Contact Sand Dollar Shelling

Call, or write, and what each is best for

Two ways to reach us. Phone (239) 301-8913. Email info@sanddollarboattours.com. That address ends in sanddollarboattours.com, which is not a typo. It reaches the same crew.

The phone is better for anything with a clock attached to it: conditions today, a departure you are running late for, a question standing between you and booking this afternoon. If nobody picks up, a boat is out. Try again.

Email is better for anything with detail in it. Twelve people across three families. A grandparent thinking hard about the step down out of the boat. A charter built around somebody's birthday. Write it out. A paragraph is easier to plan against than a conversation somebody has to remember.

There is no contact form on this page, on purpose. A form is one more inbox to miss.

Where we leave from

Trips leave from San Marco Marina, 604 E Palm Ave, Goodland, FL 34140. Goodland sits at the east end of Marco Island and it is a small place. If you have passed the marina and run out of town, you have gone too far.

Naples is a second departure point for some trips. Which one applies to yours is set when you book, and it is written on your confirmation. If the confirmation and your memory disagree, call before you drive. The two are not near each other, and a morning is a bad time to find that out.

The three daily tour windows

Three windows run each day:

• 8:00 to 11:00 AM
• 11:30 AM to 2:30 PM
• 3:00 to 6:00 PM

People ask which one is best. The honest answer is that it depends on the tide on your date, not on the slot. A full year of NOAA predictions for the Marco Island station puts the day's lower low at an average near 6:43 AM in January, drifting to near 6:31 PM in July. Winter's useful low water falls in the morning. Summer's falls in the evening. That is measured, not folklore, and it is the thing worth checking before you pick a window. The long version is on the best time to find seashells.

How booking works

Booking runs through FareHarbor, and the booking section lives on the home page: open the booking calendar. Choose a date and a window and the calendar shows what is genuinely open rather than what we wish were open.

Prices are not published on this page. They live in the booking flow, where they stay current. A number typed into a web page ages badly.

You will get a confirmation by email. Keep it. Your departure point, your meeting time and the terms that apply to your trip are all in it, and it is the fastest thing to read back to us over the phone.

What to tell us when you book

The booking flow asks for the basics. These are the things that actually change how the trip is run, so put them in the notes or say them on the phone.

• Group size and ages. Four adults and four adults with a five-year-old are two different trips.
• Mobility. Getting from boat to beach means a step down into shallow water, then walking on soft, uneven ground. If that needs making easier for somebody, tell us early rather than at the dock.
• Anyone nervous on the water. Common, not embarrassing, and worth saying. It changes where they sit, how hard the boat runs, and how much talking they get in the first ten minutes.
• What you are hoping to find. If somebody has wanted a sand dollar since they were eight, say so. Nobody can promise a shell. But we can aim.

Questions worth asking before you book

These are not trick questions, and asking them is not rude. Ask us. Ask anybody else you are considering.

• What is the tide doing on my date, and would that change which window you would put me in?
• Is the trip I am looking at shared with other guests, or private?
• How much walking is involved, and on what kind of ground?
• What do I bring, and what is already aboard?
• What happens if the weather turns on my date?
• What am I allowed to take home, and what am I not?

That last one matters more than most people expect, and the answer is not the same everywhere on this coast. Ask it out loud before you are standing on a flat with a bucket in your hand.

If the weather turns

Weather calls are made by the captain, on the day, and they are made about the water rather than the sky. Gray overhead is not a cancellation. Lightning in the area, a wind that has stacked up a sea the boat should not be working in, or a front arriving faster than forecast: those are.

If a trip has to move or come off the calendar, we call you. The reschedule and cancellation terms attached to your booking are in your FareHarbor confirmation, and that is where to read them rather than in a summary written here months earlier.

Two things are worth checking yourself in the days before a trip: red tide, through FWC's statewide status page, and beach conditions through Mote Marine's Beach Conditions Reporting System. Those pages are current. This one cannot be.

Empty shells only, and why we say it out loud

House rule aboard our boat: empty shells only. Ours, not a law we are hiding behind. A living shell taken home is an animal that died for a shelf.

The line is legal as well as personal. Florida statute 379.101(34) defines saltwater fish to include living mollusks and echinoderms, and expressly excludes nonliving shells. That sentence is the whole distinction: a live shell requires a Florida recreational saltwater fishing license, an empty one requires nothing. On City of Marco Island beaches the same idea is city code, section 54-36(o), no live shelling, and section 54-36(k) separately bans taking sand off the beach.

Sand dollars are the easiest thing to get wrong, because a living one is dark brown, purple, gray or green and covered in short spines, not white and smooth. Hold it in your palm for a minute. If your skin turns yellow, it is alive. The pigment is echinochrome, it is harmless, and it is the fastest field test there is. Put that one back, and read the rest on the sand dollar page.

Two things we will not tell you yet

Ask how many sand dollars you may take home and you will get an honest non-answer. Two independent legal reviews of Florida's rules read them differently, so we do not state a number. We have asked FWC in writing, and their answer will go on this site with the source when it arrives. Until then, FWC's own sea shell collecting page is the authority, not us.

Second, the rules are not uniform across the water we run. Parts of it sit inside the Rookery Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, whose rule appears stricter than our own, and we are confirming that with the Reserve directly. So we do not publish a list of places where you may fill a bag. Your captain will tell you what applies on the beach you are standing on, on the day.

If you like to arrive knowing things

None of this replaces asking, and asking is free. But if you read ahead, three pages are worth the time: what you are probably holding, how tide and wind set up a day, and how to keep what you carry home so it does not go chalky in a drawer three years from now.