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.
Then there is the water everyone photographs. The sand at Destin is almost pure Appalachian quartz, washed down the rivers over millions of years and ground to a fine sugar white; against it the Gulf turns the clear, lit-from-within green that gave the whole shoreline its name. A Fort Walton Beach junior-high student named Andrew Dier won a fifty-dollar contest in 1983 for coining "the Emerald Coast," and the name has described this stretch of Panhandle ever since. Out in Choctawhatchee Bay, a submerged sandbar called Crab Island turns waist-deep and turquoise in summer, a floating gathering place of boats, music, and vendors; on the Gulf side, Henderson Beach State Park keeps a run of the original dunes the way the coast looked before the towers.
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.
