E.G. Simmons Regional Park is a 469-acre waterfront park sitting quietly on the south shore of Tampa Bay, just outside the small farming-and-fishing town of Ruskin in Hillsborough County, Florida. It is not a theme park, and it is not trying to be a pristine nature preserve either. Instead, it’s that in-between space where people, RVs, mullet, ospreys, and mangroves all work out a kind of truce. The park stretches across open picnic fields, mangrove-fringed shorelines, a web of shallow paddling creeks, and a modest but beloved campground. When the tide is out, the place feels like the edge of the continent. When the tide is in, it feels like the bay is creeping up to say hello.
Why It Matters
On a map, E.G. Simmons looks like a small patch of county green space; on a weekend afternoon, it’s the closest thing many nearby residents have to a backyard beach. For Tampa Bay, which has rapidly filled in with condos and shopping centers, a big public shoreline that still has fiddler crabs and roseate spoonbills is increasingly rare. The park is also one of the most accessible places to see how a working estuary functions: where fresh water trickles out, salt water pushes in, and everything from redfish to horseshoe crabs rides the mix. For locals, it’s where kids learn to cast a net, grandparents walk at sunrise, and campers from upstate arrive with folding chairs and ambitions of doing absolutely nothing.
Best Things To Do
Visitors tend to fall into a few quiet rituals at E.G. Simmons. None of them require a wristband.
- Launch a kayak into the mangrove maze. The park’s canoe and kayak trail slips into a protected grid of shallow channels. At high tide, you can snake through mangrove tunnels; at low tide, you may end up gently scooting your boat over inches of water studded with oyster shells. It is an excellent place to see juvenile fish using the mangroves as a nursery and to discover that mullet can, in fact, jump right next to your boat when you least expect it.
- Camp right by the water. The campground wraps around interior canals and faces out toward the bay. At some sites, your back door is a short walk from the seawall where you can watch the morning shift change of wading birds. There are no dramatic cliffs or mountain vistas here; the main event is the long, flat, pastel sky and the quiet sound of baitfish flicking on the surface at dusk.
- Fish from shore or seawall. Anglers set up along the park’s edges with buckets and cast nets. People target snook, redfish, and trout, but plenty are happy with ladyfish and anything else that tugs back. On some days, the real show is the dolphin working the shallows just beyond casting distance, herding schools of mullet like they own the lease.
- Picnic and people-watch the bay. The park has pavilions and open grills tucked under cabbage palms and live oaks. On Sundays, it turns into a patchwork of family barbecues, music drifting out of coolers, domino games, and kids discovering how fast they can ride a bike over a speed bump before an adult intervenes.
- Walk the shoreline at sunrise or sunset. The light here is almost startling. With the bay stretched flat to the horizon and the industrial silhouettes of Tampa faintly visible in the distance, the sun’s low angle can paint everything in dense orange and pink. Egrets stand still in the shallows like they’re in on something you’re not.
Outdoor Highlights
E.G. Simmons is where several types of Florida landscape collide: upland, wetland, estuary, and the strangely democratic open lawn built for Sunday soccer. The edges of the park are the most interesting, ecologically speaking.
Along the waterfront, red, black, and white mangroves knit together to create that spongy interface between land and bay. Red mangroves send down their prop roots into the water like a street grid for crabs. Black mangroves handle the back line with their snaking pneumatophores poking up like little black pencils from the mud. White mangroves hang back a bit farther inland where their roots can stay mostly dry. Many visitors know none of this and simply call the whole thing a “mangrove wall.” It works fine either way.
The campground is threaded by man-made canals that now function as brackish lagoons, lined with reeds and periodically visited by manatees in the cooler months. On winter mornings when the air is still and the water is glassy, you can spot their rounded backs rising with the sound of a large exhale that seems too soft for an animal the size of a small car…