Great Bird Island

Antigua: Kayak, Snorkel & Great Bird Island Day Trip

Rated 4.9 across a solid run of reviews, this is the best single day on the water in Antigua. You paddle out through the mangroves, cross to Great Bird Island — uninhabited, protected and home to nesting red-billed tropicbirds — climb ten minutes to the cliff edge for the view east over open Atlantic, then snorkel the reef and swim off the beach. Three genuinely different things in one four-hour trip, all inside the North Sound marine park.

• Paddle the sheltered mangrove channels of the North Sound
• Land on Great Bird Island and climb to the tropicbird cliffs
• Guided snorkel over shallow reef inside the marine park

Antigua: Transparent Boat Tour to Bird & Hell’s Gate Islands

Antigua’s North Sound is a maze of uninhabited islets and reef inside a protected marine park, and the transparent-hulled boat is a smart way to see it — the coral, rays and fish are visible from your seat, which suits mixed groups where not everyone wants to swim. Great Bird Island gives you a ten-minute climb to a cliff edge with tropicbirds wheeling below, and Hell’s Gate is the arch every Antiguan photograph eventually gets around to.

• See-through hull, so the reef is visible without getting in
• Great Bird Island — nesting red-billed tropicbirds and a short cliff walk
• Hell’s Gate, a natural limestone arch standing out of the sea

Antigua: Guided Green Island Snorkel with Sea Turtles

Antigua’s reefs sit inside a marine park, and the sea-grass beds around Green Island are where turtles come to feed — which makes this one of the most reliable turtle encounters in the eastern Caribbean. Groups are kept small, guides get in the water with you, and gear is included, so it works just as well for a nervous first-timer as for a confident snorkeller. Expect calm, waist-to-chest-deep water for most of the stop, plus rum punch on the way back.

• Snorkel with green and hawksbill turtles in their feeding grounds
• Protected reef water inside the North Sound Marine Park
• Small group with in-water guides and all snorkel gear

Dickenson Bay

The busy, brilliant north-west beach

Antigua’s best-known beach and the heart of the north-west resort strip: a long crescent of pale sand and flat, shallow water, with beach bars, watersports operators and sunset views straight out to sea. Not the quiet option — deliberately.

Devil’s Bridge

Atlantic power carved into limestone

At Indian Town Point on the far east coast, the Atlantic has cut a natural limestone arch and a field of blowholes that spout on every big swell. It is raw, windy and genuinely dangerous close to the edge — and the most dramatic ten minutes of coast on the island.

Barbuda’s Pink Sand Beach

Seventeen miles, almost nobody

The west coast of Barbuda is one continuous beach — often called 17 Mile Beach — where crushed pink coral tints the sand a pale rose. Behind it sits Codrington Lagoon and the largest magnificent frigate bird colony in the Western Hemisphere. It is 90 minutes by ferry from Antigua, and worth every one of them.