Pigeon Point is a beach at the southwestern tip of Tobago, in Trinidad and Tobago, whose thatched jetty walking out over water shallow enough to show the boats' shadows on the sand is the island's postcard, and from it glass-bottom boats run out over Buccoo Reef to the Nylon Pool, a waist-deep sandbank a kilometre offshore. The point is a coral peninsula that a coconut plantation once worked, and the palms leaning over the sand are what is left of the estate; behind it lies Bon Accord lagoon, a mangrove-fringed shallow where much of the reef's fish life grows up before it reaches the coral, and off it Buccoo Reef, the largest in Tobago, protected since 1973. The flat-bottomed boats leave the jetty and cross the reef flats with the sea fans, brain coral and parrotfish sliding past beneath the glass panel, and then cut their engines out beyond the reef, where the passengers step over the side into the Nylon Pool.
The pool is a sandbank in the middle of the sea, named by Princess Margaret in 1962 for water as clear as a nylon stocking, and the boat crews will say that bathing in it takes ten years off; the coast is a low green line behind and the swell breaks on the reef beyond. From December to June the trade wind runs steadily across the bay, and the shallow water off the point is where the island's kitesurfing and windsurfing schools set up, on flat water inside the reef. In the dry months the sea holds still and glass-clear over the reef, and from July the outflow of the Orinoco drifts north and greens it. Towards the end of the afternoon the reef boats come back to their moorings, the sky turns orange and the thatched roof of the jetty drops to a black outline on the water. Pigeon Point is a jetty over clear water, and the pool it sails to has no shore.