Shell Island and the Pass

Across the pass from Saint Andrews State Park lies a stretch of coast that looks the way all of this once did. Shell Island runs several miles with almost nothing on it but pure white sand, dunes, and low forest. There are no hotels, no concession stands, no restrooms, and no trash cans, because it is kept deliberately undeveloped as part of the state park and preserve.

You can only reach it by boat or ferry, and in summer its clear shallows draw dolphins, sea turtles, and shell hunters. Its very existence is an accident of engineering. Shell Island became a true island in the nineteen thirties when a new shipping channel, the pass you see today, was dredged just south of the park to give ships a deeper, safer entrance into Saint Andrew Bay.

That cut separated this land from the shore. Over the following decades, shifting currents caused sand to fill in the old natural outlet on the southeastern end, near Tyndall Air Force Base, quietly reconnecting the far tip to the mainland. So technically it is now a peninsula rather than a true island, though almost everyone still calls it Shell Island.

Long before any of that, Native peoples lived here, and Spanish sailors and later the Navy in the age of sail all passed this way.