Grays Beach

Yarmouth's only bay-side beach, famous for its long boardwalk over a salt marsh teeming with wildlife. The beach itself is small, but the boardwalk views and sunset from here are spectacular. Great for kids exploring tidal pools.

Grays Beach (also called Bass Hole) is the experiential headline of Yarmouth — less a beach to swim at than a place to walk and look. The famous Bass Hole Boardwalk extends nearly a quarter-mile from the picnic area out across a tidal salt marsh and over to a small sand beach at the mouth of Chase Garden Creek. The walk is one of the most photographed scenes on the Cape: weathered planks, marsh grass, snowy egrets, and the bay opening up at the end. At low tide the creek beach expands into vast tidal flats you can walk for an hour; at high tide the boardwalk becomes a fishing pier popular with stripers casters. The swimming is genuinely shallow and the kid factor is high — fiddler crabs, minnow pools, hermit crabs. Sunsets here are the showstopper: facing west across Cape Cod Bay with the boardwalk silhouetted in the foreground. Pair with the nearby Botanic Trails or a meal at the Inaho Japanese restaurant in Yarmouth Port village.