Boat Tours Near Inn on Fifth, Naples

For a lot of guests, yes. Our Naples dock at Naples Bay Resort & Marina is 1500 5th Avenue South and the Inn is 699 — the same street, roughly a mile apart, straight east with no turns to miss. Most people cover that in about twenty minutes at an easy pace, and it’s flat sidewalk the whole way, past the shops, across the Tamiami Trail and down through the Bayfront district. That said, a mile is a mile: in August heat, with small kids, or coming home after a sunset cruise, plenty of folks walk one direction and ride the other. Check the distance from your own door in a map app and decide the morning of.

No — we depart from the marina, not a lobby, and we don’t offer hotel pickup anywhere. From this address that’s barely an inconvenience: it’s a mile east on foot, or about a five to ten minute rideshare, to Naples Bay Resort & Marina, and we send the exact slip and a where-to-meet note once you’ve booked. We should also say plainly that we aren’t affiliated with Inn on Fifth in any way, and there’s no partnership or arrangement between us. We’re a local, family-owned, captain-led boat company that happens to run from the far end of the street you’re staying on.

It’s a small covered boat that works Naples Bay dock to dock, $20 per person, and it’s the piece that makes a genuinely car-free evening work. Instead of driving to a waterfront restaurant, hunting a spot and driving back, you step aboard at the water and step off at the water. It suits couples, families and anyone who’d simply rather arrive by boat than by parking garage. Runs and stops shift with the season, so call us at (239) 301-8913 or check the booking page for the current schedule before you build a whole night around it. It’s also a low-commitment first taste of the bay if you’ve never been out on it.

The sunset cruise, almost every time. We run out into the bay and toward Gordon Pass as the light turns gold, you get the Gulf horizon and the color, and you’re back at the dock with the evening still young enough for a table. Book dinner for roughly an hour after your scheduled return and you’ll have room to breathe on the walk back. If you’d rather have architecture than horizon, the Port Royal mansion cruise idles the canals and seawalls at the south end of the bay and is beautiful in late-afternoon light. Either one leaves you at the water end of the same street you’ll eat on.

Often — wild bottlenose dolphins live in Naples Bay and the passes year-round, and they regularly surface alongside the boat or ride the wake. But they’re wild animals on their own schedule, so we never guarantee a sighting, and you should be a little suspicious of anyone who does. What we can promise is that you’ll be in the water they actually use, with a captain who knows which stretches tend to produce. You’ll usually see plenty of birdlife too — ospreys, pelicans and herons working the seawalls and mangrove edges — and from roughly November through March, when the water drops below about 68 degrees, there’s a chance of a manatee in the quieter backwaters.

Not the wild-island version — and this is the one trip that breaks the no-car rule. Our shelling runs leave from our other dock at San Marco Marina in Goodland, on the southeast tip of Marco Island, because that’s the head start into the Ten Thousand Islands and the boat-only beaches where the good stuff washes up. It’s a real drive south from downtown Naples, so plan it as its own day rather than an add-on. Shelling starts at $125 per adult and $90 per child. Worth knowing before you go: Collier County is empty shells only — no live shells, sand dollars or starfish — and the Florida state shell is the horse conch.