Honeymoon Island State Park

After spending a night in Tampa, my buddy and I made our way to the Gulf Coast in an effort to reach Caledesi Island State Park. We drove until we reached a dead end surrounded by rich-people oceanfront houses. The GPS said that Caladesi Island was straight ahead, but all we saw was someone’s driveway. After looking up the state park webpage, I found under the directions that in order to reach Caladesi Island, you have to go through Honeymoon Island State Park and take a ferry. We just wanted the beach, we didn’t care which one, so we made our way around to Honeymoon Island State Park and decided to hit the beach there.

The first thing I noticed was how calm the water was – I had never been to a Gulf Coast beach before, only beaches on the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Walking out into the water, I noticed that there wasn’t a quick drop off into deep water like on the other coast. The beach was pretty, as was the water – it was actually clear enough to see little fish swimming around on the sandy floor, something impossible in the rough waves of Canaveral National Seashore.

I did quite a bit of swimming while I was there – the water was so nice it was hard not to. I hadn’t gotten goggles yet at that point, so I was swimming blind, which meant I kept swimming in circles. I would try to swim parallel to shore and end out swimming out to sea, then I would try to swim back to shore and found myself swimming outward again. I must’ve really wanted to get away.

I took a stroll along the beach to check it out, but it was all pretty much the same – white sand, blue water, and the hot sun. There’s not really much else to say about it. It was a great park to visit just to lay on the beach and swim in the water. There was no nudity like at other beaches I’ve been to recently. It was just a regular beach for a good time.

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So, I wrote the above post about a week ago and had it set to post earlier, but after returning to Honeymoon Island State Park last weekend, I got some great GoPro footage while I was there. Some of the beach was pretty rocky, but there were also parts free from rocks. There’s a corner of the beach with a break build up in the ocean with larger rocks around it. The water in most of the beach was murky, but here, where the small waves couldn’t quite disturb the sand, it was pretty clear. There were schools of fish swimming around, a few larger fish including a striped one that let me get an arms length away and film him, and some needle-fish that were very skittish and wouldn’t let me get near them. I got about an hour and a half to two hours of footage while I was there, so the tough part is breaking it down into a video. As of writing this, I haven’t begun editing the video, I actually just finished the Paddleboarding and De Leon videos. But with the magic of delayed posting, I can put the video in right here: