You reach the edge of the water not by boat but by Interstate, the highway ringing Tampa Bay and depositing you beside one of the world’s longest fishing piers. Metal rail and concrete stand between you and the bay on both sides, but it isn’t a promenade built for strolling. It’s a pier built for purpose — and that purpose is fishing.
Here you are, standing where a highway used to be and where a highway still runs overhead, and the first thing the place does is insist that you slow down.
There’s no promenade romance here. No soft description of sand and sea. There’s just the water, some wind, and the tension of a line cast deep into a bay that never built itself but was engineered and re-engineered again and again.
What This Place Is
Skyway Fishing Pier State Park is the repurposed remnants of the original Sunshine Skyway Bridge that once carried highway traffic from St. Petersburg across Tampa Bay toward Bradenton. After newer spans replaced it, the old approach was left in place and converted into a fishing pier that extends into the bay — one of the longest of its kind in the world…