Blue Lagoon at San Roc Cay

08/30/2026

Somewhere on the Eastern Shore, in the hour before sunrise, the bay occasionally comes up onto the beach and lies down at your feet. 🌅

They call it a jubilee.

Flounder go flat in inches of water. Blue crabs climb the pilings and sit there blowing bubbles. Shrimp, eels, stingrays, croaker, all of it packed into a band of shallows you can walk out into with a washtub.

The reason is not magic, and it is not the fish being friendly. It is suffocation.

Mobile Bay stratifies. Dense salt water from the Gulf slides underneath the fresher river water on top, and that bottom layer gets sealed off from the air. Decomposition down there strips the oxygen out of it. When an easterly wind and a rising tide push that oxygen-poor wedge up the eastern shelf, everything living on the bottom gets driven ahead of it into the last thin strip of breathable water, which is the beach.

Harold Loesch published the conditions in 1960 and they still hold. Summer. Before dawn. An easterly wind the day before and during. A rising tide, because a falling one ends it. A saltier water mass moving in. Add an overcast day before and a glassy calm surface. When the sun comes up and photosynthesis restarts, it is over. 🦀

June through September, peaking in August. Loesch counted 37 of them between 1946 and 1956, with an average date of August 21.

The core zone is the upper eastern shore, Daphne down through Fairhope, Battles Wharf and Point Clear. Fairhope describes events running the full 15 miles from Daphne to Mullet Point, or sometimes just a few hundred yards of one beach.

You will hear that this happens in only two places on earth, here and Tokyo Bay. Fairhope's own website is careful about it, saying residents believe that. No research supports a hard two-site limit, and there are documented events elsewhere, including once near Pensacola. What is defensible is that Mobile Bay is the only place where this is documented as a regular, predictable thing.

Word used to travel by dinner bells rung in the dark and somebody hollering "Jubilee." Then phone trees. Now it is text messages.

One more thing, from Marine Resources director Scott Bannon. Creel limits still apply. Five flounder per person at 14 inches, a five gallon bucket of shrimp, a five gallon bucket of crabs at five inches. A jubilee is not a free-for-all.

08/30/2026

Right beside Perdido Pass sits a little island that easily could have become something completely different.

Condos.

Private development.

Another piece of waterfront property closed off from everybody else.

Instead, the City of Orange Beach bought Robinson Island in 2003 specifically to preserve it from development. Today, it remains a public recreational area and wildlife sanctuary.

And during summer, boaters absolutely know this place.

Robinson Island and nearby Bird Island sit in Bayou St. John near the Perdido Pass Bridge. Boats gather around the sandy shoreline, people swim in the shallow water and the islands become one of Orange Beach's most recognizable boating destinations.

But there's another side to Robinson Island.

Wildlife.

The island provides important habitat for shorebirds, including nesting wading herons and terns. Because of that, portions of the interior are off-limits to people. Dogs aren't permitted either, and designated no-motor zones help protect underwater grass beds.

Hurricanes have also battered the island.

In 2009, Gulf Shores High School botany students planted 3,050 trees as part of an effort to restore vegetation lost to storms.

Think about what almost happened here.

Orange Beach was booming.

Waterfront property was becoming increasingly valuable.

Yet instead of another development, the city preserved an island.

Twenty-three years later, people are still pulling their boats onto its shoreline.

That's one Orange Beach real-estate decision that certainly changed the view.

08/28/2026

08/27/2026

Do you have a little black suit??

08/19/2026

08/15/2026

Happy Monday from Perdido Key 💙

08/15/2026

Meet you by the water? 🫶🏼⁠
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08/15/2026