Snorkeling at Peter Island, BVI

Twenty feet of clear water - see the coral heads below?

Blue chromis fish amidst the sea fans

Redband parrotfish

The Virgin Islands are made up of a multitude of little islands, and the opportunities for exploration are boundless. After Thanksgiving at Virgin Gorda, en route back to St. Thomas, we stopped at Peter Island, BVI to snorkel. What a fantastic stop! The cruising guide shows a small area for anchoring on one side of Key Bay, on the south side of the island. A boat was already anchored there, so we checked around the area to see where we might drop the hook. It didn’t look good: sea grass, rubble, and shallows. This is an anchorage? So we cruised slowly around the rest of the bay, and what did we find? The perfect place to anchor! We motored slowly toward a broad sandy swath inshore, watching the depth carefully. Before it got too shallow, we dropped the anchor and fell back into deeper water. We ended up with our anchor and anchor chain over bare sand, and our stern floating over a fantastic reef. We just hopped off into the water and snorkeled to our hearts’ content. Here are some pics of what we saw. We love finding these little places where no one else goes!

Juvenile blue tang in a pretty reef tableau