Well before the day broke, Stanley Boggan and his friends clamored with that giddiness as they walked the docks of Destin. “They carried all of their equipment to the party boats in metal galvanized garbage cans,” Faye Nettles, Boggans’ daughter, recalls.  “They would drag those garbage cans, clattering and banging, down the stairs to the docks. They would wake everyone on the harbor.”  For that, they earned the nickname Garbos.

Stanley and the Garbos caught so many fish off of the Florida Panhandle that he had to convert the bed of his truck into an icebox.  But never in his wildest imagination could he have imagined what would come of the Black Grouper that he hooked one lucky day in June of 1968.
It probably fought, the way Black Groupers do, and it probably dove to the reef bottom, hoping to sever the line.  But when Boggan pulled it in, and he looked at the dark, leopard-skinned fish, he probably didn’t expect it to be a champion.  It was a fairly average fish: a black grouper that weighed around forty pounds.  The fish was far from the largest of its species (which can grow to a whopping 124 pounds), and it didn’t even win the tournament.

But when all was said and done, it came to be worth over $300,000, and it changed the lives of two generations of his family forever.  It is, undoubtedly, the greatest second place prize that ever existed in an amateur fishing tournament.

   But Stanley Boggan always seemed to be more interested in the fish than the prizes.  “Along with the 2 lots he won in Destin,” Nettles says, “he also won a red Renault Dauphine.”  But he never paraded around in the flashy new car.  He immediately sold it, climbed in his truck, and drove back to Alabama (most likely with a truckload of fish dripping on the road behind him). 

When people describe those plots of land in the early days of the Destin Fishing Rodeo, they inevitably chuckle at the exponential climb in their value.  Hank Klein is writing a history of the area called Destin Pioneer Settler: a land history from 1819 to 1940, and he explained how the lots were given away in the early days of the Rodeo.  A local landowner named Tyler Calhoun, who arrived in the early thirties, donated a chunk of his property as a prize for the winners every year for his entire life.  The properties were tucked away on a strip of land called Holiday Isle - a place tucked between the idyllic white powder sands of the Gulf of Mexico and Caloosahatchie bay. But at the time, he says, There wasn’t anything out there...In the old days it was like a fishing camp lifestyle.”  That lifestyle was enough to make Destin Paradise on earth for Stanley Boggan.  

Kathy Marler Blue  calls her lifelong home of Destin a “Fisherman’s Paradise.”  She’s an associate director of the Destin History and Fishing Museum as well as a descendant of one of the sixteen original families that settled the fishing village.  She says the place is geologically destined to be an ideal fishing spot.    “Off the Port of Destin, you have quicker access to the deeper water,” which she says is marked by several fissures in the earth’s surface, hidden beneath the blue water and home to schools of prized finfish.  DeSoto Canyon, whose deepest parts reach 3,280 feet below the surface, is the most massive of the three. “That’s like a two hundred seventy storey building,” she says.  It is easily enough to swallow the entire condominium complex system that has taken over Destin’s waterfront.

Even in the pre-developed days of Destin, when the Garbos fished the Panhandle, the place had the well-worn feeling of a storied fishing spot.   In 1902, a giant whale, seventy feet long and twelve feet thick, was lodged on the beach and died there.  “Families for miles around packed lunches and traveled by surrey, wagon, or ship, making a regular holiday of the trip to see the large whale,” Captain Homer Jones told Destin Historian Vivian Metee in 1971.  He said that the pilgrims ripped chunks of bone from the washed-up skeleton and stuck them in their front yard as ornament and proof that they saw the great whale of 1902.

Destin’s very founding back in the 1840’s is an angler’s tale of misfortune and adventure.   “Leonard Destin was from New London Connecticut, and he and his father and his two brothers took their fishing boats and went down to Key West,” Hank Klein said.  “A lot of fishermen from New England would spend the winter and continue their fishing there in the warmer waters.”   But warm waters breed big storms, and the men were slammed.

“They ended up getting caught in a hurricane off the east coast of Florida, and his father and two brothers were killed on in the hurricane.”  Leonard survived, but he was marooned on an island in the Florida Keys that was home to a band of Indians notorious for their distaste for Anglos.  

After a couple of months, he eventually found his way to the Florida Panhandle and founded his namesake town that would come to be known as the “Luckiest Fishing Village in the World.”

Faye Nettles is surely a benefactor of that luck.  She’s quick to say how blessed she was to have ended up in Destin.  She recalls the days when her father would pack his family in the car and drive from Birmingham to the Gulf Coast. “Daddy caught so many fish that he would carry them back to Birmingham and sell them, and that’s how we came up here every weekend,” she says.

She would eventually build a house and live on one of the pieces of property that her father won in the Destin Fishing Rodeo.  (Stanley was so good that he won a second lot as well).  “We were here when the streets were sand.  We couldn’t even find our lots because there were no lots.  There was just sand,” she said.   

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And she watched Destin change before her eyes into the place it is today.   In 1970, two years after her father reeled in the property-winning fish, the population of the county stood at 88,682.  In 1986, when she sold the house on Holiday Isle and moved to a nearby Gulf front town, the population was 133, 295.  By 2012 it had more than doubled to 190,000.

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Not all locals are in love with all of the development.  Neon-painted souvenir stores, roller coaster rides, and water slides crowd the edges of Highway 98, Destin’s main drag, notorious for painful summertime traffic jams.  For the last three years, locals have fought about helicopter tours that hover over residential areas.  And property owners on Holiday Isle, where Boggan won his two lots, are embroiled in a controversy over plans for a 180-foot high rise condominium development.

“(Locals) think there’s nothing more that can be done and then they put a zipline up,” Klein says.  His wife’s grandmother was a founding member of the fishing village.  Years ago, her cabin once sat at the terminus of the new zipline.

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Stanley Boggan would barely recognize the place, and he probably didn’t realize that he was a very early part of the process that spurred that growth.  

Originally, the town floated the idea for the fishing tournament in order to raise funds for a community center.  But gradually - and with the help of an ex-CIA agent with handy contacts throughout the country - the town worked hard to market and promote the Destin Fishing Rodeo as a hallmark event for tourism and development.  “Most people when they see the word rodeo, they think of horses, cattle, steed riding, or roping and all that stuff,” Kathy Marler Blue says.  But the name harks back to the big saltwater corrals where the early fishermen, including Captain Leonard Destin, would gather their catch before market.  She says that the rodeo was yet another way that fishing founded Destin’s society and helped to change it into the place it is today.  Today, the rodeo attracts 30,000 anglers and boasts over $100,000 in prizes.

There are hints of lament in Kathy Marler Blue’s voice when asked about the way things have changed.  “My gosh,” she says, “how many more restaurants and knick knack stores could you possibly have?”  But she stays resolute in her positivity about the tourism industry.  “Whether you like it or not, it’s still your bread and butter and it’s putting food on the table,” she says.  Her own father, Ross Clinton Marler, was instrumental in making that happen.  He once said that tourists were “more valuable than a bale of cotton, and twice as easy to pick.”   

Dewey Destin is the great great grandson of the town’s founder.  He’s lived in Destin his whole life, and his life has changed with the rhythms of the tourism and fishing markets.  Every year, he serves about 200,000 pounds of fish from his two restaurants in town, and he’s watched the sun rise thousands of times from the decks of commercial fishing boats.  He remembers the winters of his childhood, when his mother would move to New Orleans to work for a  downtown department store.  Asked whether the culture that his great great grandfather founded has been obscured by the wall of condominiums, Destin says no.  “It’s just kind of a culture that’s underneath. If you look you can find it, if you don’t, you never really know it’s there,” Dewey Destin says.  

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 If you look at the 2013 leaderboard of the Destin Fishing Rodeo, you can easily trace the connections to Destin’s salty culture.  You’ll see that Dewey Destin Seafood sponsors the Jackpot Awards for the largest King Mackerel, and if you know what you’re looking for, you can even find a direct connection to Stanley D. Boggan.

On any given day, if you wake up at the crack of dawn and stand on the jetty that separates Destin Harbor from the Gulf, you’ll see a seemingly endless stream of white fishing boats, motoring slowly towards the deep water.  One of them is called Strange Brew, and the captain of that vessel is one Ken Nettles, the grandson of the late Stanley D. Boggan.   “Deep sea fishing is in his blood,” Faye Nettles says.  He designs and re-designs custom tackle.  He builds and rebuilds rods and reels.  He loves to motor out at dark and watch the sun rise and fall.  It’s the exact stuff that his grandfather was passionate about.

Most importantly, Nettles says, her father “instinctively knew where to find fish,” and her son clearly does too.  His name is in the record books for the largest amberjack caught in the sixty-five year history of the tournament.  Nettles had been stalking the fish since it snapped his line earlier in the year.  He took his client, Mark Underdahl, to the same spot with specially devise tackle and stand-up gear to reinforce footing.   Underdahl told the Destin Log, “It was like trying to pull a donkey to the boat.”  It weighed in at 111.6 pounds and fetched Underdahl a prize of $3000.

Lucky children have grandfathers who tell wild stories about catching big fish.  Ken Nettles should have been one of them.  But his grandfather was killed in an automobile accident at the young age of 43.  Stanley Boggan was riding home from Destin in the passenger seat of a friend’s car.  That friend fell asleep at the wheel, and the car crashed through the guardrail of an overpass.  Both lives ended on impact.  

One can only imagine the fish that this extraordinary angler would have caught if he had enjoyed his winnings in the Fisherman’s Paradise where he spent his final morning.  Luckily, the fish that he caught in his short life have provided his children and grandchildren with an unbelievable legacy.  And Ken Nettles is part of that, living the life of his grandfather’s dreams.