Everything in this archive exists because of one feature of the underwater landscape: a single deep channel cutting through the shallows and bars at the mouth of Tampa Bay. Every surveyor who charted it, every fort built to command it, every pilot who runs it, and every disaster that happened in it traces back to this one fact. The channel is the reason Mullet Key has a history at all.
Tampa Bay is large, but it is shallow, ringed and floored with sandbars and seagrass flats that would ground any seagoing ship. There is essentially one deep-water way in from the Gulf, a natural channel that runs between Mullet Key and Egmont Key and then up the length of the bay toward the port. Whoever controls that channel controls access to the entire bay and the city at its head. This is the single strategic fact that organizes the whole story; it is why the Tocobaga built their capital on the bay, why the Spanish, the British surveyors, and finally the U.S. Army all cared about these particular low, sandy, otherwise unremarkable islands. Take away the channel and Mullet Key is just a mosquito-ridden sandbar; with it, the key is the doorkeeper of one of the great harbors of the Gulf.
Because the channel was the key to the bay, mapping it accurately was a prize pursued across empires. The Spanish naval pilot Francisco Maria Celi produced the first true chart of the bay and its entrance in 1757; the British Admiralty surveyor George Gauld charted it again in 1765, named Mullet Key, and urged that a fort be built to command the passage. Every later authority reached the same conclusion Gauld had, the U.S. engineer board of 1849 on which Robert E. Lee served, and the builders of Fort De Soto and Fort Dade in 1898: hold the channel, hold the bay. The two forts were sited precisely to cross their fire over this water.
What nature provided, engineering improved and now sustains. The modern shipping channel is a maintained, dredged, and buoyed system that begins at the Egmont Channel across the bar at the mouth, passes the Mullet Key cut, and runs as a long series of straight dredged reaches up the bay to the docks at Tampa and the phosphate and petroleum terminals around the harbor. From the sea buoy to the port is on the order of forty miles of channel, among the longest dredged approaches to any major port in the country, kept to a depth of more than forty feet by the continual work of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, whose dredges have deepened and widened it again and again across the past century as ships have grown. It is a narrow, hard-edged thread that a fully loaded freighter must follow with almost no room to wander, bounded by shoals on either hand.
Such a channel is too long, too shallow-bordered, and too important to be left to a ship's own master. By law every large vessel inbound or outbound is taken in hand by a Tampa Bay bar pilot, a local expert who boards from a pilot boat out at the sea buoy and guides the ship the whole length of the run and back. The pilots have been stationed at Egmont Key, at the channel's mouth, since 1926, and their station there is a direct descendant of the navigational knowledge that Celi and Gauld first set on paper. The harbor pilot John Lerro was doing exactly this work, guiding an inbound freighter up the channel, on the morning in 1980 that the Sunshine Skyway fell.
The same channel that made the bay worth fortifying has been, in the modern era, the stage for its worst disasters. The Coast Guard buoy tender Blackthorn capsized here in January 1980; the freighter that brought down the Sunshine Skyway was navigating it that May; the 1993 oil spill fouled its mouth and the beaches of Mullet Key with it. The fort built to guard the channel against an enemy fleet never fired a shot, but the channel itself has gone on collecting losses, from collisions, storms, and the sheer relentless traffic of one of the busiest ports on the Gulf of Mexico. It remains exactly what it has always been: the gate to the bay, and the most consequential stretch of water in this entire history.