For most of a century Destin stayed exactly what Leonard built: a working fishing village, reachable only by boat, its families running nets and hand-lines for mullet, snapper, and grouper. Everything changed when the East Pass was finally bridged in the 1930s and a road reached the village. Vacationers found the white sand and the impossible green water, and the same fleet that had carried fish to market began carrying anglers out to the reefs instead. The Destin Fishing Rodeo started in 1948 as a way to keep the town busy through the slow season, and it never stopped — a month-long tournament every October, now one of the longest-running fishing events in the country.
The captain who started it all was not a Floridian at all. Leonard Destin came from New London, Connecticut, out of a family of whalers and deep-water fishermen, and he learned the Gulf the hard way — a hurricane off Florida's Atlantic coast in 1835 capsized his father's schooner and drowned both his father and his brother while Leonard, barely twenty, clung to wreckage until a passing ship found him. He kept fishing anyway. By the early 1850s he had settled for good on Moreno Point, at the calm pass where the Gulf of Mexico meets Choctawhatchee Bay, married, and built a New England-style cottage and a commercial fishery that shipped its catch to Pensacola. The little settlement was called East Pass at first; only later did it take the name of the captain who would not leave, and he is buried there still, having died in 1884.
Why People Visit Destin
Visitors come to Destin for the water — the emerald Gulf, the white sand, and the fishing that earned the town its nickname — and stay for everything around it: the harbor and its charter fleet, Crab Island in summer, the dunes at Henderson Beach, and an easy, sun-warmed pace. It is the natural base for the central Emerald Coast, lively along the boardwalk and quiet out on the sand. Active in every season and welcoming to families, Destin rewards anyone drawn to the Gulf of Mexico and the best fishing on the coast.
