End. The reef is still fragile — do not touch, stand on or take coral, and use a mineral sunscreen.
No public live stream we can embed. There is no embeddable camera on St. Croix at the moment; the nearest live cameras are on St. Thomas and Water Island, about 40 miles north.