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Three kinds of kayaking, and Florida has all three. Mangrove backwater: Ten Thousand Islands and the Gulf Coast side of Everglades National Park in Collier County, Lovers Key in Lee, Weedon Island Preserve in Pinellas, Robinson Preserve in Manatee County.
Spring runs, cold and clear all year: the Wakulla River, Silver Springs in Marion County, Blue Spring in Volusia, Ichetucknee in Columbia County. Rivers through cypress and hardwood: the Myakka River in Sarasota County, Econfina River in Taylor, Fisheating Creek in Glades County, and the Peace River in DeSoto County, where you can rent boat and shuttle together. Alligators are in most of the fresh water and they keep their distance.
Collier County. It was established in 1996 under the Arizona-Florida Land Exchange Act of 1988, which transferred the land to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. The name describes what it is: a scatter of mangrove islands, too many to count properly, running down the coast between Marco Island and Everglades City.
Open the guide →Collier County. The Marjory Stoneman Douglas Visitor Center opened here in December 2025 at 815 Oyster Bar Lane, replacing a building Hurricane Irma destroyed eight years earlier. It cost forty-seven million dollars and was built to survive the next one: everything is on the second floor, standing on tall pilings ten feet above Irma's storm surge, behind impact windows and concrete walls built to withstand a category five.
Open the guide →Lee County. The four are Lovers Key, Black Island, Inner Key and Long Key, and until 1965 the first of them could only be reached by boat, which is where the name came from.
Open the guide →Pinellas County. The preserve runs along the western shore of Tampa Bay in St. Petersburg and has been managed by Pinellas County since 1993. It went on the National Register of Historic Places on June 13, 1972, and the reason is under the ground rather than on it.
Open the guide →Wakulla County. The whole river is spring-fed, so it runs clear and cold and at a steady level rather than rising and falling with the rain like a blackwater river. It joins the St. Marks about three miles above the Gulf, at the old fort.
Open the guide →Columbia County. Ichetucknee Springs State Park lies about four miles northwest of Fort White, and the state park service gives its size as 2,669 acres. Eight major springs rise inside the park and join to form the Ichetucknee River, which runs six miles to the Santa Fe.
Open the guide →Sarasota County. The Civilian Conservation Corps laid this park out in the 1930s and it opened in 1941, which makes it one of the oldest and by far the largest of Florida's state parks.
Open the guide →Taylor County. The park address is 4384 Econfina River Road with a Lamont mailing address, and the land itself sits in Taylor County. The ground shifts as you move toward the water: pine flatwoods first, then oak and palm forest, then a wide open salt marsh with islands of pine standing out of the grass.
Open the guide →Glades County. Fisheating Creek Wildlife Management Area covers 18,272 acres in Glades County, running from Palmdale down to Lakeport on the shore of Lake Okeechobee. The creek is the reason it is protected: it is the last free-flowing tributary left feeding Lake Okeechobee, coming off the southern end of the Lake Wales Ridge and threading through ancient cypress the whole way.
Open the guide →DeSoto County. Canoe Outpost-Peace River has been putting people on this river since the 1970s and is now in its third generation of the same family. The stretch of the Peace between Zolfo Springs and Arcadia, about 31.5 miles of it, is the part suited to canoes and kayaks: slow current, tea-colored water, live oaks hung with Spanish moss and cypress along the banks.
Open the guide →The only living coral barrier reef in the continental United States runs down the Keys, and John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park off Key Largo in Monroe County is where most people meet it.
Saltwater diving means the Keys and the reef: John Pennekamp in Monroe County, and Biscayne National Park in Miami-Dade, which is mostly water rather than land.
Florida has more first-magnitude springs than anywhere else on earth, and most of them run at about seventy-two degrees every day of the year, so they are cold in August and warm in January.
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