On the most perfect days ever, we finally paddled out to Shell Key. Luckily, we had scoped the whole situation out when we were camping at Fort DeSoto a while ago. We would drop the boards and all our gear at a nice put-in north of the park and then drop the truck and trailer at the bigger boat launch and ferry landing right by the entrance to the park. This meant we just had a short walk back to the put-in, but avoided having to cross Bunces pass where all of the bigger boats headed out to the gulf.
All went to plan and we had leisurely paddle out to the key. The wind was mild and the water was shallow. It was absolutely gorgeous and we even had a swimming bird accompany us. A cormorant seemed to like swimming under my boat. He joined us not too far from shore and for about a half-mile, he would swim under my boat for a while and then pop up on one side or another for air. After he left us, we had a very uneventful, but lovely paddle, enjoying the sun as we made our way to the beach we could see in the distance. We passed islands covered in mangroves and saw Fort DeSoto off to our left.
The beach that we could see as we approached was at the southernmost point of the key; mangroves to the right along the “back-side” of the key and lots of beach to the right. The first section of beach was along Bunces Pass and faced Fort DeSoto. The beach was not very deep here, but we didn’t really want to camp right on the beach anyway, so we were happy to find a grassy area just beyond the beach where we could set up camp, but be steps away from the beach. We dropped out gear and put up our sun umbrella.
Friday was relatively quiet. Some boats made their way to Outback Key, just beyond Fort Desoto and other campers slowly made their way out in kayaks and bigger boats. We wandered up the key just before sunset, finding the gulf side quite windy, but full of shells to explore.
Saturday, we headed around the back-side of the key, exploring everything that was just beyond the mangroves. We saw so many oysters, conchs, schools of tiny fish, and weird things like what seemed to be extruded sand piles from marine worms (?) and what I later learned were gastropod egg cases, but looked like cast-off skins from giant worms.
As we made our way back to our campsite, we encountered more and more people and boats. The backside of the key had been very quiet, with only a few kayakers and paddleboarders to be seen. Once we got to the deeper water that also allowed combustion engines, we made our way through the constant bigger waves being created by the many boats going by. It was quite a bit louder than it had been on Friday, but we still enjoyed the beach and sun.
The only annoying parts of camping in a popular spot happened at night. On Friday night, we had a loud group nearby that played music well into the night and around 3 AM a boat pulled up and anchored right in front of our campsite, with the the driver being not at all quiet. Mike popped out of our tent to let him know that we were right there and he quieted down a bit. In the morning he moved down to join the loud group. On Saturday night, we heard a couple of drunk guys wandering down the beach. Mike started scrambling around the tent trying to find a head lamp and then came out of the tent. I had heard them talking, but didn’t realize they were talking about taking our beach umbrella that we had left parked on the beach. Mike very nicely didn’t tell me this until morning when we found the tent chucked in the bushed because he knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep if i was worrying about people taking our stuff. He knows me well.