The World's Luckiest Fishing Village
Near Destin, Florida
Every sign in this town seems to repeat the same boast. The world's luckiest fishing village. It is not just marketing, and it has an origin story.
According to the story that stuck, in the nineteen fifties Florida governor LeRoy Collins went out on a boat from Destin and landed a big king mackerel in short order. Asked whether he had gotten lucky, Collins is said to have answered that luck had nothing to do with it, not if you were fishing out of Destin, because Destin was the world's luckiest fishing village. The phrase was too good to let go.
It became the town's official nickname and has been painted on charter boats and banners ever since. But behind the slogan is real geography. Destin sits beside the only easy natural passage to the open Gulf for many miles in either direction, and the deep water that draws big fish lies unusually close to shore.
So while the governor's quick catch made a great headline, the luck was really the shape of the sea floor just offshore, the thing Leonard Destin noticed a hundred years before anyone thought to put it on a sign.
