TALE OF THE TEETH: Missing dentures turn up on sea urchin during dive (PHOTO)

When you live in the World’s Luckiest Fishing Village, fish tales are as common as sunny days — but have you heard the one about the sea urchin with teeth?

Fort Walton Beach resident Tony Whitsman was taking a break from his lawn care business Monday and firing up his boat for the first time this season to catch some red snapper, which was the last day to catch the famed fish.

“I hadn’t been out for a while and my buddy couldn’t go with me, so I invited one of my clients to go along and she said of course,” Whitsman told The Log Thursday.

As the two headed offshore, hoping to pull in their limit of snapper, Whitsman said the older woman began to look a little sick, as the southwest winds were making the Gulf choppy.

“I looked over and could tell she wasn’t feeling well,” he remembered. “As we cruised toward the bridge rubble, she was looking pretty green.”

As the woman leaned over the boat to get sick, Whitsman said the unthinkable happened — the woman’s dentures had fallen out of her mouth and into the Gulf. By the time the woman collected herself, Whitsman said the teeth were gone.

“Once they had dropped off the boat, we had written them off,” Whitsman said. “You couldn’t imagine that you would find them.”

The twist to this fish tale is that the missing teeth were found, courtesy of Nancy Birchett and MaryAnn Epp from Scuba Tech of Northwest Florida, Inc. Out on a dive near the bridge rubble, the divers came across the teeth, perfectly propped up on top of a sea urchin.

“Sea urchins usually like to camouflage themselves in seaweed or whatever, and I am looking down there and the sea urchin had teeth on it,” Epp told The Log Friday morning. “I bust out laughing, trying not to choke on my water. I had to do a double take, I had to look back before I realized they were actually teeth.”

Wanting to help, Birchett took the teeth to the Fishermen’s Co-Op and had a sign made saying the teeth were located, hoping they would eventually be returned to their owner. Through the fishing grapevine, the connections were made and the woman was reunited with her teeth.

“That will probably never, ever, ever happen again,” Co-Op employee Katie Thrasher told The Log Thursday with a chuckle. “I have never seen anything like this before.”

Whitsman said the woman was so grateful to have her teeth back that she gave him $100 and told him to give it to the person who found them.

“She says they saved her about $1,200,” Whitsman told The Log. “I told her the moral of this story is that everybody gets lucky on the Gulf.”