For more than three decades, mornings on Duck Key carried a particular sound: dolphin calls drifting across Hawks Cay's saltwater lagoon before the first golf cart rolled down the causeway. That sound is gone now. The eight bottlenose dolphins who lived at Dolphin Connection left for SeaWorld Orlando in early 2026, closing a chapter of island life that started before most current residents owned property here. What's replaced that lagoon, and what's replaced the marina down the road, tells you more about where this island is headed than any single announcement could on its own.
Two different things are happening on Duck Key at once, and they're easy to mistake for the same story. Hawks Cay Resort is repositioning itself: bigger boats, a chef with a national television resume, a water park under construction. Meanwhile the residential side of the island, the part that never makes a press release, keeps running its own maintenance calendar of bridge repairs and canal testing, unaffected by whatever the resort decides to build next. If you live here, knowing which layer is actually changing and which one isn't is the more useful piece of information than any list of what's new.
The Marina Came Back Smaller, and That's the Point
The Hawks Cay Marina reopened in February 2026 after a rebuild made necessary by hurricane damage, and the resort put roughly $50 million into it. What came out the other side is not simply a repaired version of what stood there before. As recently as 2021, the marina held about 85 slips. The rebuilt version holds 66, but those slips are built to handle boats up to 92 feet, along with custom fish-cleaning stations, fuel service from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., live bait, wifi, and upgraded security.
Read those two numbers side by side and the shift is plain. The marina didn't get bigger. It got built for a different kind of boat. A storm forced the rebuild, and the resort used the opening to reorient the docks toward larger vessels transiting the Middle Keys rather than the broader mix of local and visiting boats the old footprint accommodated. For anyone who ties up here regularly, that means fewer overall slips competing for space, but also a marina increasingly shaped around superyacht-class traffic rather than the average weekend boat.
Where the Lagoon Used to Be
The dolphin story is the more complicated one, and the timeline matters. In March 2025, the Dolphin Company, then the parent of Dolphin Connection along with the Miami Seaquarium, Gulf World Marine Park in Panama City Beach, and Marineland Dolphin Adventure in St. Augustine, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy amid federal and state investigations into a string of dolphin deaths at Gulf World. Hawks Cay Resort itself showed up on the initial creditor list, owed $337,202 by the leased sea pen operation sitting on its own property.
By December 2025, a bankruptcy filing laid out a plan to transfer the eight dolphins housed at the Duck Key facility. On January 28, 2026, a Delaware bankruptcy judge approved the transfer to SeaWorld Orlando, and the animals moved in the following weeks.
Here's the detail worth knowing if you live on this island: Hawks Cay told the public it wasn't involved in the decision to close the facility. Court filings told a slightly different story. The resort had informed interested bidders in September 2025 that it was unlikely to extend the facility's lease past its original October 2026 end date, and Hawks Cay itself had been in negotiations to purchase the dolphin business outright. The resort wasn't a bystander to this closure. It was one of the parties shaping how it ended.
What comes next on that stretch of the property is Coral Cay Adventure Park, arriving in late 2026 with waterslides, a splash pad, a sports lawn, and an arcade. Hawks Cay is marketing it as the only adventure park of its kind in the Florida Keys. One long-running wildlife attraction is gone. A family water park is arriving in its place, timed for the same year.
A Michelin Detour Next to the Tiki Bar
The dining side of the resort split in a similar direction. In March 2025, Top Chef winner Jeremy Ford opened Salt + Ash at Hawks Cay, an elevated menu built around farm-to-table ingredients and open-fire cooking, and it's become the resort's signature dining room.
That sits alongside the casual options that were already there and haven't gone anywhere: Tiki Grill for poolside fare, Coral Grill for family-style dinners, Angler and Ale on the marina docks for anyone who wants to trade fish stories over a drink, and The Cafe for grab-and-go. The resort now runs two distinct dining tiers with not much between them, a destination restaurant built around a name chef and a set of casual standbys built around convenience. If you're deciding where to grab a weeknight dinner versus where to take out-of-town guests for something memorable, that split is now the map.
The Part of the Island That Isn't Changing
Everything above happens at the resort level, under Hawks Cay's brand and its lease agreements. The residential side of Duck Key runs on an entirely separate track, and it's worth knowing that track exists independent of whatever the resort does next.
The Duck Key Property Owners Association has spent the past year on its own list of unglamorous but necessary work: a Harbour Drive Bridge Replacement Timeline, canal water quality testing with results published in August 2025, and ongoing tracking of liquidated damages on bridge projects across the island. None of that shows up in a resort press release, but it's the infrastructure that actually keeps a residential island on the water functioning.
Club Duck Key, the recreation center at the heart of the community, keeps its own separate calendar going too. It welcomes residents from neighboring keys to use its pool, tennis courts, and pickleball courts, and its monthly happy hours, holiday festivals, tiki nights, and luncheons continue regardless of what's being built or torn down at the resort. The Duck Key Fishing Club runs on the same logic, a community fixture that predates every headline about marinas and dolphins and keeps operating on its own terms.
That's the actual takeaway for anyone living here. Hawks Cay is in the middle of reinventing its brand, from wildlife attraction to adventure park, from a broad marina to a superyacht-capable one, from casual dining alone to a two-tier food scene. The residential community around it isn't reinventing anything. It's just maintaining bridges, testing canal water, and hosting tiki nights, the same way it has for years.
What to Watch Next
Some things haven't moved at all. Hawks Cay's fireworks display, approved again for this past New Year's Eve alongside displays at Ocean Reef Club and Bakers Cay Resort in Key Largo, remains one of the few traditions that has carried through every other change on the island.
The next real marker to watch is the opening of Coral Cay Adventure Park in late 2026. That's the moment the resort will finally show what actually replaces the dolphin lagoon experience for the families who used to build a Hawks Cay stay around it. Until then, the island is living in the gap between what it used to be known for and whatever comes next.
If you're weighing a move to Duck Key, thinking about a renovation on the residential side of the island, or just want a clearer read on how the resort's changes might touch property values or rental demand nearby, The Cascone Team tracks these shifts as they happen, not after the fact. Let's connect.
