The Reefs That People Built

Orange Beach back there calls itself the red snapper capital of the world, and behind that boast is a story about how this coast learned to farm the sea. Let me tell you, because it's cleverer than you'd think.

Here's the problem the anglers faced. The floor of the Gulf out here is mostly flat, featureless sand and mud — a desert, more or less. And the fish everybody wants — red snapper, grouper, amberjack — are reef fish. They need structure: rock, wreckage, something to hide in and hunt around and gather over. On a bare sand bottom, there just aren't many of them.

So the people of this coast decided to fix that. They started building reefs. On purpose. They'd take old things nobody wanted — retired ships, barges, concrete rubble, old bridge spans, even decommissioned army tanks and airplanes — haul them out into the Gulf, and sink them to the bottom in carefully mapped spots. And the sea does the rest. Within months, that dead steel is furred with barnacles and coral and sea growth; small fish move in, then bigger fish come to eat them, and before long a sunken tank on the sand bottom is a thriving reef boiling with snapper.

Alabama has done this so thoroughly, over so many square miles of Gulf, that it has one of the largest artificial reef zones in the entire country — thousands of these man-made reefs scattered across the bottom off this coast. It's the reason the fishing here is so good, and it's a genuinely lovely idea when you think about it: taking our junk, our worn-out machines of war and work, and sinking them into the sea not to hide them but to grow life on them. A reef built from a tank. The Gulf turns even that into fish.