08/06/2026
She was a passionate advocate to save our sea turtles ❤️
Bradenton Beach gave her May 1. She had been dead four months.
May 1 is the first morning of sea turtle nesting season on Anna Maria Island. It is the day the patrol starts walking the sand. For 30 years the woman walking it was Suzi Fox, and in January 2023 the city commission voted her that date, unanimously, in a room she was not in.
She was not from here. Fox came down from Michigan in 1977, rented sailboats in Coconut Grove, then took a front-desk job at the Tortuga Inn. In 1990 she found a turtle nest at Bayfront Park in Anna Maria. She later told the Sun she felt she had a calling, joined the 40 volunteers already out there, and never left.
By 1996 the previous director had failed and lost the state permit, the one that legally allows anyone in Florida to touch a nest. Fox applied for it herself and got it. She threw out the old hatchery methods, sat through state environmental meetings nobody else wanted to sit through, and learned the science well enough to argue it in front of city commissions.
Then there was the problem she could not fix with paperwork.
A loggerhead hatchling finds the ocean by crawling toward the brightest horizon it can see. On a dark beach, that is the water. On a lit beach, it is the CONDOS.
"There wasn't one half-block area in 7 miles where you could release a hatchling and have it go to the sea," Fox said. "We didn't have any lighting ordinances back then, and people just didn't want to turn off their lights."
Ten disorientations in front of a single resort. Year after year they went backward, away from the Gulf and toward the road. EVERY one of them born knowing exactly where to go, and turned around by a porch light.
So she knocked on doors for three decades. Amber bulbs. Shielded fixtures. Code enforcement calls. Resorts, rentals, condo boards, one light at a time.
"In the first year after those first projects, nothing," she said. "Everything went into the sea."
7,339 turtle activities logged. 4,454 nests protected. 301,694 eggs. 271,680 hatchlings that made it down to the water on her watch.
In May 2022 a car crash put her through surgeries and physical therapy while the season she had never missed was already underway. She was determined to get back to the beach. She died on September 30, 2022, at 65, with that season still running.
She got 271,680 hatchlings home. She never saw a single Suzi Fox Day.
Anybody who has ever rented a place on the Gulf knows the knock on the door about the beach-side lights, and the bulb that had to be swapped before dark. Somebody had to be the person doing the knocking.
Then, on June 27, 2023, about 300 people stood at Coquina Beach and watched a nesting loggerhead crawl back toward the Gulf with a satellite tag on her shell. The turtle's name was Suzi. She swam 1,360 miles in 137 days.
The patrol started its 43rd season on April 15 this year. On May 1, 2026, the volunteers set up at Coquina Beach again, turtle shells on the table, free amber bulbs for anyone who asked. The nest-adoption program carries her name and sold out. Under a post about the day, her granddaughter Ashley wrote: "Thank y'all for still doing this for my nana."
Last season the island sent 30,899 hatchlings into the Gulf. Not one of them knew her name. They found the water because Suzi Fox spent 30 years getting an island to turn its lights off. That is the whole trick. Somebody has to make the ocean the brightest thing out there.
Image courtesy: Cindy Lane | Sun
