In mid-June, Florida State Parks posted a short update to the Curry Hammock page: a heavy influx of sargassum had rolled in, and some kayak trails might not be accessible. That was the whole notice. No reopening date, no season write-off, just a line telling visitors to call ahead and check trail conditions.

Read on its own, that sentence sounds like the park is done for the summer. Anyone who spends real time on Grassy Key knows it means something much narrower. The advisory closes a couple of water trails. It says nothing about the beach, the hammock, the bike path, or the kite zone, and it says even less about the three separate calendars that are all running right now, in the exact stretch of August that outsiders assume is dead.

What the Notice Actually Covers

Curry Hammock's paddling routes are two mapped loops: a mangrove tunnel run and a longer circuit around Deer Key. Both sit in shallow, low-flow water, which is precisely why sargassum piles up there. Wind and current push floating seaweed into sheltered channels the same way it collects in any calm cove along the Middle Keys. That's the geography behind the June advisory, and it's also why the notice is worded as a caution rather than a closure order. The park is asking people to call the ranger station, not telling them to stay away.

What's Not on the List

A lot of what draws people to this park has nothing to do with those two kayak loops.

• The park's 1,200-foot Atlantic beach stays open for swimming, snorkeling, and birdwatching. Florida State Parks uses a color-coded flag system to flag rough surf or marine pests day to day, and that system runs independently of the kayak trail notice.
• The 1.5-mile nature trail through the park's hardwood hammock is dry land. Sargassum floating offshore has no bearing on a trail that never touches water.
• The section of the Florida Keys Overseas Heritage Trail that passes the park is part of a 90-mile paved path connecting Key Largo to Key West. It's a biking and walking route, not a paddling route, so it's outside the scope of the advisory entirely.
• The kiteboarding zone keeps running whenever wind allows it. Park rules require kites to launch and land only from the day use area, with all activity kept 300 feet from the shoreline. That's well past where drifting sargassum settles against the beach. Wind decides that calendar, not seaweed.

Three Calendars, Not One

This is the part a single advisory can't capture. Late summer on Grassy Key isn't one season with one status. It's at least three overlapping schedules, each running on its own clock.

None of these depend on whether two kayak loops are passable. Someone who reads the sargassum notice and writes off the park for the season misses all four.

The Lobster Season Nobody Plans a Trip Around

The two-day sport season, mini-season, ran July 29 and 30, 2026. That's the version that shows up in every tourism headline, the one with boat ramps jammed before sunrise and marine patrols on every channel. It's already over.

What's running now is the regular season, which opened Aug. 6 and continues through March 31, 2027, nearly eight months on the water. Monroe County's daily bag limit is six lobster per person per day, the same limit that applied during mini-season here, while the rest of Florida got twelve per person during their own two-day rush. That gap matters. It means the crowd math in the Keys never favored cramming into a 48-hour window the way it does elsewhere in the state. Divers who wait until September or October work the same grounds with a fraction of the boat traffic and the same daily limit they'd have had in July. The tourist version of lobster season is two days long. The local version is a season that just got started.

Mile Marker 58 Has Its Own September

Grassy Flats Resort & Beach Club sits at Mile Marker 58, a family-owned boutique property that was rebuilt after Hurricane Irma and reopened in 2018. It's home to the Barrel & Bale tiki bar and the Rhum House restaurant, both fixtures for anyone who's spent an evening on that stretch of beach.

From Sept. 17 through 21, 2026, the resort is hosting the Grassy Key Paddle Battle, a week of paddleboarding, foiling, and outrigger canoe clinics led by athletes including Packet Casey, Jake Portwood, and Johnny Puakea. It opens with a meet and greet at the Barrel and Bale Tiki Bar, runs daily clinics alongside yoga and live music, and spends its afternoons at The Lagoon on Grassy Key before closing with a sunset sandbar paddle. None of that depends on whether the mangrove kayak loop a mile up the road is open. It's a different stretch of shoreline running on its own event calendar.

Why the Falcons Matter More Than the Notice

Starting Sept. 1, Curry Hammock becomes the headquarters for the citizen-science Hawkwatch, with volunteers staffing a viewing outpost every day through Oct. 31 to count migrating raptors. The park has built a reputation in birding circles for the sheer number of peregrine falcons that pass overhead each fall. On a single day in 2015, volunteers counted more than 1,500 peregrine falcons moving through, a record that still gets cited by birders planning their fall trips around this exact park.

That count happens from an outpost on the hammock trail, the same dry-land trail that has nothing to do with kayak access or sargassum. The advisory that closed two water loops in June has zero bearing on whether the falcons show up in September. They will, on schedule, the same way they have every year the count has run.

The Season the Notice Doesn't Describe

A one-line advisory about two kayak trails isn't a verdict on the whole park. It's a note about two specific loops, posted because the state park system would rather you call ahead than show up and find seaweed in a mangrove tunnel. Everything else, the beach, the hammock trail, the kite zone, the reefs now open for lobster through next spring, the paddle clinics at Mile Marker 58, and the falcons about to arrive on schedule, runs independently of that notice and always has.

That's the part worth knowing if you live here rather than just visit. The Keys generate a lot of generic seasonal advice written for people passing through once. The version that actually holds up is more specific than that, and usually more local than a single state park bulletin can capture on its own.

If you're the kind of person who tracks these overlapping calendars because you live near enough to Curry Hammock to plan around them, Jessica Borraccino keeps the same close watch on this stretch of the Middle Keys, whether you're thinking about a rental property, a future sale, or just want a local read on what's actually happening at any given mile marker. Let's connect, schedule your free consultation, and talk about what this place looks like from where you sit.