Crab Island is a watery playground

DESTIN,FL — Bill Head needs a back surgery or three. He’s already had five. For now, he swears by Crab Island therapy. “Damn right,” the 65-year-old boater said from his captain’s chair. “Too much fun to miss.” Just north of Destin’s Marler Bridge, this “island” getaway, although no island really exists, is a weekend tradition for locals and tourists alike. Thousands of them, like Head, visit week after week. On Sundays, small boats peddling boiled peanuts or corn dogs weave through the crowd.
   
One group of Arkansas visitors paddling through on kayaks recently said they were on the final day of their vacation, and coming to Crab Island was saving the best for last.
   
“You don’t have to worry about walkin’,” Head said. “You lay down … get all the sun you want, and the sun helps the bones.”
   
Head’s spot at Crab Island is his sanctuary. Over the years, he’s built up a cache of photos on his digital camera. He said he’s given temporary tattoos to 2,000 women, young and old, all by using his tongue.
   
“I’m old, but I ain’t dead,” he said of his pastime.
   
Boaters of all ages surround him. The clear, shallow water near East Pass attracts families with children, too. The lines separating families from party zones are invisible but understood.
   
“You pick a spot where you’re away from whatever’s going on,” said Valerie Honda, a mother with two children who swim and snorkel as often as they can. “I think it just depends on what’s going on. If it’s Billy Bowlegs, forget it.”
   
Like the rest of Destin, once a long stretch of undeveloped land, Crab Island has changed drastically over the decades. What once was a big chunk of sand above water is long gone.
   
“Crab Island was, at one time, pretty well above the water,” said Jean Melvin, director of the Destin History and Fishing Museum. “It wasn’t exactly an island — it was connected to the land.”
   
Over her 37 years in Destin, Melvin remembers a different place, where her children could swim across deeper water to reach the spot and catch crabs.
   
“Take a net and a bucket, and you had it made,” she said.
   
Years before that, East Pass didn’t even exist. In the 1920s, some locals say, when Okaloosa Island separated the gulf from the bay, the harbor was flooding and threatening the boat docks. Four men from the Melvin, Destin and Marler families used shovels to cut a small trench across it.
   
As the water went rushing out, the trench grew.
   
“Whatever the veracity of this story, if this was done it certainly changed the hydrology of the area forever,” said Timothy Mahar, a Destin environmentalist.
   
Today, Crab Island’s jellyfish outnumber its crabs and birds. Mahar rarely goes there or to nearby Norriego Point.
   
“I liked the end of the island just fine when the walk out dissuaded so many others from wanting to go there,” he said. “But now with the Emerald Grande looming on the horizon, it no longer feels like I’ve even left town.”
   
Mahar said he occasionally will dive around the west side of East Pass, but only when Crab Island is empty and usually at high tide. Otherwise, he fears what waste is floating his way.
   
“I’ve been on Crab Island on a pontoon boat filled with drunken women. I recall holding the hands of one so she could dangle her backside over the side to take care of business,” he said. “There’s that whole water quality thing again.”
   
However, recent water quality tests have been good at East Pass. A sample from the western foot of the Marler Bridge registered a fecal coliform count of just 21, according to a report issued Wednesday.
   
That’s measly compared to the 1,540 figure measured at Gulf Islands National Seashore park about four miles to the west.
   
Officials also found vastly higher coliform counts at Liza Jackson Park and Garnier Bach Park, both in Fort Walton Beach. Health advisories have been issued for them.
   
Whatever the water quality, people like Bill Head won’t waste many summer weekends away from the water. He “goes into withdrawal symptoms” in the winter. The next round of back surgeries will have to wait until the season’s over.