The Mayport Ferry and the Last Shrimping Village: A Morning at the Mouth of the St. Johns

I am the third car in line for the 6:30 boat, and the man waving me forward in the dark has done this so many times he is not really looking at the cars anymore. He is looking at the river. Behind him, the St. Johns River Ferry sits low and orange-lit against black water, its ramp clanging as the night's last truck rolls off. The air smells like diesel and low tide and something green underneath — marsh grass, maybe, or the particular wet-rope smell of a place where boats actually work for a living. A laughing gull lands on the rail, decides I have no food, and leaves.

This is Mayport, at the far eastern edge of Jacksonville, where Florida's biggest city quietly ends in a fishing village most of its own residents have never visited. I came for the ferry. I stayed for everything around it.

The five-minute crossing that should not still exist

The St. Johns River Ferry is, on paper, an absurd piece of infrastructure. It carries cars across a 0.9-mile stretch of water about two and a half miles inland from where the river meets the Atlantic, connecting the two dead-ends of State Road A1A — Mayport Village on the south bank, Fort George Island on the north. Without it, the drive between those two points is roughly an hour around through downtown. With it, the gap closes in five minutes.

It costs $7 for a car on a weekday — $6.30 if you pay through the MyJTA app, $8 on a weekend — and a single dollar if you walk on. (The Jacksonville Transportation Authority approved a fare change in May 2026 that takes effect in January 2027, so the number may have crept up by the time you read this; check before you go.) Boats leave roughly every half hour from 6 a.m. to 8:30 p.m., every day.

I paid, killed the engine, and got out. This is the move almost nobody makes and everybody should: you do not have to sit in your car. I walked to the bow rail as the deckhand cast off, and for five minutes I had the river. A shrimp boat was coming in on our port side, outriggers up, a cloud of pelicans and gulls working its wake for whatever fell off the nets. Across the water, the gray geometry of warships. Below me, the brown St. Johns sliding toward the sea, two porpoises rolling once in the wake before they vanished. It was the best seven dollars I spent all month, and I hadn't even reached the other side.

A practical note worth having before you go: the two ends run on a staggered clock, so there's a boat roughly every half hour no matter which bank you're standing on. Mayport departs on the hour and the half hour; Fort George leaves at quarter-past and quarter-to. If you miss one, you wait thirty minutes, not an hour — and waiting at the Mayport ramp, watching the working dock, is not the worst thirty minutes Florida will hand you.

A town that was a shrimp capital before it was part of a city

Mayport was here long before Jacksonville sprawled out to meet it. It was platted in 1841 by David Palmer and Darius Ferris and first called Mayport Mills, a lumber-and-fishing settlement built by some of the most unusual founding stock in Florida: bar pilots and fishermen who'd come from the island of Minorca, from Portugal, from France. Those Minorcan roots still show up on local menus, which I'll get to — they are the reason a tomato-and-datil-pepper chowder is the village's signature dish and not a clam shack import.

The fishing came in waves. In the 1850s, New England crews discovered the river mouth was thick with shad, mullet, and alewives, and by the 1870s Connecticut captains — including one Captain David Kemps, Sr. — had relocated their whole operation south. The daily work of the fishery was run largely by African-American fishermen, and three-quarters of the catch went straight up to dealers in Savannah. When gill nets and steamboat traffic thinned the mullet and shad in the early 1900s, the village reinvented itself again: motorized shrimp boats arrived in the 1920s, and shrimping became the thing Mayport was.

The peak is almost hard to picture standing here now. Through the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, the docks belonged to a roster of operators whose names locals still say — Johnny Vona, Booty Singleton, Matt Roland, Jesse Perry, A.J. Ruffin — and by the 1970s, more than 150 shrimping vessels were unloading at Mayport Village. Nearly every family in town had a shrimper in it.

Then the bottom fell out. Rising fuel prices, tightening regulation, and a flood of cheap farmed shrimp from Ecuador and Asia did to Mayport what they did to working waterfronts up and down the Gulf and South Atlantic. The fleet that filled these docks shrank to almost nothing. Today, exactly one commercial dock still takes a daily offload of wild shrimp. It's worth understanding that before you eat here, because it changes the meal.

The last dock, and where to eat off it

That one surviving dock belongs to Safe Harbor Seafood Market & Restaurant, and it is the reason "Mayport shrimp" still means something specific — wild-caught local shrimp, not the gray imported kind thawed out of a bag. The market opened at this Mayport location in 2013, and fishermen deliver to its dock throughout the day. You can stand on the deck with a basket of fried shrimp and watch a boat tie up and offload the next batch directly into the kitchen behind you. It has been named the best Mayport shrimp in the city more than once, and on a weekend the line tells you the locals agree. Tuna tacos, po'boys, shrimp baskets, the works.

Two minutes away is the other institution: Singleton's Seafood Shack, serving since 1969, when a woman everyone called Miss Ann started cooking the day's charter catch for guests out of a 20-by-20-foot building. It has grown into a glorious, listing, low-ceilinged room of bare wood tables and a riverside deck, the kind of place where the floor is not level and that is part of the appeal. Order the Minorcan clam chowder — tomato-based, lit up with datil pepper, a direct line back to those Minorcan settlers — and the devil crab. Eat the shrimp off a styrofoam plate with a plastic fork and do not, under any circumstances, wish it were fancier.

If I had to send you to one: Safe Harbor for the working-dock theater and the freshest possible basket, Singleton's for the history and the chowder. The honest answer is that you have time for both, because the village is small and you came all this way. One warning that has nothing to do with the food — both fill up fast on weekend middays, and neither is the kind of place that rushes a table. Come at 11 a.m. or come at 2 p.m., but do not roll in at noon on a Saturday expecting to walk straight to the water with a basket. The locals already have your table.

The warships across the water

You cannot spend a morning in Mayport and ignore the gray wall on the horizon. Naval Station Mayport, commissioned in December 1942 on San Pablo Island, is the third-largest naval surface fleet concentration in the United States — a working harbor built to hold around 34 ships, with an 8,001-foot runway alongside it.

For half a century it was a carrier town. The first capital ship used the new carrier basin in October 1952, and from then through 2007 Mayport was homeport to a run of aircraft carriers whose names read like Cold War history — Shangri-La, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Forrestal, Saratoga, and finally the USS John F. Kennedy, which left in 2007. No carrier is based here now, but destroyers and cruisers still slide in and out of the river mouth past the village, and if you time it wrong (or right), you'll watch a warship thread the same channel your $7 ferry just crossed. It is a genuinely strange and very Mayport juxtaposition: a shrimp boat and a guided-missile destroyer sharing one narrow brown river.

Make it a loop: ride to Fort George Island

Here is the move that turns a quick ferry novelty into a real half-day. Stay on the boat — or rather, drive back on for the return — and cross to Fort George Island on the north bank. This is the gateway to the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve, 46,000 acres of marsh and maritime forest, and it holds something most Florida visitors never see.

Kingsley Plantation is the oldest standing plantation house in Florida. The grounds are free and open Wednesday through Sunday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and what stops you is not the house — it's the curving row of original tabby slave cabins, built of crushed oyster shell, standing in the open field exactly where the people who were enslaved here lived and worked the sea-island cotton and indigo. There's a roughly 90-minute phone audio tour that's worth every minute. If you have more time, the 4-mile Fairway Loop Trail traces a retired 1920s Scottish-style golf course through the forest.

And if you want raw coast, swing south of the village to Huguenot Memorial Park, at the very mouth of the river — a drive-on beach (soft sand, four-wheel drive strongly recommended), 47 campsites, and one of the largest seabird colonies on the East Coast, with close to 300 species recorded. It sits directly across the water from the naval station, under the flight path, so expect helicopters with your laughing gulls.

What I'd tell a friend

Go early, go hungry, and treat the ferry as the experience, not the errand — get out of your car and stand at the rail. Pair Mayport Village with the Fort George crossing and you have a half-day that costs almost nothing and feels like you found a seam in the map. This is a working waterfront in the last act of a long story, the kind of place Florida keeps fewer of every year, and it's hiding at the edge of its biggest city.

If the river-town-with-a-disappearing-industry pull gets you, you're not done. Drive 35 minutes south and St. Augustine carries the same Minorcan thread at Fort Mose and the Castillo de San Marcos. Or follow the working-dock story across the state to the Greek sponge boats at Tarpon Springs and the oystermen of Apalachicola, where Florida's other fishing villages are writing the same hard, beautiful ending.