Wow! What a great day on Keewaydin! We chartered a boat with “Only Tides” Boat Charters and highly recommend them! Captain Matt and Alise were so friendly and set us up on the island with chairs, umbrella, and cooler! They also provided a fresh fruit tray, ice, sodas and water! The boat is a fiberglass deck style boat and was very nice and also fast, which allowed us more time on Keewaydin! We enjoyed sunning, swimming and found so many perfect and beautiful shells to keep! Alise is very knowledgeable about shell types and which ones are more rare. While there we also saw several different species of beautiful birds! We set up on the ocean side, which was less crowded and so relaxing! We could easily walk to the busier boat side, which also had a food boat! We were there on a Wednesday, so was not as busy as may be weekends. Captain Matt and Alise are a wonderful team and helped to make our Keewaydin day the best! We can’t wait to go again in January!

This is a great beach experience. If you have experience driving a boat and can afford to rent one for a full day, I would do that. However, check the weather. Storms in the afternoon can be pretty bad in the afternoons. If you can't rent a boat, I suggest Hemingway Water Shuttle. If your crowd is ok with getting up early, I would do the 7:45am trip to 1pm pick up. But, bring as many umbrellas/tent( if you rent or have your own boat) as your group needs, lots of water or hydration drinks, snacks/food, lots of sunscreen and apply frequently. There were mention of food, drink, souvenir, ice cream boats, but we went on a Monday in July from 9-1 and none of those were there. I think if you go from Jan-May you would see those any day of the week, but in the off season, maybe just the weekends. We opted to do Hemingway Water Shuttle for our group of 7. We just each had a chair, water bottle, and back pack cooler or bag. We brought a small rolling cooler fulm of waters, 2 umbrellas, and little clipable umbrellas for the chairs. Bring some shade of some sort! If you rented a boat and plan to stay bring a big tent. There is lots of cool shells so bring something for those. There are no bathrooms, trash cans, etc, so plan for that. Bring cash and debit cards in case food boats/ice cream boats show up.it was a great experience even in July!

Beautiful island with a beach that's great to boat up to. Go to the coastal side of the southern end, but get there early as it will fill up with tons of boats. Beautiful waters all around. A great place for a beach party.

Took Hemingway tours over to Island on spring break. They said it may get really busy as the day gets longer, as it’s spring break, but it wasn’t super busy at all. We were a group of 4, took our beach chairs, lunch and beverages. Did some shelling, walked in the refreshing clear water on the North side. A very nice experience.

I have no idea why the reviews are so high for this crowded, barren public beach.As others note the southern tip is packed with boats and basically people tailgating from their motor boat. Not at all the pristine natural beauty you would expect from the reviews. Our guide warned us not to swim on the southern side (something about the current being so strong Michael Phelps would drown) but he didn't warn us that the supposedly safe northern part isn't safe at all. The current there was so strong that even doing full front crawl against it I was barely moving forward. The only reason I didn't think it was a big deal initially was because you could still stand in the shallow water and the current seemed to be moving toward a piece of land jutting out and not open sea. I let my 11 year old daughter swim which was a big mistake. She is a very good swimmer but nearly got dragged away and had to be rescued. To think my 5 year old was swimming in his water wings for a while too makes me shudder. The bottom line with this beach is it's crowded, noisy, not very picturesque and to me is just a really middling public beach that's not at all safe for swimming unless you are a grown adult and extremely careful. That there are zero bathrooms, zero concessions (save some food boats on the northern side) and requires paying for an expensive and long boat ride if you don't have your own adds insult to injury.Hard pass.