The Fort Matanzas Ramp Was Supposed to Reopen Before Turtle Season. Some Pages Still Say Otherwise.
If you drove out to the Fort Matanzas beach ramp last winter, you found orange fencing and a closed gate. If you check a visitor guide for that same stretch of A1A today, in early August, a lot of them will tell you the same thing: still closed, expected back in May. That answer is stale. It was written for a project that St. Johns County scheduled to wrap up months ago, on purpose, before this year's nesting season ever started.
For anyone living at Summerhouse Beach & Racquet Club or elsewhere at the southern tip of Anastasia Island, that gap between what the county planned and what the web still says is the whole story of this stretch of coast right now. Here's what actually happened, and how to get an answer you can trust instead of one that's just old.
On November 17, 2025, St. Johns County and the National Park Service closed the Fort Matanzas Beach Ramp, the vehicle access point off A1A about 3.9 miles south of State Road 206, to everyone: drivers, walkers, cyclists, all of it. The county's own project page said the ramp would stay shut through May 2026, and it built in a specific reason for that window. Construction was set to happen "outside of normal sea turtle nesting season," which runs May 1 through October 31. In plain terms, the county picked a start and end date designed to have the ramp back in service before the first nest of the year got laid.
That timeline matters because it's not the same thing as "we'll get to it eventually." It's a repair with a deadline built around biology, not convenience. If the project held to that plan, the ramp near Summerhouse should already be back in normal rotation for the 2026 season, even though some visitor pages haven't caught up to say so.
This wasn't cosmetic. The ramp had been rebuilt in 2019 with a tied-back sheet pile wall on three sides, but hurricanes in 2022 tore up the ground between the ramp and its parking lot. Crews made temporary patches at the time to stop the erosion from spreading, and this project was the permanent fix: a new ADA-compliant boardwalk, staircases straight down to the sand, and repairs to the seawall and parking area.
St. Johns County Public Works project manager Corryn George described the goal as building "a long-term resiliency solution," with the added hope that a real boardwalk would pull foot traffic off the vehicle ramp entirely and make the whole access point safer to use.
While that ramp was closed, every car that would normally use it got rerouted through the Crescent Beach ramp instead, with a turnaround built at the Spyglass Beach Access Point for anyone who needed one. To handle that extra load safely during nesting season, the county layered on a stricter rule specific to Crescent Beach: exit-only after 5:30 p.m., reopening at 8 a.m., a full two hours earlier than the 7:30 p.m. cutoff that applies at every other county-managed ramp during nesting season.
Here's the part worth sitting with. That 5:30 rule wasn't tied to a date on the calendar. County documents and local coverage both describe it lasting "until the final sea turtle nest hatches," full stop. Not until May 1. Not until the ramp reopens. Until the nest itself is done. That's a different kind of deadline than most people are used to, one that depends on what a turtle does underground rather than what a calendar says, and it's a useful thing to understand if you live in a spot where construction and nesting season ever overlap again. The rule that governs your evening beach access might outlast the reason you think caused it.
Even once the ramp is fully back to normal, getting to the fort itself runs on its own separate clock. The National Park Service ferry to Fort Matanzas doesn't run seven days a week. It operates Thursday through Monday only, with boats leaving roughly once an hour between 9:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. There is no ferry service at all on Tuesdays or Wednesdays, and boarding passes are handed out in person at the visitor center the same day, first come first served, with no phone reservations. Plenty of longtime residents still learn this one by trial: they show up on a Wednesday afternoon expecting a boat and find the dock empty instead.
None of this happens in isolation from the numbers behind it. St. Johns County logged 999 documented sea turtle nests across its beaches in the 2025 season, a slight increase over 2024. But persistent high tides late in the season pushed hatch success below average, meaning fewer hatchlings actually made it out than the raw nest count would suggest. That's the kind of season that produces exactly the situation Crescent Beach saw last November: a straggler nest still active well past the general season's end, still protected, still capable of triggering a closure that outlasts the calendar everyone else is using.
If you want to know what's actually happening on the sand this week rather than what a static guide page says, the county posts daily beach driving conditions on its Facebook, X, and Instagram accounts, plus a dedicated beach driving updates page, because ramp status can shift with tide and weather even outside of construction season. St. Johns County also just launched something new worth following if you like this stretch of coast: a monthly video series called SJC Stewardship, hosted by county environmental specialist Megan Wright, which opened its first episode in July 2026 with a deep look at Fort Matanzas itself. It's a better way to understand what's happening at this end of the island than a page that hasn't been touched since last fall.
Construction isn't the only thing that's shifted at the south end of Anastasia Island. The restaurant options nearby have changed as well, and not all in the same direction.
None of this is dramatic. It's just the normal churn of a small coastal stretch, and it means the mental map you built a year or two ago is due for an update, same as your assumptions about the beach ramp.
The thread running through all of it, the ramp, the ferry, the turtle counts, the restaurants, is the same one. This end of Anastasia Island runs on several schedules at once, and none of them are printed in one place you can bookmark and trust forever. A construction deadline gets set around a biological season. A closure that started as a construction workaround gets tied to a single nest instead of a date. A ferry that looks daily on paper isn't. A beloved bar closes for good while a beloved restaurant sits in permit limbo waiting to come back.
Living here well means checking the primary source instead of the cached one. Living here happily means knowing where to eat while you wait for one restaurant to reopen and accepting that another one closed for good.
If you've got questions about what's changing at this end of the island, whether it's beach access, a favorite restaurant, or anything else about life here, the team at Lighthouse Realty has been paying attention to this stretch of coast for a long time and is always glad to talk it through. Contact us anytime.
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