Manatee protection zones

County by county, not statewide

Florida does not run one manatee rule for the whole state. Rule chapter 68C-22 holds a separate rule for each county that has zones: eighteen of them, from 68C-22.005 for Lee County to 68C-22.028 for Flagler. Four of those rules reach into neighbouring counties, which is why their titles carry a bracket — parts of Levy and Hernando with Citrus, parts of Putnam, Lake and Seminole with Volusia, parts of Clay and St. Johns with Duval, part of DeSoto with Charlotte. The Sarasota rule is a fifth case that its title does not advertise: the text covers Sarasota County “and a small portion of Charlotte County”, and its Myakka River–Big Slough zones reach into associated waters of Charlotte.

One entry in the chapter is not a county’s zones at all: 68C-22.029, the Cape Canaveral Energy Center Interim Warm-water Refuge Zone, dated 24 January 2023 in the chapter list. It is listed in the table on this page for the same reason it is in the chapter — leaving it out would make the list tidier than the source.

And the chapter lists no zone rule for Monroe County. For a boat coming up from the Keys, the manatee zones begin on the mainland.

There is no Florida manatee season

The sentence a visiting crew hears most often is that manatee season runs from 1 April to 15 November, with winter zones from 15 November to 31 March. The rules do not say that. Read end to end, the eighteen county rules name sixteen different date ranges between them, and five of them name none at all.

The period that comes closest to being standard is the winter one: 15 November to 31 March, in eight of the eighteen rules and again in the power-plant rule. 1 April to 15 November does exist — in Lee, Hillsborough and Pinellas — and in all three it works the other way round from the usual telling, restricting the summer while the rest of the year is left at a higher speed. Lee County uses both 15 November and 14 November as the end of that period, one day apart, in the same rule.

Then there are the ones nobody predicts. Flagler County’s two zones are in force from 1 May to 7 September and the rule has no year-round zone at all. Palm Beach has a 30 MPH zone from 1 June to 30 September that goes down to 25 MPH for the rest of the year. Indian River runs 1 November to 30 April and is unregulated outside it. Volusia marks two zones Seasonal and gives them 15 October to 15 April. Citrus County alone uses seven different periods, three of them ending on 30 April and three of them summer periods.

And in Manatee, Charlotte, Collier, Martin and Duval counties every zone is year-round. A date in those rules, where one appears, is about exemption permits for commercial fishermen — not about when a zone applies.

The practical reading is short: the month you are sailing in tells you nothing. The county does, and the sign on the water does.

What this page does not give you

Boundaries. Each rule describes its zones in bearings, shoreline contours and coordinates, often for pages at a stretch, and drawing those here would make this a chart, which it is not. On the water the zones are posted, and the county’s own rule is what defines them.

The maps are no help either, and the rules say so themselves: if a map and the rule text disagree, the text prevails. Seven of the rules point to the commission’s website for their maps, and that site answers every request with HTTP 403 — which is why this page is built from the code as published by the Department of State, and quotes the commission nowhere.