Gulf Breeze’s westernmost neighborhoods sit on a strip of land with water on both sides — Pensacola Bay on the south, Santa Rosa Sound on the north — and growing up there means growing up amphibious. Few people have made more of that accident of geography than Dan Green, a lifelong waterman who turned decades of boating knowledge into a second career as a yacht broker, and who has spent nearly as much time fighting for the water itself as playing on it.
Green spent his career as a commercial and residential real estate appraiser and broker — forming G. Daniel Green & Associates in 1988 after earning a business degree in Real Estate and Urban Land Studies from the University of Florida in 1979 — and he has held a yacht broker’s license for almost 30 years. The license, he admits, was mostly his family’s idea. His father and his wife Gail got tired of watching him spend hours on the phone giving free advice about waterfront property and boats. “They forced me to get my yacht broker’s license,” he says.
Growing up on the “Big Water”
Green’s coastal credentials run deep. His father, a mechanical engineer at Monsanto in Pensacola, spent childhood summers in Point Clear with an adopted family, the Muscat clan, and understood what Mobile families saw in the Eastern Shore — including the practical wisdom of a cottage oriented to catch the west winds off the bay, which kept the mosquitoes down on summer afternoons. When it came time to build a family home, he found a west-facing lot at the west end of Gulf Breeze, where Dan grew up fishing, surfing and skiing.
Sailing came by way of a great-aunt’s cottage on Perdido Bay — the “Big Water,” as Dan calls it — next door to Paul Shreck, a sailmaker and sailing icon whose dock filled on weekends with Lightnings and Windmills ready to race. By the mid-1980s, Green was racing offshore, and he was on the winning crew at Fort Lauderdale to Key West Race Week, the event sponsored by Yachting Magazine and Mount Gay Rum.
A life measured in fishing trips
He might have become a fishing guide. He deliberately chose not to. “I never wanted to turn my hobby into a job,” he says. Instead, he spent an “inordinate amount of time” — his father Jack’s words — planning and hosting tropical destination fishing trips through Central America and the Bahamas, and collecting friendships across the sport: Lefty Kreh, arguably the preeminent fly fisherman of his era; Chico Fernandez; Nick Curcione; and Jose Wejebe, host of the popular fishing show “Spanish Fly.”
That friendship produced television. During and after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill, Green and his son Daniel filmed an ESPN “Spanish Fly” episode with Wejebe. When the Gulf closed to fishing after the blowout, the plan pivoted to filming the cleanup operations inshore on Pensacola Bay from Dan’s Maverick flats boat, followed by a second show, “Bull Reds in the Bay in December.”
Three campaigns
Green’s real legacy may be as a conservationist and civic fighter. He counts three passionate campaigns in his life. The first, in the late 1990s, was the campaign for Florida’s gill net ban — a fight he joined after working as a commercial fisherman in high school and concluding that gill nets are “non-discriminating in what they kill.”
The second targeted water quality in Little Sabine Bay. In 1999, Escambia County declared the shallow lagoon — beloved by water skiers because it is always calm — un-swimmable, with bacteria counts “off the charts.” Green helped form a group with a 10-point restoration plan, a three-year and famously contentious campaign. The plan curtailed water skiing and high-speed boating with a no-wake rule — an unpopular call among neighbors — because boat props were shredding seagrass roots and wakes were eroding the shoreline. Twenty-five years later, the results are visible: water quality is greatly improved, seagrasses and shoreline grasses are flourishing, sea life has returned, and paddleboarders, kayakers and swimmers share a saltwater lagoon that is safe again.
The third campaign came in 2000, when Escambia County closed the only school on Pensacola Beach — a decision that would have meant two bridge crossings twice a day for beach families. Green joined the group that fought back, and the result was the Pensacola Beach Elementary Charter School. He served as a founding board member and president for seven years. The school has been the top-ranked K-5 public school in Escambia County since it opened in 2000 and has won federal Blue Ribbon awards for excellence.
The Coastal Mentoring Club
Green’s commitment to the next generation runs through his family as well. Believing that 95 percent of the kids growing up surrounded by water had nobody to teach them the practical skills of the water, he pushed his son Daniel to build a community service record — and Daniel responded by founding the Gulf Breeze High School Coastal Mentoring Club with a few skilled buddies. The club recruited younger students from the middle school and met monthly to teach FWC boating safety, line tying, bait catching, cast-netting and rod rigging. A competitive grant application Daniel wrote won funding originally expected to go to a South Florida club — an effort Dan credits with helping his son get into the University of Florida. Daniel, Dan says, is “a great waterman, hunter, tremendously talented chef, and everyone’s best friend.” His daughter Savannah passed the Florida Bar and practices law in Pensacola.
Boats, property and a lifetime of perspective
Now retired from his valuation career, Green brings an unusual depth of knowledge to the brokerage side of the waterfront: he has built, appraised and watched coastal homes destroyed in hurricanes; owned and operated powerboats and sailboats of all kinds; and traveled with his family to the Bahamas for more than 40 years. “There is a parallel between boats and property here,” he says. “I’ve built a big knowledge base regarding appropriate home design and boats to own over a lifetime. It’s been very fulfilling to share that accumulated knowledge with others so they might benefit.”
He recommends one book to anyone who wants to understand the water he has spent his life on: “The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea,” Jack E. Davis’s 2018 Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the Gulf of Mexico.
Blessed, in his own words, to have spent his whole life in and on the waters of the Gulf Coast, Dan Green remains what his neighbors have always known him to be — the salt of the earth, and the water.