Since Syd Solomon and Pasco Carter Jr. received permission to close Midnight Pass in 1983 in an attempt to save their south Siesta Key homes, many area residents yearned for its reopening.
Hurricanes Helene and Milton – which impacted Sarasota County Sept. 26 and Oct. 9 – abruptly opened a new pass and re-established a link between Little Sarasota Bay and the Gulf of Mexico for the first time in more than four decades.
Solomon’s home was demolished by Sarasota County following Hurricane Ivan in 2004. Mike Evanoff, the president of the Midnight Pass Society II – a group that formed in 2021 with a goal of reopening the pass – now owns the former Carter home.
That irony is not lost on Evanoff.
“Pasco Carter is the one that closed the pass and I’m the one that owns the house and is trying to open the pass,” said Evanoff, who purchased the home in 2021. “Forty years later, it’s the complete opposite, if you think about that.”
The two storms, for now, rendered moot the debate on whether Midnight Pass should be reopened, though a nascent model developed by scientists studying the flow of water through the inlet suggests the pass that currently separates south Siesta Key from Palmer Point Park and, in turn Casey Key, may ultimately remain open through natural sand movement.
Sarasota Congressman Greg Steube weighed in with an Oct. 22 letter to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, urging it permanently reopen Midnight Pass, as well as Little Gasparilla Pass and Stump Pass in Charlotte County.
The Sarasota County Commission indicated its commitment to keeping Midnight Pass open when it listed the issue among the board’s strategic planning priorities for 2025.
That followed a Nov. 6 letter from County Administrator Jonathan Lewis to Florida Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Shawn Hamilton documenting efforts to monitor the inlet, model future flow and a determination that the newly opened and wild pass meets the definition of an inlet.
The letter listed the width of the “throat” of the inlet at 130-feet and a depth of just under 15 feet.
David Tomasko, executive director of the Sarasota Bay Estuary Program, noted that after Hurricane Helene carved a small channel, the reopened Midnight Pass didn’t last more than a week.
Following Milton, whose eye made landfall on Siesta Key, “it’s now more than two months later and it’s still 12 to 14 feet deep,” indicating that, in the short term at least, it is stable.
“If you just care about the water moving back and forth and small boats being to go back and forth,” he added, “then guess what: you already have it.
After being closed for nearly 41-years the storm surge from Hurricane Helene and then Milton re-opened Midnight Pass. Now with the flow between Sarasota Bay and the Gulf of Mexico restored, boaters are taking full advantage of going in and out of the pass.
Scientists study Midnight Pass to determine a plan to keep it viable
A variety of academic institutions and agencies, including Sarasota County Public Works, the University of Florida and the University of South Florida are keeping track of the pass, as well as the impact the new water flow has on Little Sarasota Bay.
At high tide, boats and jet skis can easily travel between Little Sarasota Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, though at low tide, the passage may be too shallow for boats to pass.
Data collected and associated modeling will help establish what Sarasota County may need to do in terms of maintenance dredging to ensure the pass remains open.
Tomasko said the data will allow Sarasota County “to come up with a very reasonable, technologically and technically accurate management plan.”
Ping Wang, a professor with the USF School of Geosciences, and a team of graduate students and postdoctoral students recently conducted a 24-hour study of the pass, and postdoctoral students measured flow velocity during the December full moon.
The stability of the pass, Wang explained, is dependent on the flow of water – called a tidal prism.
Water flowing into Little Sarasota Bay from the Gulf of Mexico either heads north or south, and east.
Midnight Pass, photographed at low tide on Dec. 18, 2024, has managed to stay open since Hurricanes Helene and Milton re-opened the channel that had been closed for 41 years.
“We’re also taking some measurements at these two branches just to see if the flow is strong enough to keep it open,” he added.
The measurements will be used to create a model that can both document what portion of Little Sarasota Bay flows through each channel.
Dr. Wang has a hypothesis that the flow through the north channel isn’t as strong from the south, which could result in the pass shifting northward.
Conversely the model can be used to determine what steps need to be taken to create an equilibrium and a stable pass.
A stronger flow from the south is one reason that Midnight Pass migrated north and endangered the Solomon and Carter houses.
It’s also a reason that Solomon’s and Carter’s attempt to dig a new pass farther south failed.
Subsequent attempts to dredge a new pass failed. After the DEP denied the county’s application to re-open the pass the county withdrew its application to reopen it.
How big was Midnight Pass before it closed?
In October 1921 – before tropical systems were named – a hurricane opened what was then dubbed Musketeers Pass between Siesta and Casey keys. It was renamed Midnight Pass in 1924.
By 1955 Midnight Pass was more than 500 feet wide with a maximum depth of 13 feet.
After Milton made landfall near Siesta Key 103 years later, Brian Martel, 78, told a Herald-Tribune reporter that its closing was “paradise lost.”
The Midnight Pass of his childhood featured blue waters that rivaled the Caribbean, with abundant shrimp and fish.
Ryan Gandy, the science and restoration manager for the Sarasota Bay Estuary Program, has more recent memories – after the dredging of the Intracoastal Waterway changed the water flow inside Sarasota Bay – of similar abundance.
Until he was 10, Gandy and his step-father Herschel Hayo – a former Sarasota city commissioner in the 1960s – would fish all over Sarasota Bay, from Longboat Key south to Midnight Pass.
The state budget included $1 million for a project to re-establish a tidal connection between the Gulf of Mexico and Little Sarasota Bay, but that appropriation was vetoed by Gov. Ron DeSantis. Many Sarasota residents want to restore an inlet that once separated Siesta Key from Casey Key. The two keys were connected by a narrow strip of land, shown in this photo, until Hurricanes Helene and Milton re-opened the channel in 2024.
“I remember going to the pass as a kid in the late ’70s and early ’80s at the time where you could see it impacting those houses to the north,” Gandy recalled. “I really vividly remember a pool falling in the water or had been eroded back.”
Boats, he noted, were typically smaller back then.
Hayo’s was an 18-foot tri-hull and even as Midnight Pass was filing in, it was still possible to navigate.
“It was a different time, different boats back then.”
Hayo would talk to Gandy about when he was younger and used to travel to Midnight Pass, camp and fish for snook.
Lee-En Chung, who spent her high school years in the early 1980s living on south Siesta Key, recalled sailing with friends through Midnight Pass to the Gulf of Mexico and occasionally pausing to picnic at what’s now Palmer Point Park.
“Back then it was normal to be able to go to the south end of Siesta Key, go out to the Gulf and it was an easy place to park the boat and have a picnic,” recalled Chung, now a certified general contractor and registered professional engineer.
Why did Midnight Pass close?
Midnight Pass closed, in part because of a change in water flow in Sarasota Bay and Little Sarasota Bay that was a result of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dredging of the Intracoastal Waterway in the early 1960s.
It was also impacted by Hurricane Donna in 1960 and Hurricane Agnes in 1972.
As part of the waterway dredging, the Corps deposited dredged material on “spoil islands,” including Snake Island near the Venice Inlet and the Jim Neville Marine Preserve, located to the north and east of Palmer Point Park.
A prominent and colorful local campaign to reopen the pass continued through the 1980s and into the 1990s. The efforts subsided after setbacks from government environmental regulators in 2008 and 2009, but resurfaced with a new advocacy group and Sarasota County’s support in 2023.
Midnight Pass Society II board member Mike Holderness, a Siesta Key hotel and vacation rental operator, equates the establishment of the preserve as a main reason the original pass closed.
This aerial photo from 1984 shows Midnight Pass completely closed.
“Our whole board’s goal is just to support the county’s efforts into restoring the tidal flow into Little Sarasota Bay, keeping the pass open,” Holderness said. “What needs to be done there, you know, we’ve got to clean out the north channel that was filled in when the Army Corps dug the Intracoastal, they dumped the spoils over on a wet mangrove island.”
Evanoff pointed to the color of the water flowing out of Little Sarasota Bay after the hurricanes as evidence of how poor the water quality was.
“I mean, everybody could see after the passes open and all the aerials are the pictures from above,” Evanoff said. “It looked like a toilet bowl that was flowing out into the Gulf.
“I mean it was disgusting, just a different color of water.”
An evolving ecosystem
However, scientists say it’s not that simple. The water quality in that part of Little Sarasota Bay that Holderness, Evanoff and others reference as being brown and nasty has also created ideal nursery conditions for juvenile fish and oysters.
Tomasko noted that the water “looks different than it was and it looks different than it should be, without human intervention, but it’s not dead.
“There’s grass beds; you’ve always been able to see the seagrass meadows in there,” he said. “And it’s a hotspot for manatees, and in 2018 when we had red tide devastating Sarasota Bay, some of the lowest values we had were in Little Sarasota Bay and that was when it became a hotspot for manatees getting away from red tide: they would go to Little Sarasota Bay.
Bumper stickers supporting the re-opening of Midnight Pass have been a common sight around Sarasota for 40 years and many can still be seen around town.
“The folks who do our fish sampling have caught sea trout and redfish and Irish pompano and gray snapper and lots of anchovies,” he added. “It’s full of fish.”
Gandy chalked things up to a natural change in the ecosystem.
When Midnight Pass closed, oysters thrived because they don’t do well in high salinity.
Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission sampling indicated that the bay was a productive nursery system.
“It did change and now it’s going to change again,” Gandy said. “Right after it opened for Milton, we were doing some sampling. You could see within just a few days after Milton of the influence on that system and how much Gulf water was coming in.
“But that’s really the nature of our barrier islands; they’re movable,” he added. “These passes come and go, so I never look at it like it’s better or worse. It’s just gonna be different …We will have to appreciate it for the difference that is to come.”
This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Sarasota’s Midnight Pass is open again but is it here to stay?
