Crab Island, the Vanished Island
Near Destin, Florida
Look north from the bridge on a summer day and you may see a floating city of anchored boats sitting over water that is only knee deep. This is Crab Island, and the name is a small joke, because there is no island there at all anymore. Its story begins around the year nineteen thirty one, when the Army Corps of Engineers dredged the East Pass to deepen it for the growing fishing fleet.
The sand they pulled up was dumped on the north side of what is now the Destin Bridge, and it piled into a small landmass shaped, people thought, a little like a crab. Hence the name. But that island was never permanent.
Ongoing dredging and the constant push of the tides slowly wore it down, and in the year nineteen seventy five Hurricane Eloise swept much of the remaining sand away. What was left settled just beneath the surface. Today Crab Island is a broad, shallow sandbar, in most places only about one to four feet deep, before it drops off sharply into deep water at the edges.
It has become the most popular gathering spot in Destin, reachable only by boat, a place where an island dissolved into the sea and became a party held over its own ghost.
