I've saved one of the strangest and most wonderful stories of this coast for you, and it happens just west of here, on the shores of Mobile Bay. They call it a Jubilee, and it is one of the rarest natural events on earth — a night when the sea lays its bounty at your feet and all you have to do is bend down and pick it up.
Here's what happens. On certain still, muggy nights in the dead of summer, usually in the dark hours before dawn, a strange thing overtakes the eastern shore of Mobile Bay. The deep bay water loses its oxygen, and a slow underwater tide of that low-oxygen water pushes toward the shallows, herding everything that lives on the bottom ahead of it. Flounder, crabs, shrimp, eels — they all come crowding up into the shallows and right onto the beach, dazed and gasping, in numbers you would not believe. Flounder stacked on flounder. Crabs by the bucketful. The whole bottom of the bay, delivered to the sand.
And the people know the signs. When conditions are right, the old-timers can feel a Jubilee coming, and the cry goes up and down the shore — 'Jubilee! Jubilee!' — and folks come pouring out of their beds in the dark, in their pajamas, with gigs and nets and washtubs and lanterns, and they wade into the warm shallows and gather up more seafood than a family can eat in a month. Free, from the sea, for the taking.
Now here's the marvel: this reliably happens in only one or two places in the entire world, and the shore of Mobile Bay is the main one. Nowhere else does the sea do this on any schedule you can count on. So if you're ever on this coast on a hot, dead-still August night and you hear folks hollering 'Jubilee' down by the water — get up, grab a bucket, and go. You'll be witnessing something almost nowhere else on the planet ever sees.
Photo: Dofftoubab · CC0
