Snook Fishing on Longboat Key: Two Passes, Beer Can Island, and the Buttonwood Docks

Longboat Key is twelve miles of beach bracketed by two working snook passes, which makes it one of the simplest places in the region to build a trip around tide flow. Longboat Pass at the north end concentrates fish on the bridge pilings, the jetty rock, and the shoreline of Greer Island, the walkable spit locals call Beer Can Island; the pass runs at better than a knot and a half, and snook stack on the current seams, especially the outgoing at first light in summer.

New Pass at the south end fishes the same way around its bridge, jetty rock, and beach-side trough, with the channel a bait highway all season. The passes-and-inlets reference has both mapped.

In between, the Gulf beach holds cruising fish in the trough from June through August for sight-casting walkers, and the bay side offers a different game: the docks and grass edges of Buttonwood Harbor, the Sister Keys, and the residential dock lights from mid-key north produce snook at night all summer.

Live scaled sardines chummed against the mangroves is the daytime standard, 30–40 lb fluorocarbon leader always. There is no public ramp on the island itself; launch at Coquina Bayside just over the Longboat Pass bridge for the north end or Ken Thompson Park off City Island for New Pass (see the boat-ramp directory).

For 2026 in the Sarasota Bay region here the slot is 28–33 inches, one fish per person, seasons March 1–April 30 and September 1–November 30, snook stamp required — the snook-season guide has it, confirmed at MyFWC — and the summer pass fish are closed-season spawners, so handle them in the water and get them back fast.