One hundred yards. FWC prohibits spearfishing within 100 yards of a public swimming beach, any commercial or public fishing pier, or any part of a bridge from which public fishing is allowed. Jetties are measured differently: 100 feet from any part of a jetty that sits above the surface, with an exception for the last 500 yards of a jetty extending more than 1,500 yards from shore.
Those are two different units, yards for piers and bridges, feet for jetties, and mixing them up is the easiest way to get this wrong.
FWC draws a distinction worth understanding. Spearing is the broader term: taking a fish by bow fishing, gigging, spearfishing, or any device that captures a fish by piercing its body. It does not include hook and line, and it does not include snagging.
Spearfishing specifically means taking a fish with a hand-propelled or mechanically propelled spear or lance, single or multi-pronged, barbed or barbless, operated by a person swimming at or below the surface.
The distance rules above are written against spearfishing, and FWC’s own list excludes bowhunting and gigging from that particular restriction.
This list is longer than most people expect and it includes nearly every inshore fish Southwest Florida anglers care about. Harvest by spearing is prohibited for:
Snook, red drum, spotted seatrout, tarpon, bonefish, permit, African pompano, pompano, tripletail, goliath grouper, Nassau grouper, weakfish, sharks, spotted eagle ray, manta ray, sturgeon, all billfish species, blue crab, stone crab, lobster, and the families of ornamental reef fish, which covers angelfish, butterflyfish, parrotfish, triggerfish other than gray and ocean, seahorses, puffers and more.
Anything else the Commission manages, and anything it does not manage, may be taken by spear. But if your target is snook, redfish or trout, the answer is no, and that holds everywhere in the state.
Beyond the distance rules, FWC prohibits spearfishing:
Powerheads, bangsticks and rebreathers remain prohibited.
The practical read for this coast is that the structure most worth diving is often the structure you are not allowed to dive. A public fishing pier carries a 100 yard exclusion in every direction, and a bridge counts if public fishing is allowed from any part of it.
That rules out working the pilings at the piers and bridges our fishing locations directory covers, including Matanzas Pass, the Sanibel Causeway spans and the Charlotte Harbor piers. It does not rule out open water, nearshore reefs and wrecks well clear of those structures, which is where most of the legal diving on this coast happens anyway.
A jetty is the one case where the buffer is small enough to matter in your favor. One hundred feet is a short distance, and the carve-out for the outer 500 yards of a long jetty exists precisely because those tips sit far from swimmers and pier anglers.
FWC is explicit that anglers who catch or sell fish taken by spearing are subject to the same rules and limits as every other angler. A legal spearfishing trip still obeys the size limit, the bag limit and the season for whatever you put on the stringer. The spear changes how you take the fish, not what you are allowed to take.
Nothing in the rule gives you a tolerance. One hundred yards from a pier is a little longer than a football field, and on open water people routinely underestimate that distance by half. If you are close enough to identify faces on the pier, you are almost certainly inside it.
The same applies to the swimming beach clause, which is separate from the pier clause and often the one that catches divers out on a busy stretch of coast in season.
Spearfishing requires a Florida saltwater fishing license the same as rod and reel, with the usual exemptions. See our Southwest Florida fishing license guide for who is exempt, and our regulations page for the current size and bag limits on the species you can legally take by spear. For what is open and where the public structure actually is, the shore and pier guide and the locations directory both map it.