Anna Maria Island is a beautiful destination located in central west Florida, right between Sarasota and Tampa. This beautiful area is a well-known vacation spot for many families around the country and even from other countries as well. The sought-after, crystal-clear water and beautiful, warm weather make it one of the best places in the world to spend a week with your family. Luckily for me, it is where I was born and raised; I grew up on the beautiful Anna Maria Sound, exploring and navigating our intercoastal waterways, finding all the best fishing, dolphin watching, and hidden gems our area has to offer. I love the water so much that I ended up starting my business in 2021, right when I turned 18, so I could share my passion with families that come to our incredible island. The three main activities that I have to offer are boat tours (including sunset tours), dolphin tours, and fishing charters, and I will give you all that you need to know about each of these incredible options.
Anna Maria Island Boat Tours:
On my very customizable boat tours, I will take your party to a few hidden gems that we have in our area to see beautiful sandbars, unique birds, and wildlife like the tortoises on Egmont Key and the manatees of Palma Sola Bay! This is the perfect tour for spring and summer when the water is warm enough to swim and snorkel around. We will go to the beautiful Egmont Key, Passage Key, and Jewfish Key, where the water is super shallow in certain areas so you can get out and look for shells, sand dollars, starfish, and see an abundance of wildlife. You will be able to see a different point of view of our area that you can only access by boat and can only get the true Anna Maria Island feel with a local young captain who grew up on these waters (I promise that makes a huge difference). The perfect way to end a day is with an afternoon boat tour with AMI Excursions; you will get to see the hidden gems of the area and end the day with a beautiful sunset boat ride around Bean Point. It’s truly an awesome tour that every family should get the chance to experience for themselves.
Anna Maria Island Dolphin Tours:
In my opinion, Anna Maria Island is the best place in the whole world to see dolphins! I always tell people that come on my boat that there haven’t been too many times in my life where I’ve been on the water and haven’t seen a group of dolphins. Dolphins love the warm water and the abundance of fish to feast on in our waterways, like mullet, ladyfish, and really anything that they can find. Dolphin tours are great for young kids and a perfect way to introduce them to the ocean. I’ve seen dolphins millions of times, and I still get excited every time I get one to jump out of the water on our boat wake (which is truly one of the coolest things ever). With all that being said about how amazing dolphin tours are and how fun and interesting they can be, I do always like to let people know that we will see plenty of dolphins on our Anna Maria Island fishing charters as well as our Anna Maria Island boat tours. The fishing charters and the boat tours can be a more bang for your buck type of deal, but if looking for dolphins and watching them in their habitat is something that you really want to focus on and experience, then I will show you the best of it!
Anna Maria Island Fishing Charters:
I love taking families on boat, dolphin, and sunset tours, but there truly isn’t a better way to experience the beautiful nature of Florida than booking a fishing charter with your friends and family. When you book a fishing charter on Anna Maria Island, you truly get a 3-in-1 combination of all the amazing boat tours. We see way more dolphins on fishing charters than we do on dolphin tours due to the fact that we are looking for the same fish that the dolphins are looking for. There have been countless times when I’ve had a huge school of fish behind the boat and a family of dolphins come out of nowhere to feast on the fish that we are catching. Now, I don’t try to get the dolphins to do this, as I want to keep the incredible fish that I’m going after alive and healthy, but it’s a part of nature, and there’s not much you can do about it. We see so much awesome wildlife that you can’t see on other tours, from sea turtles offshore, huge packs of dolphins feeding on fish, bald eagles in the backwater fishing spots, packs of manatees in the backwater estuaries while fishing for juvenile tarpon, and countless amounts of beautiful birds. If you truly want to experience the real Florida feel and want to see an abundance of wildlife and catch many fish while doing so, then a fishing charter is the way to go!
