September 3, 2026
Clear Gordon Pass on an outgoing tide and the water changes color before it changes depth. Deep green-blue folds into a pale, sandy tint, the kind of shift a captain reads off the bow the way you'd read a gauge. That's the tell that Keewaydin is close. From a dock on the Port Royal side of Naples Bay, the run through the pass to the island's north end takes well under twenty minutes, sometimes closer to ten if the tide is moving with you instead of against it. It's the same pass that has always defined this end of Naples, the natural cut where the bay meets the Gulf, and it happens to be the only way to reach an eight-mile barrier island that has no road, no bridge, and no cars.
Most of what gets written about that boat ride treats it as scenery. Dolphins in the wake, white sand, bring sunscreen. All of that is true and none of it is the interesting part right now. The interesting part is that this is the middle of sea turtle nesting season, which runs into the end of October, and the two beaches on either side of that boat ride are having noticeably different years. The one you can walk to just had a rough few weeks. The one you can only reach by boat is outperforming its own recent history.
Collier County's Sea Turtle Protection Team patrols the mainland beaches it oversees daily during nesting season: Barefoot, Vanderbilt, Park Shore, the City of Naples beach, and Marco Island. That City of Naples bucket covers the same stretch of city-limits shoreline Port Royal sits on. Keewaydin doesn't fall under that program at all. Because it sits inside the Rookery Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve and is accessible only by boat, its nests are counted separately by the Conservancy of Southwest Florida.
That distinction usually reads as a technicality. This month it matters, because the two counts have diverged. A west wind event earlier in August hit the mainland side hard. Collier's environmental supervisor for the sea turtle program said the City of Naples beach was the hardest hit in the county, losing 50 nests outright and leaving another 160 inundated by the surge. In that same reporting, Keewaydin was singled out as one of the parts of the county having a good year, showing upward ticks over last season's numbers even as the mainland absorbed that loss.
It's not a one-week blip. Look at the full 2025 season, the most recent complete year on record. The mainland beaches the county monitors, Port Royal's own shoreline included, finished with 1,179 nests, up from 996 in 2024, a season-over-season gain of about 18 percent. Keewaydin, over that same stretch, went from 421 nests to 558, a jump of nearly 33 percent, and its second-highest total on record behind only the 628 nests logged there in 2022. The island's rebound has been running at roughly double the rate of the beach out front. Nobody who lives here needed a reason to make that boat ride. Now there's a specific one, and it's playing out this exact season.
The ride itself has its own logic, and it has nothing to do with which beach has more nests. Keewaydin has two faces: an open Gulf-side beach and a calmer bay-side lagoon, and which one a captain picks depends almost entirely on the wind that morning. An onshore breeze kicks up chop on the Gulf side that most people barely register, but a stronger one pushes the call toward the lagoon instead, where the water stays flat and wading is easier. There's no fixed answer to "which side is better." It changes with the forecast, sometimes hour to hour.
The approach itself moves too. On a falling tide, the sandbar shelf that a boat rides in on shifts by the hour, so the line a captain ran an hour earlier isn't necessarily the same line that works now. That's the practical reason the water-color read matters as much as it does. It's also why a guided run beats guesswork if you don't already know this stretch of the flats.
Nesting season means staked, roped-off sections along the beach right now, mostly loggerhead nests, since loggerheads are the dominant nester on this stretch of coast. Give them the standard ten feet of clearance and keep dogs leashed near any marked area. Keewaydin is worth mentioning here for a separate reason: it's the only beach in the Naples and Marco Island area where dogs are allowed at all, which is part of why it functions as a resident's beach rather than a tourist stop even with the shelling crowds that show up on weekends.
The wildlife stretches beyond turtles. Ospreys nest directly on the channel markers along the route, easy to spot on the ride in. Herons, egrets, and roseate spoonbills work the mangrove edges on the bay side, and manatees show up regularly in the Intracoastal, particularly in the slow-speed zones the route runs through on the way down. On the island itself, white-tailed deer and raccoons are common enough that a quiet early-morning walk down the beach usually turns up tracks even without a sighting.
Food service on Keewaydin is informal by design, since the island has no restrooms, no lifeguards, and no permanent concessions. What it does have, on most days, is a burger boat called Just Beachy Burgers & More and an ice cream barge called In the Pink, both of which tend to anchor near the southern tip, the stretch that draws the heaviest foot traffic on any given weekend. Neither is guaranteed to be there on a given trip, so it's worth confirming before counting on lunch showing up by boat.
If you're launching your own boat rather than running it from a private dock, the closest public ramp is Bayview Park in South Naples, just before Rookery Bay begins. From there it's roughly a half-hour run down to the sandbar section of the island, longer than the direct shot from a Port Royal dock through Gordon Pass but well marked and manageable in normal conditions. Either way, the same rule applies once you're inside Rookery Bay: read the water, not just the chart, because the reserve's protected status means the bottom here changes with the season in ways a static map won't show.
None of this requires deciding anything about where to live. It's just what the next couple of months look like for anyone with a boat and a dock on this side of the bay, which is most of Port Royal. The turtles picked their beach for this season already. It happens to be the one that takes ten minutes and a boat to reach, not the one at the end of the yard.
For more on how Port Royal's waterfront position shapes daily life here, from dock access to the neighborhood's boating culture, The CVJ Team can walk you through what makes this stretch of coastline work the way it does, on the water and off it.
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