Boating & Fishing Editor
Beat: Boat Tours, Things to Do, Destin Day Trips
Grant crewed on Destin harbour boats before he wrote about them and still reads East Pass by the tide rather than the calendar. He covers Crab Island access, pontoon rentals, shuttles and charters, and he is blunt about shoal water, crowded anchorages and boats advertised as something they are not. If the wind is wrong, he tells you to go tomorrow.
3 guides · 3 news posts
Last updatedGrant's most recent update to this site was .
Long-form
Reported guides to Fort Walton Beach, each with its own publication and last-updated date.
A quarter-mile pier, a surf line, thirty miles of bay, a tidal pass and the largest charter fleet in Florida. They are five different sports and only one of them needs a big cheque.
8 min read
Photograph: Unsplash
The boat is the easy part. The parts that cost people money are the fuel policy, the licence nobody mentioned, and an ebb tide running out of East Pass against a south wind.
7 min read
Photograph: Unsplash
You are not buying a ticket to Crab Island. You are buying a boat, a seat on a boat, or a captain, and the three cost wildly different amounts and produce wildly different days.
8 min read
Photograph: Unsplash
News desk
Shorter, dated pieces about what is changing in Fort Walton Beach.
How this was written. News published under Grant Ochoa's byline was drafted by machine from primary sources — operator notices, government and municipal releases, published schedules — and every factual claim in it was matched to one of those sources before it published. A Fort Walton Guide editor can change or pull any of it. Our editorial standards.
A tournament that has run every October since 1948, a seafood festival on the boardwalk, and the best month of the year to be on this water.
October 1 – October 31
Photograph: Unsplash
The food boats, slides and floating bars look permanent. They are not, and the arrangements that govern them shape what your day out there is actually like.
Photograph: Unsplash
Two different seasons run on the same water, and which one applies to you depends on the permit held by the boat you are standing on.
Photograph: Unsplash