The Best Spots to Watch the Sunrise on Tybee Island

Tybee's beach faces the Atlantic. That one piece of geography decides almost everything about light on this island: the sun comes up out of open water, and it goes down behind you, over the marsh on the far side. Visitors usually work this out on their second evening, standing on the sand at a quarter to eight, watching the sky in front of them turn a disappointing grey.

The sunrise side is the easy half. You do not need a secret vantage point, because the horizon is uninterrupted from one end of the island to the other and every beach access on the east side aims at it. What you need is to be awake, and to be in position earlier than feels necessary.

Set the alarm for twilight, not for sunrise

The mistake is treating the sunrise time as the arrival time. By the time the sun physically clears the water, the best part is twenty minutes old.

What you want is civil twilight, which the US Naval Observatory has beginning roughly 25 minutes before sunrise here. That is the window when the sky over the water goes from grey to pink to a hard orange line, before there is any sun in the frame at all. Almost nobody is on the beach for it.

The times shift through the year, so check yours. In early September sunrise lands just after 7:00 AM, slides to about 7:15 by the end of the month, and reaches roughly 7:27 by mid-October. Across the full calendar it swings well over an hour in each direction, which is the difference between a civilized early start in November and a genuinely brutal one in June. Look up the times for your dates and subtract half an hour. That is your alarm.

Below are five places to spend that half hour, ordered by how far you have to travel before coffee.

1. The beach at the end of the block

The simplest version, and on a first morning it is the right one. The beach is one block east of our front door, about a two-minute walk, and at that hour there is no line, no parking question and nothing to plan. You walk out, you cross the sand, you stop where the wet part starts.

What this stretch gives you is an unbroken horizon. Nothing between you and the water, no structure in the frame, no reason to compose anything. If your goal is to watch rather than to photograph, this is the one.

It also means you can be back in the room with your shoes off fifteen minutes after the sun is up, which matters more than it sounds when the rest of your day starts at nine.

2. Tybee Pier and Pavilion

About a quarter mile south, five minutes on foot from the inn, which is close enough to leave when twilight is already underway and still make it.

The pier is the photographer's answer to the problem with sunrise on an open beach: water and sky are beautiful and almost impossible to make interesting. The pier hands you pilings, rails, roof lines and the silhouettes of whoever is already out there fishing. At low water the pilings stand in wet sand that mirrors the whole sky back.

Two ways to shoot it. From the deck, looking east, using the rail as your foreground. Or from a few hundred yards up or down the beach, with the pier side-on as a black shape against the color. The second is the harder walk and the better picture.

3. Mid Beach, about a mile north

Just over a mile from the inn, which is a twenty-minute walk up Butler Avenue or a very short drive. The Deck, the oceanfront bar on the dune line, is the landmark if you are navigating in the dark.

The beach is wide through here and there is no pier, no crowd of buildings, nothing to work around. It is the purest version of the frame: sand, water, sky, and a lot of space to yourself. Worth the extra mile on a morning when the forecast promises broken cloud, because a clear sky is the least interesting sunrise you can get and this is where you can see the most of it.

If you walk it rather than drive, give yourself a genuine twenty-five minutes. Butler at 6:30 AM is quiet, but it is still a mile, and arriving as the color fades is worse than not going.

4. North Beach, by the lighthouse

About two miles from the inn, which at that hour is a drive rather than a walk. This is the one on the list you have to commit to the night before.

The reason to make the trip is that the north end curves toward the inlet, so you are looking across a channel rather than at empty ocean. The horizon has edges out here instead of one flat line. It is a different photograph from the one you get on the straight stretch of beach in front of the island, and the drive back down Butler with the sun already up is a decent start to a morning.

One thing to know: the Tybee Island Light Station and Museum keeps daytime hours, 9:00 AM to 4:30 PM and closed Tuesdays. A dawn visit means the tower from the outside. Plan it as a beach trip that happens to have a lighthouse in the background, not as a lighthouse trip.

5. Whatever beach the tide has just left

Not a place so much as a condition, but it changes the morning more than the choice of spot does.

Tybee's tidal range runs around 6.6 feet, which is a great deal of beach appearing and vanishing twice a day. At low water a wide, hard-packed apron of wet sand opens up and holds a thin film that reflects the sky back at you. The color doubles. Every photograph gets a foreground for free. At high tide the same stretch is a narrow strip under the dunes and the sky is all you get.

The two daily lows shift about fifty minutes later each day, so a low tide that landed at dawn on Monday is a mid-morning low by Wednesday. Check the NOAA predictions for Tybee against your dates before you decide which morning to get up for. If one of them puts low water near sunrise, that is the morning.

Where not to go

The back river, meaning the Chatham Avenue side at the south end, faces west. It is the island's one genuine over-water sunset and it is precisely wrong at 6:45 AM, because the sun will come up behind you and behind the island. People send visitors there because it is the pretty side, and for sunrise that advice is backwards. Save it for the evening, and read our sunset guide for what to do with it when you get there.

The rules do not relax at dawn

An empty beach feels like a permissive one. It is not.

Dogs are not allowed on the beach, at any hour. This is the one that surprises people most, because early morning is when dog owners assume the rule takes a nap. It does not. No glass, no smoking either, same as at noon.

Sea turtle nesting runs May through October, and by the tail end of the season there are marked, roped nests along the upper beach. Give them a wide berth and keep off the dune vegetation. Those plants are what hold the dune together, and walking through them is prohibited for a reason that becomes obvious the first time you see what a storm does to a bare dune.

Getting out the door

The unglamorous part of a sunrise post is the forty minutes before it.

We do not serve breakfast, which we would rather say plainly than dress up. Every room has a coffee maker, and at 6:15 AM that is the realistic answer. Sunrise Restaurant is effectively next door at 1511 Butler Avenue, and Mi Vida is a couple of minutes further up at 1315, but neither publishes hours we can confirm, so if you want a proper breakfast before the walk, call ahead the day before. Sunrise is (912) 786-7473 and Mi Vida is (912) 472-4651. Our dining guide has the rest of the island by meal.

A few other things that make the early start survivable:

• Set an actual alarm. The rooms have blackout curtains, so the sky doing something spectacular outside will not wake you. That is a feature at 11 PM and a hazard at 6.
• The front desk is staffed around the clock, so leaving before dawn is not a problem and there is somebody to ask about the weather on your way out.
• Parking is free until 8 AM. City meters run $4.00 an hour from 8 AM to 8 PM year round, so the drive to the north end costs nothing at 6:45. If you linger past eight, pay through Park TYB.
• Bring a layer. The air coming off the water before sunrise is cooler than the day's forecast leads you to expect, and you will happily carry it home by nine.

Afterward, the heated saltwater pool is a reasonable place to spend the hour before the rest of the island wakes up. Warm water and an empty deck is a fair trade for the alarm.

How we picked these

Distances are measured from our front door, because that is the number that decides whether you actually go. Every spot is on the Atlantic side, since the sunrise is not negotiable about direction. Nothing on the list needs a ticket, a boat, or a gate that opens at nine.

And we left off anything whose opening hours we could not verify. A sunrise guide that sends you to a locked door at 6:30 in the morning is worse than no guide at all.

If you are still choosing dates, our month-by-month guide covers what the water and the weather are doing across the year. Planning a trip around one of these mornings? Check availability. We are a block off the beach and five minutes from the pier, which is the whole reason getting up for this is realistic here.