Choctawhatchee Bay

Four men with shovels changed this bay overnight. They were only trying to keep their houses from flooding.

In the spring of 1929 heavy rain in Alabama came down the Choctawhatchee River and pushed the bay several feet above normal. Its one outlet to the Gulf, a crooked channel a couple of miles east of Destin, had been clogged shut by a storm. With the water rising toward their homes, a handful of local fishermen went out onto the sand with shovels and boat oars and cut a relief trench across to the Gulf. About six feet wide. Enough to let some pressure off.

By morning the trench was a pass. The sand here is fine and loose, and twenty eight miles of pressurised bay had gone through it.

Everything followed from that. The bay had been largely fresh, fed by springs and the river. A permanent, direct opening to the Gulf turned it salt. Freshwater fish retreated upriver, sea grasses moved in, and Destin became a fishing town.