Drive south through Bellport on a July morning and the village ends the way a lot of South Shore villages end, at a marina, with the Great South Bay flat and open beyond it. What happens next is the unusual part. A boat called the Whalehouse Point pulls off the dock with as many as 47 people aboard, crosses the bay, and lands at a beach on Fire Island that the Village of Bellport owns outright.

Long Island has no shortage of municipal beaches. It has very few municipalities that own land on a separate island and run a scheduled boat to get their residents there.

A village beach on a barrier island

Ho Hum Beach sits on the ocean side of Fire Island, in the gap between the Fire Island National Seashore's Watch Hill and Suffolk County's Smith Point Park. There is no road to it, no bridge, and no parking lot. In the village's own words it is "only accessible by the Ferry and private boat and is open to residents and their guests."

For a beach reachable only by boat, it is not roughing it. The village lists picnic tables and benches, a concession stand, a changing room, cold water showers and restrooms. What is not there is everything you would normally drive past on the way to a beach, which is most of the appeal.

Bellport owns a second beach as well, Mother's Beach, on South Howell's Point Road on the bay side, with parking and a playground. Swimming is prohibited there. That detail is what makes the ferry more than a convenience: the boat is how a Bellport resident gets into the ocean under the village's own flag.

How the Whalehouse Point runs

The ferry carries 47 passengers including its staff and runs between the village marina and the beach from May through September. It works weekends from Memorial Day weekend until school lets out in June, then goes daily through Labor Day. For the 2026 season the village has it running seven days a week, weather permitting.

From June 27, departures leave the marina at 10 a.m. and then every half hour until 1 p.m. There is nothing between 1 p.m. and 2:30 p.m. After that it resumes on the half hour until 5:30 p.m., and Saturdays from July through Labor Day add a 6:30 p.m. run.

That midday gap is the one thing worth reading twice before you plan a day around it. A ninety minute hole in the middle of the schedule is fine if you know about it and a long wait on a dock if you do not.

What it costs

Resident fares run $15 for an adult on a weekday, $10 for a senior and $7 for a child under 12. Weekends are $20 for a resident adult. Guest rates are higher.

Season passes are where the real money is: $325 for an adult, $275 for a senior, $200 for youth aged 3 to 12, and $600 for a family. Those are priced for households that go a dozen or more times a summer, not for the occasional Saturday. Beach passes for the 2026 season went on sale at Village Hall on May 4.

If you do not live in Bellport

Then the way onto the boat is an invitation, because the ferry is for residents and their guests. That arrangement generates a certain amount of annoyance every few summers, and the annoyance is not unreasonable. A publicly owned beach that a member of the public cannot walk onto is a strange thing to write down.

The counterargument is just as plain. The village owns the beach, maintains it, and pays for the boat and the crew that runs it, out of the tax base of one small village. Opening the ferry to everyone is not a policy change so much as a question about who covers the bill.

The practical answer for everyone else is that the same barrier beach is open on both sides of it. Watch Hill, immediately to the west, is run by the National Park Service and reached by a seasonal passenger ferry out of Patchogue. Smith Point County Park, to the east, is Suffolk County's and you can drive to it over the William Floyd Parkway bridge. Neither one asks for your address.

If you are going

Ho Hum Beach
Ferry departs the Bellport Village Marina, Bellport, NY 11713
Season: May through September
Passes and tickets: Village Hall

Check the village's own schedule the morning you go. The boat runs weather permitting, and on a bay that shallow the weather has a vote.

There is something worth noticing in all of this beyond the beach itself. A village of a few thousand people owns oceanfront on a barrier island, operates a passenger vessel, employs a crew and sells season passes at its own Village Hall. That is the kind of small, self-contained municipal machinery that most of Long Island handed off to towns and counties decades ago. Bellport still runs its own, and the boat leaves at ten.