Boat Tours Near The Moorings, Naples

No, and we’d rather say so up front than let you plan around it. Every one of our tours departs from our slip at Naples Bay Resort & Marina, 1500 5th Avenue South, and we do not board guests at private residential docks anywhere in Naples. That has nothing to do with your dock or your canal — it is how a captained, licensed passenger operation works, with a single permitted departure point where the boarding, the paperwork and the safety brief all happen. For a Moorings address that costs you a ten to fifteen minute drive around to the bay side of town. Put 1500 5th Avenue South in your phone and the logistics are finished.

Range, capacity and somebody else’s attention. Range, because the trips genuinely worth handing off are the long ones, and the haul south into the Ten Thousand Islands eats a whole day of fuel, focus and shallow-water nerve. Capacity, because your cockpit was built for your household, not your household plus the in-laws plus four grandkids. And attention, because our USCG Master Captains are out here every week and spend the trip reading the water out loud — where the birds are working, why that flat turned the color it did, which cut still carries water at the bottom of the tide. You get all of it without earning a single minute of it.

Figure ten to fifteen minutes by car from most of The Moorings, generally heading south and then east on 5th Avenue South to the marina. Call that a range rather than a guarantee, since in-season traffic on US 41 and through downtown does what it does — check it from your own address in a map app the morning of. Coming by water is a different animal. Moorings Bay and Naples Bay do not connect on the inside, so you would be running out Doctors Pass, down the beach and back in through Gordon Pass to reach us. Lovely ride, poor way to hit a departure time. Take the car.

Yes, with the honest version attached. Our wild-island shelling trips leave from our other dock, San Marco Marina at 604 E Palm Avenue in Goodland, on the southeast tip of Marco Island — that is a couple of hours of head start over leaving Naples, and it is precisely why we run them from there rather than pretending the distance isn’t real. Shelling starts at $125 per adult and $90 per child. From the Naples slip, a beach and island trip puts you on boat-only shoreline out toward Gordon Pass instead. Either way, Collier County is empty shells only — no live shells, sand dollars or starfish. Florida’s state shell is the horse conch.

Then we run a different trip, and you will appreciate that more than most of our guests do. A hard outgoing tide stacked against a west wind turns that pass into something nobody should take a boatload of people through for the sake of it. Our captains would rather stay inside, work the mangrove edges toward Dollar Bay and the Rookery Bay side, and hand you two genuinely good hours than prove a point in the inlet. Sea state and weather calls belong to the captain, full stop. If a trip gets called off on our end, ring (239) 301-8913 and we’ll talk through the options with you.

No licenses needed. Our charter vessel’s license covers everybody fishing aboard as a paying guest, so nobody has to buy anything before they show up. Rods, reels, terminal tackle and bait all come with the trip. If you’d rather fish your own stick, bring it — just mention it when you book so the captain can plan around what it’s rigged for and where he was going to put you. On the rules: tarpon are catch-and-release only, snook are regulated and seasonal, and your captain will tell you on the water what is open and what goes back. Regulations move, so we don’t print them here.