The Beauty of St. Croix

With August just days away it feels like summer is already coming to a close. We’re starting to look ahead to our winter season preparation, and excited for a return to St. Croix.

Why St. Croix?

In case you’re new to Juliet’s family, each winter we leave Miami and the Bahamas behind in search of calmer weather. The cold fronts that plague the northern North Atlantic make the Gulf Stream crossings unpleasant and borderline dangerous. Instead of contending with that, we find calmer waters down in the US Virgin Islands, namely St. Croix. This off-season gives our crew a break from all the travel the Bahamas itineraries require. And It also allows our customers to explore another destination without worrying about what the accommodations with be like.

About St. Croix

This little island is a hidden gem, and conveniently a part of the US! That means no passport required, and from most airports it’s an easy one-stop flight through Miami or Puerto Rico. Once you land, our taxi driver will bring you to the pier to board Juliet. Then you unpack and set up your dive gear, and the pool is open on one of the best dive sites around.

The Frederiksted Pier

Ask any crew member and they’ll tell you if they had it their way, we wouldn’t leave the pier all week. Not because we don’t want to do our jobs, but because there’s just so much to see!

At over 1,500 ft (500m) long, the pier is nearly impossible to explore on one dive (not that we haven’t tried!). So we break it up into three sections throughout the week. On boarding day, your check out dive is at the shallowest part of the pier including the sea wall, rubble piles, and support pilings up to about 18′ (6m) of water. This is where we’ve found the highest concentrations of seahorses, gold-spotted eels, and octopuses. Later in the week, we’ll anchor off the middle section on the south side for flying gurnards, batfish, sting rays and the ever-present frogfish hunt. The final deeper section has more green sea turtles than you’ll ever see in one dive, spotted eagle rays, more octopus, huge schools of fish and dramatic lighting on the pillars in 45′ of blue water.

And the night dives! Hands down, best night dive of any site we do, all destinations. Have you ever seen eight octopuses on one dive? Common occurrence! Four batfish? Totally normal. Eels so strange you’ll be pouring over the Fish ID books late into the night trying to sort out which ones you saw.

And we haven’t even left the pier yet! There’s so much more to St. Croix…including a surprise for the first 10 people to book if you use coup0n  “STX25” via the deposit page.

The West Side

Just south of the pier are a series of sloping reefs that offer some incredible sea life. Eelectric Avenue is appropriately named for the abnormally large population of Green Moray Eels. You’ll see fields of garden eels, huge schools of grunts, and friendly hawksbill sea turtles, just to name a few of the common sightings.

North of the Pier is Butler Bay, famous for it’s field of artificial reefs at varying degrees of difficulty and depth. The North Wind is a stately little tug in 40′ (12m), next to a large barge. Further north is the Suffolk Maid and Coakley, sitting near each other in 70’/23m. For a real show, there’s Armageddon, the remnants of the old Pier that was reconstructed in the 1980s. Materials from the torn down pier were loaded onto a barge and sunk in 90’/30m at the southern end of Butler Bay. And it’s a wealth of marine life and drama!

Cane Bay

The walls of Cane Bay are also full of drama and intrigue. North Star sheerly drops from 20’/6m to endless depths. The light at the top sparkles over feeding sea turtles and waving sea fans. Further east in Cane Bay is a sloping wall of sand channels and higher profile coral heads. This area is fantastic for snorkeling or looking for colonial era anchors abandoned to the depths.  Keep your ears open for humpback whale song during the dive. The whales migrate down to this area to calve and breed. Males can be heard singing from as far as 10 miles away!

Convinced yet?

If you haven’t experienced St. Croix, you simply must. And do it soon! We’re looking into different destinations to rotate in for Winter 2026-27, so don’t sleep on it. This winter is a shortened season due to haul-out, and next winter could be the last one. The first trips are only 6 months away, ensuite cabins are still available on 4 trips, but they are going fast. Book your spots soon!