Pigeon Point is a beach at the southwestern tip of Tobago whose thatched jetty is the picture the country uses to introduce itself abroad — and whose best water lies a kilometre out to sea. Flat-bottomed boats leave that jetty and cross the flats of Buccoo Reef, with coral, sea fans and fish sliding past under the glass panel at your feet. For years the trip ended with everyone stepping off and walking about on the reef itself; the flats are shallow enough to make it possible, and thousands of feet did the rest. Coral cover inside the marine park fell by roughly 28 percent between 1994 and 2008. Now the boats anchor over sand and you snorkel above the coral instead of standing on it. Then the engine cuts out beyond the reef and you step over the side into the Nylon Pool. It is a bank of soft white coral sand where the water comes up only to your waist, with open sea on every side and the coast a low green line behind you.
It sits warmer and stiller than the sea you left. The crews will tell you that bathing here takes ten years off, and they are honest enough about that part being folklore. The scoops of fine white sand they hand round as a skin scrub do work. Back on shore, the coconut palms leaning over the beach are what is left of the plantation that once worked this peninsula. Behind them Bon Accord Lagoon opens quietly through the trees, a mangrove shallow where much of the reef's fish life grows up before it ever reaches the coral. From December to June the trade wind runs steadily across the bay, and the flat, shallow water off the point is where the island's kite schools set up. It is forgiving because you can stand up in it hundreds of metres out. Late in the afternoon the reef boats come back to their moorings, the wind falls with the sun, the bay goes glassy, and the jetty's thatched roof drops to a black outline on the water.