St. Petersburg's Ferry Isn't Coming Back. A Different One Is.

Ask around St. Petersburg long enough about the ferry and someone will eventually shrug and give you some version of what Mark Hubbard said publicly this spring.

"Why doesn't Tampa Bay have anything? I mean, not even privately. It really is quite confusing."

Hubbard runs Hubbard's Marina, the Madeira Beach company about to operate the boat service across the bay, and his frustration points at the actual story here. For nearly a decade, St. Petersburg had a ferry to downtown Tampa that worked, until the arrangement behind it broke. What comes next isn't the same boat with a new coat of paint. It's a different ownership structure, built specifically around the failure point that ended the last one.

Why the Old One Actually Died

The Cross Bay Ferry ran from 2016 until April 30, 2025, and its last season was its best one. The boat carried a record 72,000 passengers, riders that Tampa Bay Times described boarding for what many called a bittersweet final crossing. That's not a service anyone abandoned for lack of demand.

What ended it was a contract dispute. The operator, Boston-based HMS Ferries, told Hillsborough County it planned to swap the existing catamaran for a slower vessel, one that would have roughly doubled the 50-minute one-way crossing time by dropping cruising speed from 27 knots to 15. County commissioners ruled that violated the service's performance terms and voted to terminate the agreement rather than accept the downgrade.

Strip away the paperwork and the underlying issue is simple. The public agencies funding the ferry didn't own the boat. The service relied on a seasonally leased vessel brought in from out of state, so when the operator proposed a slower replacement and the county read that as outside the contract's performance terms, there was no local vessel ready to step in. Owning the boats and basing them in Tampa Bay addresses that gap directly.

What's Actually Different This Time

The service now being rebuilt, temporarily branded the Tampa Bay Ferry, addresses that exact vulnerability. Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority isn't renewing a lease. It's buying vessels outright with federal money and hiring a local, multi-generation boating family to run them.

The fare drop matters less as a discount and more as a signal. PSTA CEO Brad Miller has said the new pricing works because "the service with our own vessels can be much more economically run," which is the whole point of owning rather than leasing. The capacity jump matters too: two boats mean the service can run seven days a week year-round, something the single-vessel model never managed.

The Family Betting Its Name On It

Hubbard's Marina isn't a transit contractor picking up a new line of business. It started in 1928 when Captain Wilson Hubbard opened a bait-and-tackle shop, and the family moved the operation to John's Pass on Madeira Beach in 1976, where it's run deep-sea fishing charters and sightseeing tours for decades. Tara Hubbard and Captain Dylan Hubbard, part of that same family, have been the public faces of the new ferry plan alongside Mark Hubbard.

PSTA structured the deal to match that long horizon: a five-year operating agreement with an option to extend another five, which gives Hubbard's a decade of runway if the service hits its benchmarks. That's a very different incentive than a company leasing boats one tourist season at a time. St. Petersburg City Councilmember Deborah Figgs-Sanders, who chairs the PSTA board, put it this way when the vote passed:

"PSTA did everything they needed to do to accommodate those concerns as well and we're going to do everything to ensure that this project is more successful than the one before."

What's Locked In and What Isn't

Some pieces of this are settled. Others are still in motion, and it's worth being precise about which is which.

Confirmed:

• Hubbard's Marina, operating as Tampa Bay Sea Taxi, holds the five-year contract with PSTA
• Fares will start at $10 one-way
• Tampa's dock stays at the Tampa Convention Center
• St. Petersburg's temporary dock sits near the Vinoy Basin, with a permanent terminal planned at the Pier near the St. Petersburg Museum of History
• An $850,000 federal grant, secured through U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor, will fund that permanent terminal's security gate, ticket booth, and ADA-compliant access, sized to dock two vessels at once

Still moving:

• Final selection between the two preferred vessels, sourced through a nationwide search that turned up candidates in Seattle, San Francisco, and western Louisiana
• Refurbishment timelines that officials estimate at three to six months for the preferred option, but potentially more than a year if PSTA has to fall back to the backup vessel
• A public launch date that has shifted across announcements, from ahead of spring break 2026 to spring or summer 2026 to a more recent "later this year"

None of that slippage means the plan is in trouble. It means two secondhand passenger vessels have to be found, inspected, purchased, and rebuilt before anyone boards, and that kind of procurement doesn't move on a press release's schedule.

Why the Ownership Question Outlasts the Sail Date

It's tempting to read every new headline as the real update, but the date isn't where the story lives. The story is that PSTA now owns the boats instead of renting them, and the operator is a family that's worked these waters since before the Pier existed in its current form. The earlier service ran on a seasonally leased boat, and the new one is built around locally based vessels and an agreement that can run for a decade.

When the Tampa Bay Ferry does start crossing the bay, it will do it with two Hubbard-crewed vessels instead of one leased catamaran, docking eventually at a permanent terminal instead of a borrowed slip. That's the structural change. Everything else is a matter of when the paperwork on the boats catches up to it.

If a working ferry between downtown St. Petersburg and downtown Tampa is part of how you're thinking about property near either waterfront, Ryan Newton-Block tracks projects like this one as they happen, not just when they make headlines. Let's connect.