In 1835, fed up after a poor fishing season, Destin’s great-great-grandfather Leonard left New England and set his sails south, seeking richer waters. After surviving some trials and tribulations—a hurricane, a shipwreck, and a dreaded yellow fever season—he eventually made his way to a tiny peninsula on the Gulf of Mexico, sixty miles east of the Florida-Alabama line. There he built a home on a sandy strip of land facing the translucent emerald waves of Choctawhatchee Bay.
This spit of sand would eventually come to be known as Destin—the “world’s luckiest fishing village.” And for Leonard Destin, these waters were certainly a fortunate find. Just offshore, the gulf drops precipitously to deeper waters that nurture schools of red snapper and Spanish mackerel—a sea of plenty for a fisherman like Destin to build a business, selling his catch to market in nearby Pensacola. Growing up in the lucky fishing village named for his forebearer, Dewey Destin followed in his family’s footsteps, learning to catch crabs and mullet. Today, he owns a string of local seafood restaurants, including one next door to the spot where his great-great-grandfather Leonard first settled.
On a sunny, seventy-degree day in December, I met Destin on the boardwalk outside the restaurant to talk about his town’s history, its luck, and the ways that luck continues to be tested. A tall, slender man with white hair, polarized sunglasses, and a relaxed manner, Destin gently shooed a seagull trying to snatch a shrimp from a nearby plate before joining me at a picnic table.
“You take fishing out of Destin and it wouldn’t be what it is today,” he told me, looking out over Choctawhatchee Bay while we snacked on fried gulf shrimp and hushpuppies. Easy access to a productive fishery is the reason the largest recreational charter fishing fleet in North America docks right here in Destin. The chance to hook a huge sailfish combined with the opportunity to enjoy white sand beaches and sparkling waters is what draws millions to visit the town each year. Today, tourism accounts for nearly a third of the jobs in this county of 68,000 residents.
“Our natural resources are what built this economy,” says Kathy Marler Blue, director of the Destin History and Fishing Museum. “Having good water, a good fishery, and beautiful beaches helped us become the world-class resort we are today.”
Satellites would eventually capture horrifying images of an oily sheen extending across an estimated 68,000 square miles of the gulf.
So you can imagine how Destin residents felt when they woke on the morning of April 21, 2010, to news of a disaster unfolding just offshore. The night before, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig had exploded out in the gulf, killing 11 crewmen. The complicated machinery that had tapped into an oil deposit deep under the sea floor collapsed. Crude oil gushed from the hole and seeped into the currents circulating around the Gulf of Mexico.
Satellites would eventually capture horrifying images of an oily sheen extending across an estimated 68,000 square miles of the gulf. Oil coated the beaches from Louisiana to Alabama, causing mass mortality among fish, seabirds, and marine mammals. In Louisiana, oil choked the plants that were holding together the state’s already-disappearing coastline. President Obama declared it the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history.
As the slick spread, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration closed more than a third of the gulf’s fishery to protect consumers from contaminated seafood. Instead of hauling in their catches that summer, gulf fishermen put their boats to work installing floating barriers, trying to prevent oil from reaching their home shores. The region’s commercial fishing industry lost $1.6 billion in the first eight months.
“Fishing seasons are good and bad. Hurricanes come and go,” Destin said. “But that’s the first time in my life that I realized we had the potential to really ruin Destin and what it was— perhaps permanently.”
On July 15, 2010, 87 days after the explosion, crews finally capped the well. But that was just the first step in a complex and hard-fought recovery that has played out in courts, statehouses, and communities across Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas ever since. In 2011, the Deepwater Horizon Natural Resource Damage Assessment Trustee Council reached an agreement with BP, the company that had hired Deepwater Horizon. BP agreed to front a billion dollars for restoration, research, and land protection throughout the region. And in 2016, a federal judge in New Orleans ordered BP to pay $20 billion to help Gulf Coast communities recover. It was the largest environmental settlement in U.S. history.
The Florida Panhandle—the part of the state stretching roughly from Tallahassee west to the Alabama border—is far enough from the spill’s epicenter that its beaches escaped severe contamination. But the disaster still brought the economy to a halt, says Phil Coram, program administrator for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. Florida’s beaches and waterways are the primary attraction for the more than 100 million tourists who flock to the Sunshine State each year. After the spill, “People stopped going to the beach. They stopped fishing,” Coram says. “And so we sought funds from BP to compensate for those lost recreational uses.”
Rick O’Connor is an educator and naturalist in Pensacola. When BP money began flowing into the area, he feared it would be used to put up more high-rise condominiums with private beach fronts—as he’s watched happen elsewhere in Florida, particularly in Destin.
