Walking Pinellas Beaches: Day 1 – Honeymoon Island State Park

Today’s Walk

Start / End: Tarpon Springs – Tarpon Springs

Distance: ~5.7 mi / 14,409 steps

Time: 4 hours, 4 minutes

Today’s listens: “Long Season” by Fishmans, “Hejira” by Joni Mitchell, Odd Lots podcast – “Understanding the Most Viral Chart in Artificial Intelligence”

Compared to my last long walk, this one feels like it has a bit of a false start. Tonight, I’m back at home, writing to you from my couch after completing my first day of walking along the shore of Honeymoon Island State Park. Yes, there are plenty of places to stay around the park in charming Dunedin, and plenty of people do. But it’s hard to justify the expense (and terrible pillows) when this highly underrated piece of Gulf Coast is just 25 minutes from our door.

Outside of our two small but respectable local beaches in Tarpon Springs, Honeymoon Island is our closest “real” beach, and I feel very grateful to have this unusually intact piece of nature nearby.

Once known as the decidedly less romantic Hog Island, the park earned its current name from a short-lived promotion in the 1940s offering stays at cottages on the island to newlyweds. Thanks to a combination of incompetence from developers and protection efforts from local environmentalists, it never suffered the fate of so many barrier islands in Florida, packed to the brim with homes and high-rises. It’s been part of the Florida state park system since the early 1980s, and in my opinion, it’s one of the best combinations of natural beauty, accessibility, and environmental protection of any beach I’ve seen.

So, unlike some upcoming days along this walk, my stroll today was along a nearly entirely undeveloped stretch of coastline, curving northwest from St. Joseph Sound to the Gulf.

I’ve been here a fair number of times before, so I wasn’t expecting any surprises today. Still, barrier islands have a way of surprising you. It’s obvious to anyone who visits that Honeymoon Island is being actively shaped by some pretty strong tides and currents. In between prominent points supported by breakwaters, the beach deeply curves inward repeatedly. Depending on the tides, this can create mini sandbars around the rows of rocks used to prevent further beach erosion. On a more practical level, it creates little private areas for people willing to get there early.

For relatively long stretches of the walk, it was just me and the many birds that call Honeymoon Island and the surrounding area home. I saw anhingas, reddish egrets, oystercatchers, ibises, terns, ospreys, and, from afar, one of the park’s prized bald eagle nests. It should be no surprise that Honeymoon Island is an important local part of the Florida Birding Trail, and has been an important part in turning me into, as Morgan puts it, a “bird guy.”

After a few miles of walking north, I hit water in a place I wouldn’t have when I first visited the park in late 2022, a few months after moving here. The northernmost point of the walk would have to be here, rather than the “true” end of Honeymoon Island, or North Honeymoon Island as it might rightfully now be called. The islands split naturally in early 2024, although I have to imagine two near-misses from strong hurricanes that year probably helped widen and deepen the new channel.

Here at the end of the park, there were just a few other intrepid souls who made the walk, and me. Spend enough time walking on beaches, and you’ll quickly learn that most people seem constitutionally incapable of setting up more than 300 yards from the entrance from the parking lot, meaning you end up with absurdly packed clusters separated by huge, empty gaps.

This felt like a particularly appropriate north end of the walk. From here, I could see all the way back to Tarpon Springs, and beyond into Pasco County. I rested here for a while, hesitant to leave this peaceful place and the few people who’d made it up there (including a guy who’d set up on an increasingly shrinking sandbar), but it was time to turn around and head south.

Retracing your steps is never the most fun of a beach walk, especially when it involves voluntarily picking your way through dead mangroves in calf-deep water (there was a reason for this decision, I promise).

But, in the spirit of using the day as a warm-up day, I decided to check my pace and test out some equipment I hadn’t used since my last beach walk five years ago. Pacewise, my 35-year-old legs haven’t fallen off too much from what my 30-year-old ones could do (with a lot more training) back in Jersey in 2021. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a bit concerned about how I’ll feel after a few days of doing this, but that’s a problem for three days from now. In any case, part of this walk is proving that I still can do this (and doing it before I can’t).

Five years is also enough time to forget why I didn’t use certain equipment on the second half of my Jersey beach walk. After struggling for 20 minutes or so to set up my portable beach canopy in a very mild wind, I recalled the fact that this thing is basically useless in anything stronger than a light breeze. Alright – lesson learned; it’ll be staying at home, and I’ll be coming up with another portable shade solution so I don’t end up lightly charred by the end of this trip.

Honeymoon Island’s southern tip is set aside as a pet beach, and there is usually more joy in this small section than the rest of the park combined. Unfortunately, early afternoon Wednesday is apparently not a peak time for taking your pets to the beach (although, why not? It’s not as if most people around here have jobs, anyway), and there were few witnesses (on two or four legs) to the completion of the day’s walk.

So, one day down. For most of my walk south, my path for tomorrow was visible in the distance. In fact, it’s just across the water in that final video above. Tomorrow, I confront the only real challenge that’s given me any sort of pause on this journey. That’s walking from one “island” to “another.” I’ll explain more in my next post, when I’ll explore Caladesi Island State Park and Clearwater Beach.