Recreational shrimping is open on the St. Johns, five gallons a boat

Recreational shrimping is open in every county the St. Johns River touches between Palatka and the sea. The limit is the part worth knowing before anyone loads a boat. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission sets it at five gallons, heads on, per harvester per day. It then sets a possession limit of no more than five gallons, heads on, per vessel, and that second number does not scale with the number of people aboard. Four adults in one boat are held to the same five gallons as one adult alone.

A recreational saltwater fishing license, resident or non-resident, is what the state requires unless the harvester is exempt. It is the saltwater license even where the water is very nearly fresh. There is no size limit on shrimp.

The closed season is April and May, and FWC draws it around six named counties: Nassau, Duval, St. Johns, Putnam, Flagler and Clay. That list is close to a description of this river. It is September. None of that binds now. It is the line a reader will run into next spring.

The gear rules are dimensional. A cast net may be up to 14 feet stretched. A dip net may have an opening no larger than 96 inches around the perimeter, and a frame net no larger than 16 feet around the perimeter. A beach seine is capped at 500 square feet of mesh area at 2 inches stretched mesh. Push nets are for harvesters on foot. Shrimp traps are allowed up to four, each 3 feet long by 2 feet wide by 1 foot high. No more than two nets may be fished from a single vessel at any one time.

One caution about the state’s own page. It carries a separate and stricter rule for the Big Bend, where the limits are two gallons per person and five gallons per vessel and only cast nets and dip nets are allowed. That is the other coast. It does not apply here, and the two blocks sit close enough together on the page to be mistaken for one another.

The water the run is waiting on

The river is still warm. It is warmer than it was on this date in either of the last two years.

At Buffalo Bluff near Satsuma, just upriver of Palatka, the USGS daily mean water temperature was 85.1 degrees on Saturday. On the same date in 2025 that gauge read 82.0, and in 2024 it read 83.7. The gauge at Jacksonville was 84.2 degrees Saturday, against 82.4 a year ago and 82.6 the year before. USGS publishes these in Celsius and the Fahrenheit here is converted.

The shape of this September is the unusual part at the Jacksonville end. The daily mean there peaked at 86.5 degrees on Sept. 14, a week ago. In both 2025 and 2024 that station took its seasonal peak in the last days of August and spent September coming down. This year the downriver water was still climbing in the second week of the month.

Monday’s instantaneous readings say the same thing in another instrument’s voice. At 11:24 in the morning NOAA’s gauges had Mayport at the Bar Pilots Dock at 84.2 degrees, Dames Point at 84.4 and Jacksonville University at 84.6, all three with clean quality flags. Those three are the only stations between Ponce Inlet and the Georgia line that publish an observed water temperature, and all three of them sit in this river.

None of that forecasts anything. It is what two agencies’ instruments recorded at stated minutes. No state or federal agency publishes a shrimp run forecast for the St. Johns. Nothing in a temperature record names a date.

What did arrive is weather. Florida Sportsman’s Northeast Florida forecast for Sept. 17 to Sept. 21, written by Captain Roger Bump, opens by reporting that the first northeaster has finally arrived, and puts mullet running up and down the Intracoastal and through the inlets. That same forecast names shrimp twice and both times as bait, small pieces fished near the jetties for mangrove snapper and jumbo shrimp fished for redfish in the St. Johns. It reports no shrimp taken by anyone.

Fresh at Palatka, salt at Jacksonville

The stretch between Palatka and Mayport is not one body of water. The gauges make the gradient plain. USGS publishes salinity in parts per thousand, and at midday Monday the river read 0.6 at Buffalo Bluff near Satsuma, 0.6 at Racy Point near Hastings, 1.0 at Dancy Point near Spuds, and 1.1 and 1.2 at the two gauges by the Shands Bridge near Green Cove Springs. At Julington Creek at Hood Landing near Bayard it was 2.2. At the St. Johns River at Jacksonville gauge it was 15.

Open ocean runs around 35. So the river at Palatka on Monday was near fresh, the river at Jacksonville was a little under half-strength seawater, and everything between Hastings and Green Cove Springs sat much closer to the Palatka end than to the Jacksonville one. Three of those gauges, Racy Point near Hastings, Dancy Point near Spuds and the Shands Bridge pair on the county line, are reading water a St. Johns County resident can reach from a public landing.

On where white shrimp are found, FWC’s research FAQ says this: “The white shrimp is also caught principally in northeast and northwest Florida, but it is generally found in waters that are muddier, shallower, and less salty than waters where pink shrimp and brown shrimp live.” The agency’s own linked species account, which would carry the life cycle in more detail, returns a 404.

Six hours and forty-seven minutes

A shrimper works a tide. The tide in this river is not one event. It is a wave that takes most of a working day to travel from the jetties up to Putnam County, losing nearly all of its height on the way.

Take the high water NOAA predicts at Mayport at 5:42 Monday evening, 4.91 feet above mean lower low water. The same high reaches Orange Park Landing 3 hours 24 minutes later, at 9:06 that night. It reaches Green Cove Springs at 10:39, 4 hours 57 minutes behind Mayport. It reaches Racy Point at 11:44, 6 hours 2 minutes behind. It reaches Palatka at 12:29 Tuesday morning, 6 hours 47 minutes behind Mayport. Welaka gets it one minute after that.

The height goes as the time comes. NOAA publishes the great diurnal range, the average distance from the lower low water up to the higher high, as 4.96 feet at Mayport. At Palatka it is 1.40 feet, at Racy Point 1.27, and at Green Cove Springs 0.90. The tide that moves nearly five feet of water at the Ferry Depot moves about eleven inches at Green Cove Springs.

Predicted high and low water, in feet above mean lower low water, Eastern Daylight:

Those are predictions. They are harmonic arithmetic about the sun and the moon. They carry no wind, no rain and no river. After a week of northeast wind the water in this river is routinely somewhere other than where the table puts it. A prediction is not a forecast, and neither one is a measurement.

For anyone setting a height against a survey rather than against a boat, NAVD88 sits 2.99 feet above mean lower low water at Mayport, 0.77 feet above it at Palatka, 0.62 at Racy Point and 0.41 at Green Cove Springs, all on the 1983 to 2001 epoch. NOAA publishes both datums and not the subtraction between them.

What nobody publishes

No agency, marina or charter operation reachable from here has published a dated count of shrimp taken out of this river this season. Florida Sportsman’s regional forecast, the only current named report covering this coast, mentions shrimp only as something to put on a hook.

So the state of it on Monday is this. The season is open, the limit is five gallons to a boat, the water between Palatka and Jacksonville is running warmer than it has on this date in two years, and the downriver gauge took its seasonal peak a week ago rather than three weeks ago. What that does to the timing of the run, nobody with a gauge in the water has said.