Photos Fort Desoto

Photos below…click a photo to open the photo gallery.

Fort De Soto is located in the southwest corner of Mullet Key, at the entrance to Tampa Bay. It consists of 1,136 acres made up of five interconnected islands (keys).

• during the Civil War, Union troops had a detachment on both Egmont and Mullet Keys. Union ships were looking for blockade runners
• during WWII the island was used for bombing practice by the pilot who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima (in fact, when wading in the shallow water we had to be careful not to step into one of these holes!)

Favorites: Our campsites were beachfront and private. There was a large school of 25″ trout in directly in front of our campsite. A highlight was our paddle to Shell Key for overnight tent camping and we cooked over and open fire on the beach directly on the Gulf of Mexico. We loved canoeing around all the islands, seeing 100’s of birds, saw our 1st Manatee and porpoises.

Fish we caught: Jamie caught a bonnet head shark, pinfish, 25″ trout (that we kept and ate prior to finding out it is a closed season in that county on trout due to a kill-off from a red tide earlier in the season – oops!), two Sheepshead (the 1st one wriggled off the hook and landed on it’s sharp fins on the floor of the inflatable canoe…and NO, the hissing sound of escaping air was not coming from the fish. We ended up with 3 pinholes that deflated the bottom (chamber) of the canoe and put an end to that day’s fishing! 🙁 We were out of commission for a day while the repair patch dried.