We visited St. Kitts as travel restrictions started to lessen after Covid. The island was fairly strict about vaccination, we had to apply in advance in order to be allowed through customs once we arrived. This suited us and once on the island there were very rarely any crowds to speak of.

We stayed at the Marriott St Kitts Beach Club, not far out of the capital city of Basseterre. You can see much of the resort here, there were several restaurants and a little pizza takeaway place. One big pool and a couple smaller ones. We spent much of our time on the island here.

This is the beach at Frigate Bay. It's a lovely beach but as you can see we arrived during sargassum season. They actually had a little train that came along the beach a couple times a day and scooped up the mounds of sargassum and hauled it off somewhere. It was in the water as well, we generally don't find it to be as horrible as a lot of people do. It occassionally wraps around your legs out at sea but it's really not that bad. There is a small protected area here with a row of rocks just offshore. Outside the rocks are some pretty solid crashing waves.

We rented a car, which required getting a driver's license for the island specifically, which is mostly a formality and some cash. Once we had a car, the first thing we did was circumnavigate the island. If you didn't stop you might be able to do this in an hour. We were in no hurry and we stopped at Brimstone Hill Fortress on the opposite side of the island. There are no roads across the center which is mountainous and rugged. That's looking into the center from this viewpoint.

Brimstone Hill is an impressive fortress with an exciting road up from the coast to get inside it. The island has a very complex history of ownership between France and Britain and sometimes both in unusual circumstances. The fort has a commanding view to west.

Below the fortress is Sandy Point Town and far out in the distance, if you can see the triangular shadow there is the island of Saba (part of the Netherlands).

The fortress takes a few hours to explore and there's a museum in the center section regarding the history of St. Kitts the country and the colonial period leading up to independence. St. Kitts is, at least at the time of our visit, the least populous country in the western hempishere.

Back to Frigate Bay, there are quite a few restaurants in easy walking distance from the Marriott and other nearby resorts (we only had the car for a couple days). This is a local paella variant at one such restaurant (Rock Lobster) nearby.

The island of St. Kitts is an oval with one projecting peninsula that juts out towards Nevis, the other island that makes up the country. This is a view along that peninsula and the road that traverses it.

Out at the end of that road are several more resorts, the ferry to Nevis, and a few private beach bars. We spent one afternoon at Reggae Beach. The St. Kitts beach bars generally have a restaurant, bar, beach chairs, a little store and restrooms available. This was a very relaxing day and the beach here was out of the sargassum and had the best snorkelling we found on the island.

This crazy thing is (apparently) called a feather duster worm. The waters at Reggae Beach had starfish, turtles, lobster, upside down jellyfish and a big variety of fish.

The coral in this bay is in small clumps separated by sandy ocean bottom. I wouldn't call it a reef but there are some nice patches of coral here and there.