We were looking for the same thing for our stay this coming August- a quiet beach resort that was family oriented. A highly recommended resort was the just opened Hammock Beach (
www.hammockbeach.com). A bit pricey, but when I called directly, they gave me a better quote than any of the discount places like Expedia, Travelocity, etc. 4 pools, lazy river, large slide, lots of kid friendly activities, golf for hubby, ocean front, etc. It is a condo resort, that also has guest rentals of the condos.
Supposedly less that 90 minutes from Universal, located 15 miles south of St. Augustine.
An internet search of the place yielded only positive reviews from previous guests. Most were 5 stars out of 5, one person gave it a 4 star rating due to it being a bit remote (just what we want though).
Last August, we stayed at St. Pete beach . We were told we were there during a red tide, however, at the time I could not find any verification of this on the Florida Red Tide websites and the resorts certainly weren't commenting. Anyway, the amount of dead and dying fish/eels/horseshoe crabs at the tide line was rather disconcerting. You literally had to tip toe your way through the carcasses. And forget wading in the water. I realize that swimming in red tide water is not harmful to most healthy people, yet everything I read said don't swim if there are dead fish. When we were there, every wave carried a few more dead fish. Making sand castles at tide's edge brought numerous unwelcome dead visitors. The stench was terrible. We had reserved an ocean front room, but couldn't open the doors because of the dead fish smell. I have to add that I grew up on the coast, so am pretty immune to most beach related smells and various washed up things. What was the most disturbing for us was that our children were very upset with all the gasping fish on the beach. They wanted to throw them all back in. We walked the beach at least a mile both ways from our hotel and the fish kill was the same. The hotels along the beach made no effort to clean the fish off the beach during the day. It was so bad, we actually cut our stay short. Called Universal to see if we could get a room a day earlier and headed off to Orlando. Hopefully, this was an isolated incident.
However, this year, we are trying the Atlantic side. Can't persuade Hubby to give the gulf coast another try, especially after reading the Florida red tide websites that August through November is the prime red tide season and is not all that uncommon in the St. Pete area.
Florida residents, feel free to step in here...is red tide really as prolific as the websites seem to indicate, or did we just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time? Interestingly enough, the 1995 picture on this website (
http://www.mote.org/~mhenry/rtchrono.phtml) is EXACTLY what our beach looked like. We took lots of pictures and I compared them and the density of dead fish was the same as in 1995. The good thing is that it looks like the waters have been clear this summer.
Additionally, if anybody else knows about this new Hammock Beach resort, both pros and cons, we would love to hear about it.
-Goofy
(edited - apparently, I can't spell
)
I live here in Venice. 
