What Orchid Island Paddlers Are Actually Seeing on the Lagoon This Season

Push off from Kayak Cove on a still morning and the water reads differently than it did three seasons ago. The tannin haze is thinner. Circles the size of dinner plates surface behind the bow, hold for a moment, and disappear. A pale green blade drags against the paddle where nothing grew a few years back.

None of that is coincidence. The Indian River Lagoon is in the middle of a quiet recovery that most national coverage has yet to catch up with, and residents launching from the Town of Orchid's spoil islands have the closest seat to it. This post is a field guide for what you're looking at when you're out there this season.

The number that changed

The story most people carry in their heads is the 2021 collapse. That year, algae blooms smothered central lagoon seagrass beds and manatees starved by the hundreds. A record mortality event between 2021 and 2022 killed more than 2,000 manatees, and at the height of the crisis the lagoon carried an "F" rating from the Marine Resources Council due to poor water quality and collapsed food sources.

That is not the water you are paddling now.

The FWC officially declared that Unusual Mortality Event over in March 2025, with recorded deaths dropping from over 1,100 in 2021 to 565 in 2024. The county-level shift is sharper: Indian River County reported only 7 manatee deaths in 2025, down from 25 in 2021. Set against the statewide population estimate of between 8,350 and 11,730 animals, enough to warrant a reclassification from endangered to threatened in 2017, that local drop is what a working recovery looks like at the county scale.

The lagoon itself is being graded again, cautiously. The 2025/2026 Lagoon Health Report delivered an overall "okay" rating for many central basins — modest sounding, but in marine conservation terms it represents the first sign of a "silent recovery" that has been years in the making.

"Okay" is the ceiling this season. That is still a different ceiling than "F."

What you're seeing when the grass comes back

Seagrass is the whole game. When it disappears, manatees starve, water clouds, and every wading bird in the food chain gets thinner. When it returns, everything above it does too.

The blade brushing your paddle is most likely shoal grass. After losing over 90% of its seagrass biomass a decade ago, the lagoon is benefiting from experimental nurseries at hubs like the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute, which are now mass-producing Shoal Grass (Halodule wrightii), a "pioneer species" that can survive in more varied salinity and light levels. Shoal grass is the scout. It moves into disturbed bottom first, holds sediment down, and creates the light conditions the slower-growing turtle grass needs to follow.

For a paddler out of Kayak Cove, that means the shallow flats between the spoil islands are the places to watch this year. Where you see a green tint through clear water at three feet of depth, that is a working nursery. Where you see manatee footprints — seemingly still circles that swirl in the lagoon, the "footprint" of a manatee, meaning there's one or two nearby — that is an animal foraging, not a boat wake.

A few things worth watching for from the cockpit this season:

• Shoal grass edges in one to three feet of water along the west side of the spoil islands
• Manatee footprints near dock lines and shallow foraging flats, especially early morning
• Tricolored herons and snowy egrets stalking the grass edges, which is a proxy for baitfish returning
• Roseate spoonbills and American white pelicans working the flats between November and April
• Living Docks rimmed with dark, crusty mats along the pilings

That last one is worth its own section.

The oyster mats bolted to fifteen docks

If you paddle close enough to a private dock along the Town of Orchid shoreline, you may notice something new hanging off the pilings a foot or two below the tide line. Over 15 "Living Docks" in Indian River County now use oyster matts to filter the water, improving the clarity (turbidity) necessary for seagrass to photosynthesize.

The mechanism is unglamorous and beautiful. Each oyster on a mat filters roughly fifty gallons of water a day. Multiply that across fifteen dock installations, and you have a distributed filtration system running on the same tide that carries your kayak. The grass you are watching return is downstream of somebody's oyster mat.

This is why the local recovery reads differently than a headline number. Statewide manatee counts move slowly. A neighbor bolting an oyster mat to their piling moves the water in front of your house within a season.

Where the pelicans go after they leave

If you have wintered in the Town of Orchid, you already know the calendar. The white pelican visits the Treasure Coast from November through April. They arrive in loose flotillas, work the shallow flats in cooperative feeding lines, and disappear north before the summer heat lands.

Two things to note this season. First, the birds are following the fish, and the fish are following the seagrass. A stronger pelican presence on the flats between the spoil islands and the mainland shoreline is a lagging indicator that the baitfish base is rebuilding underneath. Second, the return schedule is a soft one. Cold snaps in the Carolinas push them south earlier. If you paddled Kayak Cove on a warm November morning last year and saw nothing, try October's tail end this year.

Beyond pelicans, the roster at Kayak Cove holds steady: manatees, pelicans, tricolored herons, snowy egrets, and more all congregate throughout the marshes, pine flatwoods, and hardwood hammocks that ring the launch.

Two other launches worth the twenty-minute drive

Kayak Cove is the launch you have. It is also worth knowing the two nearby launches that give you a different read on the same water.

Round Island Riverside Park, at 9810 South A1A, is the public counterpart. Round Island Riverside Park is the best all-around kayak launch on the Treasure Coast, with two boat ramps, a canoe launch, paved parking, and a manatee-viewing boardwalk. Shallow water keeps most motorized boats away, making it ideal for wildlife paddling. It is widely regarded as the best single spot on the Treasure Coast to see manatees. If you want to bring visiting grandchildren somewhere that will produce a manatee sighting on a schedule, this is the higher-percentage bet than your own dock.

The Manatee Observation and Education Center in downtown Fort Pierce is the no-paddle option for guests who do not want to be in a boat. The Center overlooks the Indian River Lagoon and Moore's Creek, a freshwater tributary and historical resting spot for the Florida manatee, with a covered observation walkway and a second-story observation tower for viewing Florida's "Gentle Giants," and you may also see Bottlenose Dolphin, Mullet, Brown Pelicans, and Terns. It is also a useful benchmark. If Moore's Creek is holding manatees in cold weather and your stretch is not, the temperature differential explains the absence.

Before you push off

Two practical items that shifted this year and matter for anyone launching from Kayak Cove.

First, the manatee protection zones changed on paper. Check manatee protection zone maps before launching. FWC maintains current maps at myfwc.com/manatee, and Indian River County zones were under active revision as recently as April 2026, so verify before you go. If you have been paddling the same route for a decade, the boundaries you memorized may not be the boundaries in force.

Second, the hotline. If you encounter an injured, sick, dead, or entangled manatee, report it to the FWC Wildlife Alert Hotline at 1-888-404-3922, or dial *FWC or #FWC from a cell phone. Do not attempt to assist the animal yourself. The recovery is real, but boat strikes and cold stress still surface animals that need intervention, and the difference between a rehabbed manatee and a lost one is often whoever paddled by first.

The read from the cockpit

The lagoon you paddle this season is water that has been through something and is on the way back. It is not fixed. The underlying threats, including nutrient pollution, harmful algal blooms, and vessel strikes, have not been fully resolved, and experts estimate it could take 10 to 20 years for seagrass beds in parts of the central Indian River Lagoon to recover fully. The people at Kayak Cove who put in three mornings a week are already logging the difference in real time. Thinner haze. More grass. Fewer empty flats. A pelican line where there was open water two Novembers ago.

That is the read from the cockpit this season. Bring binoculars, keep a respectful distance, and know that the circle behind the bow is almost certainly a footprint.

If you would like to talk through what living on this stretch of the lagoon looks like from the property side, or you have friends asking what has changed in Vero Beach lately, Vero Premier Properties is happy to have that conversation over coffee at the Beach Club.