Keewaydin Island between Naples and Marco Island Florida

As the picture clearly shows, the most exciting thing about this island is that it is so boring.  Hardly anyone lives here and except for holiday week-ends and one big party week-end at the end of May at the far southern extremity relatively few people come here.  While there are 50 platted private lots on the 8 mile long island, (six of them are owned by members of one family) many of them have never been developed and those few that have been are for the most part unobtrusive.  The most southerly of the private homes on 5 acres was recently listed at $2.8 million and can be seen on YouTube.  A number of lots were purchased by various conservation agencies and much of the island falls within the Rookery Bay National Estuarine Reserve which controls development rights over 110,000 acres in this general area.  

Known earlier as Key Island, the name was changed to reference the Longfellow poem “Song of Hiawatha” by the operators of a series of “Outward Bound” type sleep-away camps called Keewaydin Camps.  These camps, fourteen in all at the zenith were located in Vermont, Maine and Ontario among other places.  One of them, founded in 1893 appears still to be operating in northern Ontario at Lake Temagami.  As I was researching their website I was surprised to find that it is located  just 100 miles by bush plane from where I earned my Boy Scout canoeist merit badge in Algonquin Park about 50 years ago.  That episode evokes a fond but painful memory in that I had to carry a canoe that weighed much more than me for a 100 yard portage connecting Smoke Lake to Grape Lake without putting it down.  I not only whittled my own paddle from a piece of redwood, but with the rest of the troop we shaped the canoe from fiberglass matte and resin, on a group owned mould.  With the canoe on my aching shoulders it soon became apparent that we had used way too much fiberglass and ought to have spent another day sanding it away. When the Keewaydin Camp on Key Island closed as a result of financial difficulties traced back to the Camp Director and his spouse’s misallocation of funds, the facility was converted to a lodge.  It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1987, closed in 1999 and is now privately owned. 

Despite its apparent seclusion, depending on wind and tides, this island is readily accessed from various embarkation points in the Naples area.  If you or a friend has a boat with a motor, you can be there in minutes.  By paddle it is generally less than a one hour trip with a favorable tide to three different landing areas.   From the east you can use the free Shell Island launch and follow the Hall Bay navigation markers west to the intersection of the Intracoastal, cross over it and at Green marker 28A, enter the channel between Little Marco Island and Gannon Island.  The white beach straight ahead is your destination, though it is the smaller beach on the east or channel side of Keewaydin and not the mind bogglingly huge beach on the west side that everyone raves about.  You can beach your craft here and walk across the marked trail a few yards to get to the big beach.  On this stretch you were travelling between Little Marco Island on your right and Cannon Island on the left.  After Little Marco ends in a long mudflat, if you want to cruise down the left side before you cross the channel to the big island, there is a long narrow beach interrupted by large Casuarina root balls that is one of the prettiest sights around.  There are a lot of variable currents in this area known locally as Hurricane Pass and Cannon Island turns itself into Sea Oat Island in this general area, which is constantly changing.  The small bays bordered by the stumps face west to Keewaydin and I have spent quite a few glorious hours on this little stretch watching the big boys with their motorized toys across the channel.  You can also access this area from the south by renting kayaks at the Isle of Capri or renting a motorboat or pontoon boat from the Marco River Marina.  If you feel more comfortable with a commercial day trip, there are plenty of those around including the big catamaran at Naples City Dock called “Sweet Liberty” that offers shelling cruises for a very reasonable price. 

Though it is the shortest route, I don’t recommend coming to Keewaydin Island’s west side through Gordon Pass when embarking from the north but it is very easy to do when conditions are favorable.   If you are car topping, you can park at the fore-mentioned 33rd Ave. South cul de sac and paddle south a little more than a mile and you will be there.  However, this generally works only when there is no wind or the forecast is for very slight winds.  Wind speeds of over 10 knots, from any direction other than east will usually kick up two or three foot waves and crossing Gordon Pass between and among very large boat wakes, tidal currents and incoming surf make for a tricky crossing that is not for the faint of heart.  When approaching from the north, it is preferable to launch from Bayview Park’s boat ramp where Keewaydin is a clearly visible hop and a skip to the west.  The kicker though is that you still have to find a good public landing spot on the island that is not choked with impenetrable red mangroves.  If you coast with an outgoing tide to the Intracoastal markers and turn left (south) then Keewaydin will be on your right.  About 2,000 yards into this segment you’ll enter Dollar Bay.  From Marker 68, head WSW and there will be an entrance to a series of mangrove channels, that will take you to either of two different landing sites, about a mile from the north end of the island.  If you wish you can go further south to Green Marker 67 and then head southwest to the opening.

The bays that you enter out of the mangrove channel literally back up to the big beach.  The mangrove channels are not easy to navigate without a guide the first time and while technically you can’t get lost in here as there is only one way in and out, there are a lot of dead-ends and you feel like you could, especially if you can’t discern the opening for the way out.  Don’t try this one on your own, until you get a chance to study the area and make a few other practice runs.  If you have a GPS with a chart plotter you can get in and out of here quite readily with just three or four waypoints at the mouth, the destination and a couple of tight turn channels in between.  I also recommend that anyone attempting this trips study the area on Google Maps before embarking and bring a paper chart in case your GPS runs out of battery power.  In a place where there are hundreds of thousands of mangroves it seems odd to use a red mangrove tree as a marker but from the pic below you can  see that this particular one is very distinctive indeed.  When you see it, you will have arrived at the beach cross-over.

Another route that will give you access to the center of the island which is its most remote point, is to look for Red Marker 46 on the Intracoastal.  This part of the beach is so relatively isolated, that it is recommended as a camping site by the Naples Kayak Company and from time to time you may encounter some fellow free spirits here.  If you are coming from either the north or south by motorized craft, just follow the numbers.  For my purposes, it is too long and too busy to follow the channel to this mark from either end.  I recommend an outgoing tide from the Shell Island launch site.  Rookery Bay is only a couple of miles long so a two knot favorable tidal current coupled with a few hundred well placed paddle strokes in a northwesterly direction will suffice to get you there in less than a hour.  The bay is very shallow with a mean water depth of less than three feet, so there is very little boat traffic.  A pod of four dolphins once cavorted with me in here for a delightful half hour.    At the north end of the bay, the channel takes you out to the Intracoastal again.  Green Marker 47 is visible first and when you turn the corner in a southerly direction, you’ll see the Red Marker 46.  Opposite it, there is a sandy landing area that you can use to beach your boat.  The path to the big beach is about 30 yards long and depending on how long you are planning to stay, you might wish to carry your kayak across so your gear is not out of sight as you are wandering up and down the main beach.  You have roughly 4 miles of beach in both directions before it ends so this is likely as close as most of us are even going to get to gazing at a long stretch of uninterrupted white beach sand as far as we can see in either direction. 

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