A small island in Christiansted harbour, a two-minute boat ride from the town's boardwalk, with a strip of sand at its west end, a beach bar, a barbecue stand and a hotel. The beach in downtown Christiansted — sheltered water, the fort across the harbour, and an endangered lizard in the undergrowth behind the sand.
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) | — | — | Gentle · 1.6 ft | 99% |
| Tomorrow | Skip today | Thunderstorms in the forecast · Sargassum offshore | 10 am–1 pm | — | Gentle · 1.6 ft | Thunder |
| Sun, Nov 8 | Skip today | Sargassum offshore · Choppy — NW swell into the bay | 8 am–11 am | — | Gentle · 1.6 ft | 82% |
| Mon, Nov 9 | Think twice | Sargassum offshore · Showers likely (91%) | 8 am–11 am | — | Gentle · 1.3 ft | 91% |
| Tue, Nov 10 | Think twice | Sargassum offshore · Showers likely (74%) | 8 am–11 am | — | Gentle · 1.3 ft | 74% |
The call is the same one our beach report makes, refreshed every half hour: the swell reaching the harbour (Open-Meteo's marine forecast off the beach), 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; the result and its date are in the water-test section below. It is a model, not a lifeguard's report. The bars under each call are the hours from 8 am to 5 pm. Today's beach report
Taxi fares into Christiansted from the airport and the cruise pier, today's beach and weather reads, Buck Island's boats from the same waterfront, and the island around it — each one opens the full page.
Protestant Cay and the Christiansted waterfront from OpenStreetMap: the cay with its beach, hotel and dock, the boardwalk across the water with the ferry pier in front of the King Christian Hotel, and Fort Christiansvaern. Tap a pin for its section.
Protestant Cay sits in Christiansted harbour on St. Croix's north shore, about 150 m (160 yd) off the town's waterfront. The only way over is by boat: the hotel's ferry — The Beach Bar calls it a water taxi — leaves from the boardwalk in front of the King Christian Hotel and takes about two minutes. Hotel guests ride free; the hotel publishes no fare or timetable for day visitors, so ask at the dock or call (340) 773-2035.
Getting to the boardwalk is the longer part. The airport is on the south coast and the cruise pier at Frederiksted on the far west end. There is no taxi to the cay: the official fares in the table are to Christiansted, and from the drop-off the boardwalk is a short walk. Driving, the National Park Service's car park by Fort Christiansvaern is the nearest lot, and the Park Service says cars must be out of it by 4:30 pm.
| From | 1–2 passengers (flat) | 3+ (each) | Drive |
|---|---|---|---|
| Airport (STX) | $24 | $14 | — |
| Frederiksted | $36 | $17 | — |
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. Fare calculator for any two stops
Taxi from the airport · Taxi from the cruise pier · The St. Croix guide
The Hotel on the Cay holds the island on a lease from the government, and the beach, the bar, the barbecue and the ferry are all the hotel's. Day visitors are welcome — The Beach Bar's own site invites them to spend the day on the cay — but the hotel publishes no entry fee and no day-visitor ferry fare. The prices and hours below are the hotel's and the bar's own, as listed in October 2026.
| The ferry, hotel guests | Free |
| The ferry, day visitors | Not published — ask at the dock |
| Loungers, umbrellas and cabanas (the Dock House) | Not published |
| Cocktails at The Beach Bar | $8–$14 |
| Beer (domestic / imported or Leatherback) | $5 / $6 |
| Bucket of five beers | $20–$24 |
The bar's menu lists its drink prices; Rolling Smoke and the Dock House publish none. Travel guides quote a few dollars for the round-trip ferry, but the hotel does not publish a fare, so we do not print one.
| The Beach Bar | 10 am – 8 pm daily |
| Rolling Smoke | 11 am – 5:30 pm daily |
| The hotel's pool | Temporarily closed |
| Fort Christiansvaern, across the water | 8:30 am – 4:30 pm daily |
The Beach Bar's own site gives 10 am to 8 pm; the hotel's dining page gives the bar 10 am to 10 pm. The hotel publishes no ferry timetable. The fort is closed on Thanksgiving and Christmas Day.
Checked October 29, 2026 against the Hotel on the Cay's dining page, its rooms and private-island pages, The Beach Bar, its menu, DPNR's beach advisory of October 16, 2026, of October 9, 2026, of September 25, 2026, the National Park Service's Christiansted hours and the St. Croix Source on the sunscreen law. Prices and hours change: the hotel answers on (340) 773-2035. DPNR tests the beach each week and posts the result as a beach advisory; (340) 773-1082 on St. Croix.
Everything is a few steps apart: the dock on the side facing town, the sand round the west end, the bar and the barbecue behind it, and the hotel in the middle of the island. Prices and hours are the hotel's and the bar's own, as listed in October 2026.
About a hundred metres of sand round the cay's west end, looking out over the harbour and its moored boats. The hotel calls it Cay Beach and the water calm; its own page sells it for swimming, sunbathing and snorkelling, and The Beach Bar calls it the only beach in downtown Christiansted. We found no lifeguard service listed: swim with someone, and read the water test before you go in.
The hotel's boats shuttle between the boardwalk, in front of the King Christian Hotel, and the cay's dock in about two minutes. The ride is complimentary for hotel guests, the hotel says. It publishes no timetable and no fare for day visitors — ask the crew, and ask when the last boat back runs.
Photo: Cm.christiansted.horster, CC BY-SA 4.0The bar on the beach, open 10 am to 8 pm every day by its own site (the hotel's dining page says until 10). Rum drinks are $8 to $14 — a painkiller $9, a rum punch $8 — beer $5 or $6 including Leatherback, brewed on St. Croix, and the cheapest soft drinks $2. Loungers, umbrellas and cabanas are rented at the Dock House by the pier; neither publishes prices. Giant chess over the harbour, Jenga and ring toss are there to borrow.
The barbecue on the cay, 11 am to 5:30 pm every day: smoked meats and seafood, with vegetarian dishes, the hotel says. It publishes no menu prices. After 5:30 the food is back across the water in town.
Photo: Prayitno / Thank you for (12 millions +) view from Los Angeles, USA, CC BY 2.0The low, arched hotel in the middle of the island, built in 1968–69. Every room has a balcony — over the harbour and the sunrise, over the beach and the sunset, or across to the fort — and the hotel takes weddings on the beach. Its pool is temporarily closed. The government, which leases out the property, signed a 60-year lease with new developers in 2022 for a renovation and 60 more suites; the hotel now describes its rooms as recently renovated.
On a clean-water week the harbour is a sheltered swim. Check DPNR's latest advisory first — Protestant Cay failed the bacteria test for two weeks running in October 2026 — and keep near the beach: boats come and go through the harbour all day.
Photo: Jaro Nemčok, CC BY-SA 3.0The hotel lists snorkelling off the cay. The bottom off the beach is sand rather than coral reef — this peacock flounder was photographed on it near the cay in 2010. For coral, the reef off Buck Island and the wall at Cane Bay are the island's snorkels.
Photo: Auratus Nicole, CC BY-SA 3.0The St. Croix ground lizard, a small striped ground-dweller, was gone from St. Croix itself by the late 1960s; its two natural populations left are here and on Green Cay, the Fish and Wildlife Service says, put at 100 to 300 lizards each in 2018. It forages in the leaf litter and undergrowth behind the sand. Watch it, and leave it and its leaf litter be.
Photo: Photo by Martin Lie, Trondheim, Norway, CC BY-SA 3.0The yellow Danish fort on the waterfront, next to the ferry pick-up, is the heart of the Christiansted National Historic Site — the first National Park Service unit in the Virgin Islands, from 1952. The fort was the Danish governor's residence. Open 8:30 am to 4:30 pm daily; the Park Service charges $10 for visitors 16 and over.
Photo: Prayitno / Thank you for (12 millions +) view from Los Angeles, USA, CC BY 2.0Christiansted's boardwalk runs along the harbour from the ferry pick-up, past bars and restaurants built out over the water and the docks where the day boats tie up — Buck Island trips among them. The cay's beach and the town are an easy afternoon together.
On the cay there are two places, both the hotel's: The Beach Bar on the sand for rum drinks and beer, and Rolling Smoke for barbecue until 5:30 pm.
Across the water, the King Christian Hotel — the Hotel on the Cay's sister hotel, beside the ferry pick-up — has several restaurants and a coffee roastery, and the rest of the Christiansted boardwalk and town are a short walk.
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; the Fish and Wildlife Service notes that storm surge from Irma and Maria in 2017 struck the low cays off St. Croix hard, this one among them.
The cay sits inside Christiansted harbour, which faces north; the beach is on its sheltered west end, and the open-sea swell breaks on the reef out beyond the harbour, where you can see it from the sand. Calm most days. Heavy rain is the thing to watch here: DPNR advises staying out of the water where storm runoff comes down, and the cay sits in a town harbour. The call at the top of this page reads the swell and the rain every half hour.
| Day | Sky | High / low | Rain | Wind | Seas offshore |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Today | Showers | 85° / 77°F | 99% | SW 13 mph, gusts 29 | 2.6 ft |
| Tomorrow | Thunderstorms | 84° / 76°F | 83% | SW 14 mph, gusts 32 | 3 ft |
| Sun, Nov 8 | Thunderstorms | 85° / 76°F | 82% | WSW 10 mph, gusts 22 | 2.7 ft |
| Mon, Nov 9 | Drizzle | 87° / 79°F | 91% | NW 4 mph, gusts 10 | 2.2 ft |
| Tue, Nov 10 | Drizzle | 85° / 79°F | 74% | ENE 10 mph, gusts 19 | 1.9 ft |
| Wed, Nov 11 | Overcast | 87° / 81°F | 54% | ENE 10 mph, gusts 24 | 2.1 ft |
| Thu, Nov 12 | Drizzle | 87° / 81°F | 51% | ESE 8 mph, gusts 21 | 2.8 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).
No — there is no public live webcam on Christiansted harbour 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.
Local tradition holds that while the French ruled St. Croix, Protestants who died on the island were not buried on the Catholic main island but out on the cay — hence its name. It is told as a story, not a record, though the cay does have a historic burial ground, the St. Thomas Source reported in 2022.
Under the Danes the harbour's chief pilot lived on the cay for many years, a post often held by a naval officer. Hans Frederik Meyer Visby, visiting the Danish West Indies in the late 1860s, painted the pilot's house with the Danish flag above it.
Biologists count about 200 St. Croix ground lizards spread over the cay. On St. Croix itself the lizard is last reported in 1968; the mongoose is blamed.
The Hotel on the Cay goes up in the middle of the island.
The St. Croix ground lizard is listed as endangered, and Protestant Cay and Green Cay are designated its critical habitat.
Ten lizards from Protestant Cay are moved to Ruth Cay, off the south coast, to start a second population; it grows to an estimated 170 adults by 2007.
The Fish and Wildlife Service and the hotel's owners agree to protect the lizard's habitat — the leaf litter and undergrowth the hotel's landscaping had been clearing.
Storm surge from the two hurricanes strikes the low-lying cays off St. Croix, Protestant Cay among them; what it did to the lizards there is not known, the Fish and Wildlife Service said in 2018.
Governor Albert Bryan Jr. signs a 60-year lease of the 7.2-acre hotel property with Christiansted Harbor Resort and Marina LLC, which won the government's 2020 bid, and sends it to the Legislature: a $25 million, two-phase renovation, 60 new units and a better ferry. On November 15 the developers tell the Senate the hotel will stay open through the work.
Sources: Uncommon Caribbean, 2021 · Per Nielsen, Flåden og Dansk Vestindien (1997) · U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service: 5-year review, 2013 · U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service: recovery plan amendment, 2018 · Government of the Virgin Islands, 2022 · St. Thomas Source, 2022
DPNR tests Protestant Cay for bacteria every week. It failed for October 5–9 and 12–16, 2026, after weeks of passing; the latest advisory is the one that counts. After heavy rain, stay out of the harbour water whatever the last test said.
The hotel publishes no ferry timetable. Ask the crew when the last boat back runs, and what a day visitor pays, before you settle in.
The U.S. Virgin Islands ban the sale of sunscreens with oxybenzone, octinoxate or octocrylene. Bring a mineral (zinc or titanium) one.
The small striped lizards in the leaf litter behind the sand are St. Croix ground lizards, an endangered species found naturally in only two places. Watch them; do not chase or feed them.
Rolling Smoke closes at 5:30 pm and the bar at 8 by its own site; for dinner, the King Christian Hotel's restaurants and the boardwalk are across the water.
Fort Christiansvaern is beside the ferry pick-up, open 8:30 am to 4:30 pm. See the fort in the morning, then cross to the beach for the afternoon.
Think twice todaySt. CroixBuck IslandSargassum offshore · Choppy — SSW swell into the bay
Skip today todaySt. CroixCane BayDPNR water test failed — unsafe for swimming (advisory of Oct 16)
Think twice 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.By the hotel's ferry from the Christiansted boardwalk. The boat leaves from in front of the King Christian Hotel and takes about two minutes to the dock on the cay. There is no other public way over.
It is complimentary for Hotel on the Cay guests, the hotel says. The hotel publishes no fare or timetable for day visitors, so ask at the dock or call the hotel on (340) 773-2035; travel guides quote a few dollars for the round trip.
Yes. The Beach Bar invites day visitors to spend the day on the cay, and loungers, umbrellas and cabanas are rented at the Dock House. The beach, the bar, the barbecue and the ferry are all the hotel's.
Check DPNR's latest advisory first. In its weekly tests the beach failed the territory's bacteria standard for October 5–9 and October 12–16, 2026, and the advisory of October 16 calls it unsafe for swimming or fishing; it had passed every week from August 10 to September 25. After heavy rain, stay out of the water where storm runoff comes down, as DPNR advises.
There is no taxi to the cay itself: taxis go to Christiansted, and the ferry leaves from the boardwalk there. The official fare from the airport to Christiansted is $24 for one or two, $14 each for three or more; from Frederiksted, where the cruise ships dock, $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 it is across the island. Ships dock at Frederiksted, on the west end; take a taxi to Christiansted (the official fare is $36 for one or two, $17 each for three or more), walk to the boardwalk in front of the King Christian Hotel and take the ferry over. Agree a time for the ride back, and keep the all-aboard time in mind.
Yes. The Beach Bar serves rum drinks and beer from 10 am to 8 pm daily by its own site (the hotel's dining page says until 10 pm), and Rolling Smoke serves barbecue, seafood and vegetarian dishes from 11 am to 5:30 pm daily. For dinner, the King Christian Hotel's restaurants and the boardwalk are across the water.
The hotel lists snorkelling off the beach. The bottom there is harbour sand rather than coral reef, with flatfish such as peacock flounders; for reef, Buck Island's underwater trail and the wall at Cane Bay are St. Croix's snorkels.
We found no lifeguard service listed for Protestant Cay. Swim with someone, keep close to the beach — boats use the harbour all day — and read DPNR's water test first.
The St. Croix ground lizard, an endangered species since 1977. It died out on St. Croix itself by the late 1960s, and its only natural populations left are on Protestant Cay and Green Cay; the cay is its designated critical habitat. Watch it in the leaf litter behind the sand, and leave it be.
Local tradition says that when the French ruled St. Croix in the late 1600s, Protestants who died could not be buried on the Catholic main island and were buried on the cay instead. It is a story rather than a record, but the name has stuck.
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.