Pipe Creek Sandbar

Pipe Creek runs between Compass Cay and Staniel Cay in the Exumas, Bahamas, and the sandbars within it appear and disappear with the tide across a shallow bank of extraordinary clarity. There is no single fixed beach here — there are bars, and their positions change.

The Exumas are a chain of some three hundred and sixty cays running a hundred and eighty kilometres, and the bank behind them is shallow enough that the water reads as a set of distinct colours from the air. This is the archipelago people cross by boat rather than visit by road: Staniel Cay has an airstrip and a marina, Compass Cay has a dock, and the water between them is the destination.

The sand is fine white aragonite, the water is warm and often less than two metres deep for kilometres, and at low tide bars emerge as clean crescents with sea on every side. They are unconsolidated — no rock, no vegetation — and a bar charted one season may be somewhere else the next. Nurse sharks at Compass Cay and the swimming pigs at Big Major Cay are the two things everyone in these waters goes to see; both are managed attractions and both have welfare questions attached that are worth knowing about.

Nothing is built and nothing can be. Boats anchor, people wade, and the tide ends the visit. Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park, immediately north, was the first marine protected area of its kind in the world when it was designated in 1958, and it is no-take throughout — the reason the fish in these waters behave the way they do.

A bar that is somewhere else next season. There is no road, no ferry and no scheduled service — you arrive by boat with someone who knows the bank, because it is very shallow and vessels ground here regularly. Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park to the north was the first marine protected area of its kind anywhere, in 1958.