The November Guests

November is not the cruelest month on Mobile Bay; in fact, it may be the best time of year. The weekend before Thanksgiving, my girlfriend and I kayaked and fished on the Blakeley River and around the marsh islands of the upper Bay. We’d never had much luck fishing the area in the funkier months of summer, but this time was different. We launched at Hooked Up by the Bay and paddled south on a cool midmorning, moving out past the Causeway and Bayway, mooring for a bit on the marsh islands that were dotted with heron and other waterfowl I could not name. In the distance to the West stood the RSA Tower and the container cranes of the Port that stretched across the skyline like great Mesozoic birds. From her kayak near the marshes Aryn harvested Rangia clams — also known as Cajun or cocktail clams — a muddy-tasting bivalve that never really caught on as a food source here and one that I would not be eating that night. We only had one fishing rod between us that day so we passed it among the kayaks and took turns casting, catching a bounty of redfish and flounder and baby croaker with miniscule live shrimp. And though the fish were not quite legal size — this part of the Bay is a nursery, after all — it was nice to see the Bay so alive with activity after so many bereft outings in the warmer months. When the fish are biting the hours dissolve into liquid and time is of no consequence. So eventually it’s not the clock that brings you in but a gnawing hunger and subsequent visions of Conecuh sausage and gumbo.

The water in the Bay now is clearer than it’s looked in years, the locals say. There’s been a drought this season, and while the water is generally less turbid in the winter months, the pause in dredging since August (to be picked back up this April) has likely contributed to greater water clarity. It’s a great time to be outside. And if fishing is not your thing, I recommend traversing the beaches of Dauphin Island in the early winter mornings and embracing your inner snowbird. Take your dogs to the Audubon Trail on the East End and let them cavort off-leash and swim in the Gulf if you’re alone. Like us they have nothing to lose but their chains. Dauphin Island is, of course, a bird sanctuary, and while the sightings were few during our trip there in late November there are still great opportunities for birding in the winter months. The cover story for this issue looks at the work of coastal biologist Olivia Morpeth with the Alabama Coastal Bird Stewardship Program, and what the organization is doing to preserve aviary habitats that are so critical to nesting, reproduction, and migration.

“These birds play an important role as indicator species for our coastal habitats” Olivia tells writer Sam K. Wilkes in his in-depth piece. “The presence of these birds, or lack thereof, can signal potential health issues in local coastal ecosystems … Monitoring these health factors is not only important for our local wildlife, but also for the people who live here and recreate in these waters.”

Not only are the birds important bellwethers of ecological health, they also drive ecotourism on the island, with some 400 species wending their way through this little spit of land in the spring and fall, making the island a sort of “ATL Delta hub” for our feathered friends. And with that come the visiting birders with their binoculars and a more focused attention on habitat preservation.

Indeed, everyone (fish, fowl, beast, or man) plays a part in our area’s ecological health, so if you’re not yet a member of Mobile Baykeeper, we ask that you consider joining this winter season, and becoming part of something bigger than yourself.

Peter Frank and the Great Loop

What drives a person to climb Kilimanjaro or swim the English Channel? Why did Alexander Supertramp light out for the territories, only to meet his demise after ingesting the seeds of a toxic plant in the Alaskan wilds? Why did Huck Finn set sail on the Mississippi — was it to get away from the Widow Douglas and his abusive father, or was it something much deeper that called him down the river? Why do locals like Ryan Gillikin and Joseph Bolton kayak the Alabama 650 every year, pushing their bodies and minds to the point of exhaustion and delirium? And why did Forrest Gump decide to just start running?

It’s a mystery, folks. The biblical Cain was our first Great Wanderer, but he had little choice in the matter. After slaying his brother out in the boonies one fine autumn day, he was cast east of Eden, condemned to walk the Earth for eternity, branded with God’s own tattoo. 

Unlike Cain, today’s explorers will tell you they do have a choice — at least some of the time. But what drives them to set sail upon the dark waters and traverse the barbarous lands remains somewhat of a mystery, even to them. For its part, America has a long tradition of explorers and wanderers. The conquistadors of Spain got the ball rolling in the name of gold, God, and glory. Lewis and Clark (along with Sacagawea) traversed the western frontier at the behest of Jefferson, while Mason and Dixon settled some important boundary disputes with their jaunts. Voyaging is a big part of the national character, from Kit Carson in the Rockies to more intellectually prone seekers like John Muir and Edward Abbey. And then there are the cultural titans like Jack Kerouac and the Grateful Dead, whose legions followed in the literal footsteps of their journeys, forging a new kind of adventurer along the way.

Today’s explorers seem to be as much about the spiritual quest, and not as much about clapping eyes on new lands. For them, it’s a test of will, a feat of the heart. Perhaps this is because today’s voyages can’t help but look and feel a little different, now that we live in the time of GPS and mobile phones. Alaska may still be the last terrestrial frontier, but in the age of satellites, civilization is never out of reach in the way that it once was. What about that Mars trip we’ve heard so much about? Well, that might be a while. So perhaps it is that after centuries of settlement and industrialization, the American wilderness is all but erased, but the wilderness within remains.  

One of America’s great modern explorers is not a household name. He is a gentleman by the name of Verlen Kruger. A native of Indiana who lived in Michigan for much of his life, Verlen, who died in 2004, is credited with canoeing more miles than any other American — in excess of 100,000 miles. Somewhere in between the time of his relentless voyaging, he managed to design a specialty canoe, the Savage Loon, a thirteen-and-a-half-foot craft specifically tailored for long voyages. Reminiscent of a kayak, the Loon has all the tell-tale features of a traditional canoe in that the boat features a hollow shell with a raised seat and lacks the keel or fin found on most kayaks. With a cockpit more than eighty inches long, it was designed to be able to navigate rough conditions on extended treks. In canoe circles, the Loon is known as a “decked canoe,” meaning that the deck covers a portion of the cockpit — and indeed it is often mistaken for a kayak. 

In addition to his contributions to design (he funded his voyages by leasing his patent to commercial canoe-makers like Savage), Verlen Kruger is known for having logged one of the longest canoe jaunts in human history, a 28,000-mile odyssey across North America that came to be known as the Ultimate Canoe Challenge. This was a feat that found Verlen and his son, Steve Landkin, paddling the length of the Mississippi and Colorado rivers upstream as part of The Great Loop. That’s a pretty long haul against the current when you are clocking a 6,000-mile route. In 1981, Verlen and his son became the first to canoe the Great Loop in reverse, or clockwise, as one sees it on a map. 

“I’ve often thought about the results of making some of these big trips,” Verlen once said. “I haven’t done anything great for humanity; it was more that I’ve done something great for myself. But I do hear from other people who say they’ve been inspired by my travels. Hopefully, I can get them to look a little farther, a little deeper into themselves, into what they can do.”

The Great Loop is a circumnavigational route that winds through the eastern half of the United States (15 states) and parts of Canada (two provinces), taking “Loopers” through the Intracoastal Canal, the Great Lakes, the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi River, and a byzantine network of canals and rivers in between. Most undertake the voyage with a motorized craft, taking on average about a year to complete the journey, though it has been done in as little as six weeks. The great majority of voyagers elect to travel in a counter-clockwise direction, which allows them to move along with the currents, which can be especially helpful on powerful rivers like the Mississippi and Ohio. For the motorized set, the trip is typically one of leisure. The starting point is a matter of choice, but many opt to start in Chicago in the fall, which allows them to wind around Florida in the winter, when many parts of the northern route are closed. 

Read the rest at Mobile Baykeeper.

The words for water

Language, one of the core human properties, connects us to the land and water, for it is through language that much of our worldview is shaped. In his book Thirty-Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape, Manchán Magan explores the history of a language — in this case, Irish — and a landscape that is inextricably linked.

“Our landscape now looks like an increasingly anonymous expanse of indistinguishable fields, yet seen through the Irish language each field has its own word, depending on its characteristics and function,” Magan writes. “To a city-dweller this land may all look the same, and in English each would probably be just referred to as a field, yet to someone whose ancestors have been cultivating the land, growing grain and tending cattle for over four thousand years, and who has built up the soil over centuries by hauling seaweed from the shore and burning limestone to add alkalinity, they look very different.”

Many Native American languages contain numerous words for “water,” and these various shadings describe its different qualities and functions. It’s a level of complexity that attests to water’s cultural significance in indigenous societies. One can’t help but wonder how many words the Mississippian people had for “water” at the Bottle Creek site, a part of the Delta so complex and mysterious as to defy description in English.

In his latest novel The Promise of the Pelican, Roy Hoffman draws on Mobile Bay for inspiration. For Hoffman, the Bay is a character in and of itself, as kaleidoscopic and varied as any individual. As he tells Virginia Kinnier in this issue: “If you look at Mobile Bay every day, you’ll know that it can be like the person you live with; it’s the same person each day, of course, but that person has moods and expressions and gestures.”

Hoffman may not be coining new words for “bay,” but he is exploring its dynamics and nuances through long-form storytelling. “I once followed along with a bar pilot for an article I wrote,” he says, “so I know the eeriness of the fog in the morning and what the bell buoys sound like before you can even see them, so I was able to draw on those experiences to add more realistic elements to the story.” 

It is these nuances — the “eeriness of the fog” and “what the bell buoys sound like” — that give shape to the story of Mobile Bay, and, ultimately, the story of those who live on its shores.

Cormac McCarthy once wrote that things separate from their stories have no meaning, that they are merely objects without a sense of place or purpose. It is only through storytelling, one of his characters contended, that things start to possess a history and a sense of meaning emerges.

We are losing our storytelling traditions in this country and losing them fast. Local newspapers were once a place for common ground, a forum where we could all learn about the day’s events and about each other. Our daily gazettes were far from perfect, but they were vital to the health of a community. The social networking sites we have today position users in a feedback loop that fuels tribalism and division. Controversial content is amplified and puts us at each other’s throats. All nuance is lost, and it is that nuance that gives stories their human quality and allows for empathy and understanding.

This issue tells the story of Peter Frank, a young man from Michigan who is traversing the six-thousand miles of the Great Loop in a canoe, much of it up-current. He is connected to the land in ways I cannot imagine, and I wonder how many words he has for “water” inside his head. We hope his story inspires you. If it does, please consider supporting CURRENTS and the preservation of our culture through storytelling. By doing so you’re helping preserve the waters and land that create those stories. 

Visit mobilebaykeeper.org/currents to become a Baykeeper and subscribe to this publication.

Oasis in Dublin and the Ghost of Brendan Behan


The Auld Triangle Comes Full-Circle

A few minutes before Oasis took the stage at Dublin’s Croke Park last Sunday, a curious thing happened. A solitary, unexpected voice issued from the PA and sounded over the stadium and rooftops of Drumcondra. It was not the Who, Beatles, or Bowie that heralded the band’s arrival that night — as has been the custom on previous dates this tour — but the voice of Luke Kelly and the Dubliners belting out a poignant a cappella rendition of “The Auld Triangle,” the song made famous in Brendan Behan’s 1954 breakout play The Quare Fellow and first performed by the playwright on a radio program in 1952.

A good contingent of the 82,000 in attendance that Sunday — most of them well-lubricated and braced for lift-off as 8:15PM ticked closer— sang along to the tune, their voices growing loudest when Kelly hit the lines “And the auld triangle went jingle jangle/ All along the banks of the Royal Canal.”

It was a seriously meta moment in Oasis world that, for many, shattered the fourth wall.

Behan, who grew up in a tenement house in 1930s North Dublin, said he learned the song from a tramp named Dick Shannon in Mountjoy Prison, where the writer was serving time in the ’40s for attempted murder for IRA-related activities. Mountjoy is less than two kilometers from the stadium, and one can imagine an inmate in the prison-yard hearing Kelly’s voice drift along the banks of the canal and humming along.

The Dublin gigs were considered a homecoming of sorts for the Gallagher brothers, and the fans knew it. Liam and Noel’s mother Peggy, who hails from Charlestown in County Mayo, where the Gallaghers spent many childhood summers and first cultivated that trademark spirit of lawlessness, was in attendance both nights and got a shout-out from Liam onstage. (The boys’ estranged father, Thomas, who came from County Meath, was not there.)

Noel Gallagher has said there would be no Oasis without his Irish roots, and for the entirety of this tour, he’s flown the Erin go Bragh flag from his speaker cabinet. “We are Irish, me and Liam, pretty much,” Noel once told a reporter. “There is no English blood in us. Oasis could never have existed, been as big, been as important, been as flawed, been as loved and loathed, if we weren’t all predominantly Irish.”

So many of the great English rock bands boast Irish heritage, with the Pogues being perhaps the most notable. Morrissey best encapsulated the Anglo-Irish dynamic with the song “Irish Blood, English Heart.” John Lydon of the Sex Pistols was certainly London Irish, and John Lennon famously embraced his Irish roots later in his career. All of the original members of Oasis had Irish roots, making them the last in a long line of great rock bands molded in the Anglo-Irish tradition.

Noel has said the brash, defiant swagger of Definitely Maybe stems from the Irish rebel songs the brothers were weaned on, for it is there where the edgy, pump-your-fist-in-air element of the music originates. Up to a week before the show rumors swirled that the Wolfe Tones, a group the Gallagher brothers saw as kids when the Irish folkies would stop in to play Manchester, might open the Dublin shows, with the Tones writing recently to Liam on X:  “Well lad, hope you’re excited for Croker this weekend, any idea what time our sound check is at?”

But it was no dice, and one laments missing the chance to hear the Tones deliver the rousing “Come Out Ye Black and Tans,” a song written by Behan’s brother Dominic, delivered to the fiery hordes at Croker.

As “The Auld Triangle” drew to an end at 8:15 and the band came onstage to “F***in’ in the Bushes,” with the words “THIS IS NOT A DRILL” flashing in red letters on an 80-plus-meter screen, one could not help think of the ghost of Brendan Behan sipping champagne and sherry from somewhere in the catacombs, or glugging whiskey on a stool at The Gravediggers, and smiling. 

Illustration: Study from life of Brendan Behan by Reginald Gray, 1953. Public domain.

They Call Him Droopy

Every Delta fisherman knows Droopy Williams. Or at least knows of him. You’ve probably seen him as you’ve zoomed along the Causeway – a sort of roving landmark, sometimes in the waters above the highway, sometimes below. 

For nearly six decades he has been a shrimper for the bait shops along that raised ground between Spanish Fort and the city. I say shops. Once there were a dozen or more, but now there is only one. 

Droopy Williams grew up in the Delta in a cabin on the Tensaw River at Cloverleaf Landing. He was raised by his grandparents. Since he was a kid he has been called by that name. He says most folks don’t know his real name (don’t expect to get it here) but there is one who does – his aunt is Lucy “Pie” Hollings, proprietress of the Cloverleaf boat launch and a local Delta legend. The family lived off the land and water when he was growing up; crabbing, running trotlines, and raising hogs and cows on Gravine Island just across the river. They were different days indeed.

These days, driving into Mobile in the early morning hours you might catch him working the Blakeley River in his 24-foot trawler, the words LIVE BAIT painted in bold red lettering on the side. It’s a reassuring sight. For all the change behind us and all that lies ahead, no matter what comes you can rest assured that the sun rises, the sun goes down, and that Droopy is out there catching shrimp.

At age thirteen he went to work for Autrey’s Fish Camp, as soon as school let out for summer, and it was during those summer months that he first lived on the Causeway with Billy and Queenie Wright, who ran the shop. It was the mid-1960s and everybody fished. In those days you could rent boats by the hour at Autrey’s or Stauter Boat Works, and try your luck for redfish or trout on your lunch break. It was a sort of Golden Age, but of course all that changed in ’69 when Camille showed up like a woman scorned and let everyone know the party was over.

In his years on the water, Droopy has seen all manner of change. There has been sustained development, increased dredging operations, and an oil spill, to name just a few of the things that have left their mark. These days the shrimp are smaller and the fish are less plentiful. There are more gators and bald eagles, but less snakes. The hogs his family once raised on Gravine Island are no more, but their progeny now run wild and roam the woods of the upper Delta. There is only one bait shop left standing on the Causeway, for which he still supplies shrimp, and as Williams is a bait shrimper, not a licensed commercial operator, he can only sell directly to bait shops.

Droopy is the only Black shrimper on the local scene — a fact he seems to take pride in. He’s tried to take on numerous deckhands, but it’s tough work and most can’t cut it, so these days he prefers to work solo. He says he doesn’t mind going it alone though: every changing wind and tide is like a greeting from an old friend.   

Today he lives on Cloverleaf Landing, just up the road from where he grew up, shrimping in the morning and fishing for bream most afternoons, and he says there is no better place on earth to live.

We met up with him one cold, January morning at Cloverleaf when the tide was low. We couldn’t launch the boat, so we stood on the bank and heard his many tales of a life on the water.

— Read the rest in CURRENTS.

In the shadow of the spill

It’s been fifteen years since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig suffered a blowout and spilled five million barrels of crude oil into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The 87 days that followed the explosion on April 20, 2010 — forty miles off the coast of Louisiana — left residents gripped in a white-knuckle, teeth-grinding frenzy, as the slick continued to grow and approach the coast like some kind of atavistic, sci-fi horror show.

By the time The Great Blob was finally contained, it had affected 70,000 square miles of the Gulf, roughly the size of Oklahoma. It was the worst industrial disaster in U.S. history by volume. To this day, the extent of ecological damage is unknown.

At the time it went down, the explosion and its ensuing spill wasn’t nearly as surprising as BP’s seeming inability to stop it. Three months is a long time to watch Anderson Cooper report on scenes of sheer devastation coming out of your own backyard. Less than two months after the explosion, BP, who had leased the rig from drilling contractor Transocean, had even stooped to soliciting suggestions on its website for ways to stop the flow. 

For anyone who loved the Gulf and called it home, or had even enjoyed a Bushwhacker at the Flora-Bama during a Spring Break in the long ago, the spill was a major wake-up call. There was a period in those three months where Life As We Knew It on the Gulf Coast might conceivably be over. 

Thankfully, that didn’t happen. Fifteen years later, we are more vigilant about threats to our waters, and, in many ways, ecological efforts are more robust. The 2012 RESTORE Act helped lead remediation efforts, and NOAA has been stalwart in their efforts at restoration. Safety standards have reportedly improved at rigs since the Deepwater Horizon. But are we truly protected from another major spill — who knows? 

Ninety-seven percent of offshore oil and gas drilling in the U.S. happens in the Gulf, and, currently, only a fifth of the Gulf’s 2,200 active leases are in operation, due to a large production supply and the high costs of drilling, according to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, a federal agency that manages offshore drilling. 

It’s clear that drilling in the Gulf will be around for some time. Let’s hope the regulatory framework remains intact as well. We have too much to lose.

— from CURRENTS (SPRING 2005)

A Mind of winter

It takes a mind of winter to see the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. Wallace Stevens wrote that in 1921, in a poem called “The Snow Man.” The line has haunted me since I first read it in college, during the snows of yesteryear, somewhere in the stacks of UVA’s Alderman Library.

The poem still puzzles me. The scholarly consensus is that Stevens is talking about the nature of human perspective — how our view of the natural world is defined by our emotional conditioning. It ends with an invitation to find the beauty in Old Man Winter — but with the caveat that only those who’ve frozen their butt off can truly appreciate “the spruces rough in the distant glitter/ of the January sun.”

It’s been a warm November in Alabama, so we may not get those polar lessons. But you get the picture.

Winter is a season for reflection. Our watershed in Coastal Alabama has faced numerous threats over the past year — wetland loss, sewage spills, coal-ash pollution, and mud dumping from dredge spoil have taken their toll. Reckoning with these challenges head-on, and witnessing the damage they’ve already wrought, helps us recognize and reflect on what’s worth protecting.

We started CURRENTS to tell the stories of Mobile Bay and its people, because it’s those stories — good, bad, and ugly —  that give it meaning. 

As we wind down another year, we ask you to reflect on what’s important to you about our waters, and to consider giving to Mobile Baykeeper as part of our End-of-Year campaign. You can do that by donating directly at MobileBaykeeper.org/give, or subscribing to CURRENTS.

A Universal Language

The Cap d’Antibes juts into the sea about fifteen miles south of Nice. Along its rocky shoreline the blue waters of the Mediterranean lap against a beachfront that soon gives way to dense flora dotted with Roman villas and neoclassical hotels. The stone ramparts of old Antibes, surrounded by cobbled streets and Provençal markets, date as far back as the 16th century. It is a place where time stands still. Indeed, this Old World picture-postcard scene is a far cry from our little corner here in south Alabama, but for Michael Mark, a retired Mobile lawyer and competitive world-class sailor, those differences dissolve when you’re on the water.

Soon, Mark will discover that sailing around the Cape of Antibes, with its strong easterly winds blowing across the peninsula, is eerily similar to sailing out of Fairhope Yacht Club with a good southerly breeze. It is late October and he is one of three Americans competing at the Finn European Masters in Cannes, France, an annual regatta that features more than one-hundred and fifty sailors from twenty-five countries. Michael Mark has sailed European waters before and already knows some of the sailors, so he’s not entirely a fish out of water, though this will be his first time sailing the Cote d’Azur.

The week-long race takes sailors up and down the Mediterranean coast, from Cap Croisette, just south of Marseilles, past the fabled Lérins islands off Cannes. One of these islets is the Île Sainte-Marguerite – a densely forested patch of land with a medieval barracks that once held Louis XIV’s most famous political prisoner, the Man in the Iron Mask. With a Romanesque fortress towering behind them, a sea drama unfolds that might see sailors navigating nine-foot swells in 30 knots.  

“I’ve sailed all over the world, and this was by far the most beautiful place I’ve sailed,” he tells me. “The eastern breeze runs parallel to the shore and comes around the point of Antibes,” Mark continues, “and when you sail out of Fairhope with a southerly breeze, you want to go left because the wind slows down over land, due to friction. It’s the way the land is situated, relative to the direction of the wind. Most of the sailing in the Mediterranean is kind of like sailing Fairhope. But that’s one of the basic things you learn after doing this for 50 years: it all works the same. Water temperature and air temperature and currents. They all work the same.” 

The Finn is not really known outside of sailing circles, so you’d be forgiven for not having heard of it. It is a cat-rigged, solo dinghy that was part of the Olympic class from 1952 until 2020. It is similar to a Laser, only with more bells and whistles. Considered the most demanding single-hander craft to operate, the challenges further multiply when you compete at the international level like Mark does.

The Race is On

In Cannes, it is early in the competition and Mark is rounding the cape of Antibes, having come up from the starting line at the Cannes Yacht Club. It is cold and rainy on the first day of racing, with big storms that eventually call for a red alert and a halt in competition. Later in the week the sun will emerge. In the rare moments when the wind slackens and there is a brief respite for the racers, one gets to sit back and enjoy the view of the gleaming yachts moored at the Port Vauban marina, in the long shadow of the Maritime Alps. Surely, a man could do worse for himself.

For this year’s European Masters, there are two races each day, with each race split into two fleets due to the size of the field. Each race runs about 60 to 75 minutes and the courses are about five miles long, with a headwind to start and downwind to finish. When you factor in the starting times and the break between races, it can add up to about six to eight hours on the water each day.

“The big challenge is the physical part,” Mark says, adding that he “ate clean” for most of the week in Cannes, dropping ten pounds despite a lot of baguettes. “I’ll sometimes get some cramping issues, but I was happy about the physical preparation.”

As is usually the case with regattas this size, the start can be a hairy affair. And though he’s had some brilliant starts this race week, he still has to deal with the other boats on the open water, even though, as a Finn racer, you mostly compete against the elements and yourself.

“You’ve got to use your brain while being physically tested,” Mark, 65, says about racing the Finn. (The dinghy was designed just before the Helsinki Olympics in Finland in ’52 — hence the name “Finn”.) “You’re using your abs and quads, while also doing math equations in your head. You’ve got to do some meteorology and know what waves or lack of waves might be better for you.”

A longtime member of the Buccaneer Yacht Club in Mobile, Mark has been sailing Finns in Mobile Bay for about twelve years. And what makes you a good sailor in Mobile Bay makes you a good sailor in the Mediterranean. He is currently ranked 7th in the U.S. in the Finn class and has cracked the top 100 in the world. “They don’t have a big tide off the coast there,” he tells me. “Even though we don’t have a big tide in Mobile Bay, we can still get some currents. And that was what was happening in Cannes – with wind, you get current. This is kind of what happens in Fairhope, too – as you get farther off the water, the current is stronger . . . and when you get out of that it can become a little weaker. But that’s the cool thing about figuring these places out.”

With the Finn however, skill is often not enough. Strength and size are required to create enough leverage to drive these boats hard in the open water and you need some heft to really maneuver your instrument with authority. It is generally reserved for sailors who weigh 200 or more pounds and run about 6’ to 6’5”. Mark is a fairly big guy and after a New Orleans sailor recommended it to him post-Katrina, telling him it’s a great physical workout, he made the switch.  

At the Masters, Mark finished 100th out of a fleet of 150, but notes that he beat fifty of the best Finn sailors in the world and finished in the middle of his age group, the largest division. The Italian, Alessandro Marega, took home the overall crown, ahead of France’s Valerian Lebrun, the reigning French champion, who also holds the title of European “Master” champion. 

Mark is pleased, but says his results don’t do justice to his performance. There were four rounds of competition over the week, with the top racers advancing to the championship round. A lot of the racers had been active throughout the European season, with the Masters event marking the culmination of tournament competition. “It’s amazing how good all these guys are,” he says, “but it’s a brotherhood because we all love doing the same thing. Since you’re in a boat by yourself, everyone is just self-dependent. And they respect one another because they know how hard it is to sail these boats.”

Talk to any sailor with some years on the water and he’ll tell you that sailing is an activity that bonds people the world over. It’s a tribe that transcends cultural, geographical, and political differences. The water is the common denominator. The best part, Mark says, is just the hang, and the keen sense of friendship that develops among the racers. There was little talk of world affairs, other than the de rigueur “Kamala or Trump” query. He befriended one Spanish sailor in particular who interviewed him for his podcast.

“It’s still a coastal place here in Cannes,” Mark says. “You got humidity and a sea breeze. Same sort of conditions everywhere. I was expecting it to be a lot more stuck-up at the yacht club, but it’s not at all. It’s just a good vibe.” Cannes is a chic and fashionable town, known internationally for its annual film festival. The food is, of course, exceptional – most notably the bouillabaisse, a dish that is, according to some culinary historians, an ancestor to our region’s gumbo. Nearby is Monaco and across the border is Italy, where Mark’s wife and daughter enjoyed time shopping together. 

For his part though, Mark opted to spend his downtime in the company of his competitors in the club. “You get the chance to meet so many people, and when you find your people, it’s just really cool,” he says. The Yacht Club de Cannes is smaller than the Buccaneer Yacht Club, but surprisingly, he says, it is anything but stuffy, with many of the racers lodging for the week in camper vans outside the club with their dogs. 

Most of the sailors he talked to were curious about Mobile Bay (“Where is that?), even the two Americans from Newport Beach in California. He invited several of them to sail in the North American Masters in Fairhope next year in April and lodge at the Grand Hotel. If they come, they will no doubt enjoy our Southern hospitality.  

The German Yankee

Joerg Kemnade grew up in Bremen, a town in northern Germany about sixty miles west of Hamburg. In his younger years he started sailing a Laser-like dinghy called the X-4. He’d put it on the roof of his Volkswagen Passat and drive across the Alps to the Adriatic Sea, outside of Venice, a distance of 500 miles. He brought that sailboat over from across the pond when he moved to Mobile in the early ’90s, launching it regularly on the beach by the Grand Hotel. He was in his 50s back then and has remained a stalwart member of the Buccaneer Yacht Club ever since.

The self-described “German Yankee” came to Alabama to work for Degussa (now called Evonik) as a mechanical engineer, eventually overseeing the North American division for copper engineering. He’s been retired since 2011. “Next year I will be 80,” he says, before adding a bit of self-deprecating humor, “I will be called a legend.”

Even as a young man, Kemnade wanted to sail a Finn. In the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, a German Lufthansa pilot named Wilhelm Kuhweide won the gold medal in the Finn class and became a hero in Germany at a time when Cold War tensions simmered. Naturally, a younger Joerg wanted to follow in his footsteps. It took about forty-three years, but in 2007 he was able to finally purchase a Finn – a Vanguard, for about $4,000 – from a fellow club member. 

“I still like the boat and am attached to it, though I don’t sail it as often as I did before,” Kemnade says. “But I plan to be in the boat and compete when I’m 80.”

Kemnade has raced competitively throughout the U.S., including at a Master’s race in Milwaukee. To this day, he enjoys the challenge of the Finn with its power and balance, including the fact that it can easily capsize, and yet still has the accouterments of a big boat.

“The Finn community in the U.S. is small but very active,” Kemnade says. “People from the north like to come here when we have the Masters, or the national championship in early spring. We’re like a big family.”

Kemnade has competed in the Dauphin Island race numerous times. In fact, he was set to compete in the tragic 2015 race that saw five sailors lose their lives when 90 mile-per-hour hurricane-force winds suddenly swept the course. Kemnade was poised to race with two other sailors, both over 60 (“we were over 200 years old combined”), but the team made the last-minute decision not to go. “One guy who died, they never found, and I knew him well. And that was a big, big tragedy,” he says.

A great body of water

Mobile’s sailing culture dates back to the Jazz Age, when the Buccaneer Yacht Club was still in its infancy. In those early days the club embodied the live-and-let-live vibe of the times. The war was over and it was time to party. Catamarans and yachts lined the shore, and turtle races happened on the deck of the club. The Jolly Roger flag, the official skull-and-crossbones crest of the BYC, flew from every mast. Susan Roullier, an artist and longtime resident of the western shore, chronicled the club and its founding in a previous edition of CURRENTS.

These days, the flapper girls and the turtle races may be gone and the bar serves more Miller Lite than martinis, but the pirate spirit is still alive in the Buccaneer’s membership. Michael Mark is the de facto leader of the Finn crew, and there are eight sailors at the Buccaneer who are active with that craft. Some of those compete at regattas across the country and some venture worldwide to compete.

David Hickman grew up in Mobile, but he did not pick up sailing until about five years ago, when he was in his mid-30s. He now spends two or three days a week on the water, sailing Finns with the rest of the Buccaneer crew. He chose the Finn because, he says, “It’s as big a dinghy as you can have for a one-man boat. It’s an Olympic class, it’s made for bigger people. I was about the right size. There is a fleet here in Mobile and there are always people sailing them.”

Size and weight are important factors for those racing this craft, and it’s easy to get overpowered by the wind and have the boat keel over. Despite being a relative newcomer to the sport, Hickman competes in local and out-of-town regattas, including a race in Toledo, Ohio. He recommends that anyone who’s interested in Finn – or just sailing, in general – give it a try. “Come on down to the Buccaneer,” he says. “We’ve got boats if you are interested in learning. We don’t have organized lessons, but we’re out here often enough.”

Julian Bingham is another relative newcomer who used to sail fishboats before transitioning to the Finn. Before the great Finn switch, a lot of the sailors at the Buccaneer were sailing Stars, which are a two-person sailing craft. “Stars got more and more expensive and it was harder to sail with a team of two,” Bingham says. “So the Finns started getting popular.”

Changing winds

Those lucky enough to live on Mobile Bay, or at least spend several days a week on the water, are often the ones most attuned to its health. The Bay is kaleidoscopic in its changing nature; its true algebra is only suggested by science and these residents have a heightened sensitivity to its changes. These folks are the Bay’s eagle-eyes and they can be reliable as any weather instrument. As much as any oysterman or shrimper, they understand that without a healthy bay, we have nothing.

“We are out here a lot and you can tell the difference on some days when it is very clear, and then on days when it’s gone murky because of all the silt,” Michael Mark says. “And you see the trash that comes along after a big storm. And of course we’ve been able to see the changes since Gaillard Island was put there, probably mostly positive changes. But we can tell that the Bay has silted in a lot. The Bay used to be a lot clearer – and not that long ago. But you notice it on a daily basis. We had some very nice grass beds right here in front of the club. You could see it sailing where the water’s clear in the shallow water. I used to go with my daughter and soft-shell crab. You could see the animals going through there. Probably in the last ten years they are completely gone. They are just covered up. It’s all gotten silted on top of that. A lot of the silt is coming from the Tennessee-Tombigee, but it’s also coming from this dredging. Any dredging is obviously going to create silt – picking up mud and creating silt.”

Coming from folks who’ve sailed the world over it is important to hear that Mobile Bay is a unique marvel worth preserving. Our Bay is a nutrient-rich, riverine system, and while its optics may not rival the azure beauty of the Mediterranean, it’s special in so many other ways. Those who sail it understand that.

“Mobile Bay is a great body of water,” says Kemnade. “Those who have been here a long time like Michael, they know how the wind behaves. There is also the current and the deep channel in the middle. And you have a tide here, too. That is what is so challenging about sailing. You have to know about weather, how the clouds impact the wind. How is the shore, if there are trees, how does that impact the wind? It’s not just holding the boom . . . that’s leisurely sailing. Racing is a challenge.”

— from CURRENTS (SPRING WINTER 2024)

Perdido Blues

Sitting on the edge of Soldier Creek, staring across the water of a fine April morning. The wildflowers are in bloom, little purple clusters that my dog won’t stop eating. The tide is low at this hour and the weather is cool. There are few signs of life in the water below the wharf. I have never caught many fish here, other than catfish, a perennial nuisance. Once in a while I’ll catch a redfish or sheepshead, or maybe some white trout off the artificial reefs in Perdido Bay — but for the most part, it’s about the act, not the catch, when you work with rod and reel in these parts.

If you talk to the old-timers around here, they will tell you the fishing is not what it used to be. If you ask why, most will point the finger at the paper mill in Cantonment. From the 1940s until 2012, the mill – which came under the ownership of International Paper in 2000 – discharged the bulk of its liquid waste directly into the waters of Eleven Mile Creek, a tributary of Perdido Bay, causing catastrophic levels of pollution.

“There was something they were dumping in the water that was keeping the sunlight from penetrating, and it was killing the grass beds,” says Captain Wes Rozier, a veteran in-shore fishing guide who grew up near the bay and started guiding in his teens. Rozier can remember the lush grass beds that covered the bay in the 1960s, back when crabs and oysters were plentiful.

“Until the grass grows back in Perdido Bay, the fishing is not going to be good here,” he says with some resignation. “And it used to be such a great fishery. The ducks were back there in the rivers. Oh man, it was really good.”

Today, International paper reroutes its waste through a pipeline that empties into 1,400 acres of sprawling wetlands. As part of a process that is designed to reduce pollution input, the waste percolates in the wetlands for several days before settling into Eleven Mile Creek. This newfangled system was set up back in 2012, in compliance with the 2010 National Pollutant Discharge Elimination program. “As it relates to further development of the wetlands, we have a dedicated team focused on ongoing preservation efforts and driving future investments toward maintaining the wetlands,” Whitney Fike, the regional communications manager for IP, tells Mobile Baykeeper.

While many consider IP’s efforts effective, skeptics remain.

“We haven’t really seen any difference in the bay since [2012],” says Jackie Lane, a marine scientist who’s run the environmental watchdog group Friends of Perdido Bay for nearly four decades. “The fishing didn’t really get any better. In fact, it’s continuously been getting worse. Lack of good algae is the problem. When you only have blue-green algae blooming off the bay, you’re not going to get a good food chain off of that.”

Lane casts some of the blame for the bay’s pollution on the EPA, for allowing chlorine dioxide to be used by the paper mills as a bleaching agent for its pulp products. “As we have seen on Perdido Bay, chlorine dioxide breaks down into chlorate which is a potent herbicide. This has upset the primary productivity in the bay,” Lane wrote this spring in her monthly newsletter.

It’s no secret the upper part of the bay has borne the brunt of the damage. You can sometimes see a brown-white scum that looks like dish detergent frothing along the upper bay’s shores. Some of the foam is natural, while some is augmented by pollution, but just how much is caused by pollution is hard to say.

The water around the Lillian Bridge offers telling signs as well. The bridge can be a popular location for catching sheepshead, especially in the late summer and early fall. Some fishermen tie off on the pilings and fish under the bridge, while others anchor close by. I have moored there many times but I doubt I’ll do it again. When you pull your anchor up from the murky depths, you inevitably find that it’s covered with a dark and gooey slime — what Lane calls a “dioxin-laden sludge.” The gunk is hard to wash off and makes a cruel mess of the boat. It looks like the sign of a waterbody that is sick and diseased; a far cry from the sandy bottoms that once blanketed the bay floor. I have never caught many fish under that bridge, but it is where some anglers go when they’re looking to land sheepshead for a fishing tournament, or entertain a guest with a sure catch.

Fortunately, Soldier Creek, where I spend most of my time, seems to have escaped the pollution issues that plague other parts of the watershed. Testing from Mobile Baykeeper’s SWIM program indicates consistently low levels of fecal bacteria there. The creek is a relatively protected estuary that flows nine miles from its source before emptying into the bay’s middle portion. Its headwaters consist of scenic hardwood swampland canopied by cypress, sweet bay, and swamp tupelo. Beyond it stretch moist pinelands and thick forests of pine-oak. As it flows south the creek becomes a saltwater marsh that is dotted with cordgrass, black needlerush, and other grasses, a critical habitat for aquatic life.

I still catch my share of blue crabs in the middle part of the creek, along with juvenile shrimp when the season is right. Not to mention finger-mullet, pinfish, and a miscellany of other bait fish with my casting net. I am a certified natural with the net (my one true angling skill), and the joy of catching chum in that contraption helps offset the disappointment that attends a consistently slack fishing line.

In late summer I can sometimes catch the bigger mullet when they’re running. It is during these months when the dolphin sightings increase. You can find them moving into the fresher water at dusk as they chase schools of fish and perform little arabesques on top of the water before diving back down in search of their catch. I have never landed enough mullet to justify a neighborhood fish-fry, but a man can dream. Our late neighbor, a farmer of German stock named Curtis Cassebaum, held one every summer. He’d fry up the fish after a big haul with his seine and serve them to friends and family with a grin the size of Buc-ee’s, along with arm loads of sweet corn from his family farm.

There was another fisherman in the neighborhood who was always worth his salt, and he lived next-door. His name was Jensen. He could work a bait net like a ninja. He knew every nook and cranny of the creek, as well as every honeyhole on Perdido Bay. He was a big-bear of a man with snow-white hair and a cigarette perpetually dangling from his chatterbox lips. I can still smell the cigarette smoke — Pall-Malls, I think they were — which hung thick and heavy on the wet air and announced his presence on those early summer mornings.

Like every good fisherman, Jensen was protective of his spots. When I first got to know him I urged him to take me out in his boat, but those pleas always fell on deaf ears. I knew he fished the reefs in the bay in the late fall with his brother and it was always gangbusters, to hear him tell it — hundreds and hundreds of white trout that he’d clean and freeze and send off with his brother when it was time for him to pack up and leave.

Jensen had lived on Soldier Creek for twenty or so years, long before my family’s arrival, and  fishing was central to his life. Though I’m sure he did his share of deep-sea fishing, he was for the most part an in-shore fisherman, and he was committed to working the waters close to home, or in his own backyard, for that matter. One of the trademarks of his lifestyle was his mode of transportation on the home turf: the golf-cart. Every trip he ever made from his house to the wharf involved that little buggy. I don’t recall ever seeing him actually walk the one hundred and fifty feet on his own two legs.

I never spoke with Jensen about the health of the bay, and what it was like in the old days. Maybe it’s because I couldn’t get a word in between all his wisecracks. But he was not someone who was easily deterred by obstacles. He was going to fish till the end of his days regardless.

The Bay

Perdido Bay is shaped like a tilted hourglass, with its upper portion bisected by the Alabama-Florida state line. Its freshwater sources include Perdido River (which is rated an outstanding Florida water body for its ecological health), Eleven Mile Creek, and Bayou Marcus from the north, with Wolf Bay inputting into its southwestern portion. Palmetto Creek and Soldier Creek flow into its middle section on the western side.

It is a relatively small bay, covering just fifty square miles. The lower portion runs from Innerarity Point southward to Perdido Pass, where it flows across islands and shoals into the Gulf of Mexico. The bay’s watershed comprises Perdido Key in Florida, as well as Ono Island, Gulf Shores, Wolf Bay, Cotton Bayou, and Old River on the Alabama side, along with parts of the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway (GIWW).

For decades the bay has been beset by pollution, despite its status as a tourist destination. A grand jury investigation in the late 1990s revealed it to be one of the most polluted waterbodies on the Gulf Coast. In the fifty-two year period from 1940 to 1992, Perdido Bay lost seventy-four percent of its seagrass coverage, according to a 2002 report from the U.S. Geological Survey. 

The Mill

Just north of Pensacola off U.S. 29 sits the town of Cantonment. The paper mill that defines the town to this day opened in 1941, when the region’s timber industry was in full tilt. The mill was built by a man named John Pace — for whom the town of Pace, Florida is named — who ran a large-scale timber operation with his brother. Originally, the region’s forests were dominated by longleaf pine, but after timbering, the forests were replaced with faster-growing slash and loblolly pine to satisfy ever-increasing demand.

At the time of its opening, the Florida Pulp and Paper company owned and operated the plant, where it produced artillery boxes for the war effort. Today the mill is owned by International Paper, which purchased the operation from Champion International in 2000. The plant spans 900 acres with more than 500 employees. Headquartered in Memphis with more than 50,000 employees worldwide, International Paper is mostly owned by institutional investors like Vanguard, Blackrock, and State Street Global, with the top 11 investors owning 50 percent of the company. Its total economic impact is estimated to be in the neighborhood of $300 million, according to a 2019 report from the Pensacola New Journal. 

For years, the general consensus has been that the mill is the main culprit of the bay’s pollution problems. Kenneth L. Heck, Jr., a local marine scientist, wrote the following in a 2005 report for the law firm Levin Papantino: “Since initial construction in the 1940s, and subsequent expansions of what is now the lnternational Paper Company’s mill in Cantonment, there have been a series of well-documented declines in water quality and environmental conditions in upper Perdido Bay that have been attributed to the discharges of IP and its predecessors, and reported in both the scientific literature and the popular press.”

The Good News

Despite years of pollution and ecological neglect, there are positive signs for Perdido Bay. According to satellite mapping data reports from 2020, there has been an increase of roughly 200 acres of seagrass in the bay since 2015.

That increase is due to several factors, according to Whitney Scheffel, a senior scientist at the Pensacola and Perdido Bays Estuary Program, a non-profit that was established from EPA grant funding in 2018. One of these is the presence of several no-motor zones around the islands in the lower part of the bay, which Scheffel calls “an effective way of protecting those grasses.”

The PPBEP has also been working with the Nature Conservancy on using dredge material to help restore areas like Robinson Island and Bird Island — popular hang-out spots for boaters and weekend revelers in the summer — and increasing seagrass habitat there. 

“Those islands have seen a lot of erosion,” Scheffel says, “so we will be restoring the islands and transplanting some of the seagrasses to a safer location where the major beds occur. We hope to increase overall protection for those habitats to help bring it back to what it once was.”

 In July, Mobile Baykeeper assisted with the transplantation of seagrass from Robinson Island to Walker Island.

Scheffel says a lack of historical data for Perdido Bay means we know less about water quality (e.g, dissolved oxygen levels, turbidity) in the Bay than the seagrass population. That means it can be hard to get a clear, comprehensive picture when it comes to assessing critical issues. The organization has been working with partners across different agencies to do more comprehensive monitoring. Watchdog groups like Friends of Perdido Bay have been conducting community monitoring projects through the years in certain sections of the bay. Scheffel says while those programs are good, more comprehensive efforts are needed.

“Sometimes you can get a silo and not really be thinking about it holistically,” Scheffel says. “Just to make those assessments you need a certain amount of data, and some of that data is just not there.”

I was curious to ask Scheffel about the sludge that blankets the bottom parts of the upper Bay; the slimy crud that invariably makes you question the health of your catch. (Last year the state of Alabama issued two fish consumption advisories for redfish and speckled trout caught north of the Lillian Bridge in Perdido Bay, recommending no more than two meals per month.) She says it’s likely the result of accumulation over time, stemming mostly from the days of heavy industrial pollution before the passage of the Clean Water Act. “I think it’s hard to determine one cause realistically,” she says of the sludge. “I think it’s the result of many decades of abuse.”

Scheffel notes that you encounter sandier substrate and less sludge as you move into the healthier, lower portions of the bay, which is to be expected as you move away from pollution point-sources. Yet she is careful to note that the yardstick by which one measures the bay’s health is ever-shifting.

“We’re kind of where we are and the environment is changing rapidly,” she says. “We will never get it back to what it once was and that’s because the conditions aren’t what they once were either, due to many decades of not always making great decisions about keeping the environment at the forefront.”

The PPBEP has been working closely with International Paper in an effort to get a better picture of holistic pollution issues in the bay. At one point in their discussions, IP was not passing specific tests for water-quality monitoring, and they were trying to pinpoint exactly why they were not passing that test. Scheffel says IP was able to rectify the situation by implementing an additional filtration process to the treatment method and meet standards.

Since 2010, IP says they have improved the conditions of the receiving wetlands by planting more than 180,000 native tree species; establishing a land management program to restore a 1,200-acre mitigation area; and conducting monitoring and research to document the benefits of removal of effluent flow from Eleven Mile Creek. In 2023, IP announced it was shutting down on its pulp production lines, a move that cost 100 jobs.

“There’s definitely been an improvement,” Scheffel says of the paper mill’s efforts. “I think people misunderstand outward signs that are happening in Perdido and they always direct that to International Paper.”

The Fishery

These days, Captain Wes Rozier only fishes Perdido Bay a few times a year. And that’s when he has clients who insist on fishing that kind of water. He prefers to work spots  like Santa Rosa Round, where the grass is still lush and the fish are plentiful. He says he has to fish the bay really hard for hours just to get a few trout or redfish, when he should be catching the limit with no problem.

At 62 years old, Rozier remembers seeing lush grass beds in the bay as late as the ’80s, when there was still a healthy population of crabs and oysters. He talks about catching tarpon in Eleven Mile Creek with fly-fishermen that he’d take on guide trips. And then, before you knew it, the grass beds were gone.

Rozier can still catch fish in the rivers in the winter months. The only time the fish really move in Perdido Bay, he says, is when they’re coming out of the riverwater in search of more salinity to spawn. The fish that once moved through the bay and made the trek to Perdido Pass and Big Lagoon for spawning are no longer there, either due to die-off or locating someplace else, he says. “Fishing is based on oxygenated water, and it’s based on water temperature. Specs and red fish …  they migrate distances just because of salinity of water. They don’t migrate like the Spanish mackerel … if he stops, he dies.”

Since the early 2000s, the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources has conducted surveys to determine trends and the abundance of certain fish species in Perdido Bay. One of those is a gill-net survey that targets juvenile and subadult fish species. Another is a survey with recreational anglers that monitors catch rates on behalf of NOAA fisheries, though the data for that survey is limited due to the dearth of boat ramps in the area.

Kevin Anson, a marine biologist with ADCNR, says the fishery is somewhat stable for various species. He sounds a somewhat hopeful note when he says “there are reports of fishermen catching species that 20 years ago people were not catching.”

Despite his frustrations as a fisherman, Rozier is careful not to place the blame squarely on International Paper. He notes in particular the problem of lawn fertilizers, an issue that has only gotten worse with development. “You just can’t do the things we do today,” he says.

Rozier thinks there was a time about 15 years ago when things appeared to be improving.

“There was a little bit of spark right before the oil spill, and the fishing was starting to get better. We were starting to catch a number of fish. Then the spill happened and it just went downhill from there. You could go in and crush the flounder right before that, but they are just not there anymore. They were spawning in the oil out there and that hurt it. But there was a point just before that where I thought, okay man, this thing is starting to turn. And I think IP was in the process of trying to clean it all up then. But Mother Nature corrects everything [in the end]. As long as there is one male and female to spawn, the waterways will come back. But Mother Nature doesn’t have a clock. So if something messes up, there is a certain time before it all corrects itself. But it’s a shame. I won’t live long enough to see it. Probably you won’t either.”

A Clearwater Revival

Soldier Creek teems with life on some days, especially in its upper blackwater section. A few weeks ago my dad glimpsed a sea turtle in the creek, not long after stumbling across a nest of alligator eggs. There is aquatic life to be found, for sure. So maybe it’s just me when it comes to the fishing. Maybe I’m just bad at it.

Gardner Love is another story. A 17-year-old junior at Elberta High who lives off Soldier Creek, Love caught the Alabama state record for snook this spring.

One May evening after school Love was fishing the marshes with a spinning rod, working a silver-chartreuse Devil Soft Bait. After snagging a few trout in the late afternoon, he cast his line toward some marsh grass and got hung up in a tree. When he finally managed to finagle the line out of the tree his lure hit the water and then kaboom.

“I thought it was a tarpon at first,” he says, “because I’ve seen people catch those before. Whenever it first hit I thought it was a lot bigger than it was because it hit my lure so hard and then threw a big splash in the air. Halfway through fighting it it jumped out of the water and that’s when I knew it was a snook, because I’d seen them on fishing shows. I had never heard of them being around here.”

The common snook is a tropical fish that has not historically been caught in Alabama waters. It is mostly found around the Keys and is usually not seen north of the Everglades, until now. Local marine scientists have attributed the influx of tropical fish in Alabama waters of late to rising water temperatures. 

Scott Bannon with DCNR says there are recent signs of a continuous snook population in the Perdido Bay Area, so the question arises as to what protections need to be placed on the fish. Currently in Alabama there are no limits on bag size or slot length. Bannon says the state might set a bag limit on snook in the near future, which would likely follow Florida’s bag limit of one.

“They prefer the clear water,” Bannon says of snook, which is known to be great for eating. “We had one that was caught in Dog River, and there have been some in Mississippi, though those are probably wayward fish. But we’re starting to see them more and more.”  

When asked about the quality of fishing in Soldier Creek, Love says it has been slow the past three years, compared to the days when he fished it as a kid. But he says the past three months the fishing has been better than anytime in his life, and that’s he’s landed speckled trout, redfish, and flounder every time he’s gone out.

“I grew up here and I know where everything is in the creek,” he says. “I know it like the back of my hand. I know all the spots to fish and how to catch fish. And it’s definitely been good lately.”

Love’s words are good news for anglers working a fishery that is changing and still under threat.

— from Mobile Baykeeper’s CURRENTS

Built to last

My dad bought his Stauter in 1984. He got it from a guy who worked at Delchamps on Old Shell Road who was pulling up stakes and moving to New Orleans. It was a 16-foot, 1966 Aqua Queen, painted in two-toned black and white with a racing stripe indent on the upper hull. He paid less than a princely sum for it.

It was the second Stauter made that year. The serial number on the keel reads 660002.

I don’t remember him buying the boat as I was only five years old at the time. But I do recall my time in it during the ensuing years. I have vivid memories of learning to ski behind it on Cypress Garden trainers at Point Clear, not far from the Grand Hotel. I remember seeking shelter under the bow as we raced back from Sand Island on summer afternoons — when thunderstorms would appear out of nowhere and turn the skies from blue to black in the space of a Steely Dan song, threatening death-by-lightning-strike. I can still smell the salt and mahogany under the bow and hear the sound of the waves slamming into the boat with a ferocity that was, I believed at the time, certain to leave us shipwrecked. Indeed this was not a craft made for easy rides on the storm-tossed sea. But nothing ever happened and in its 40-year history with my family, the boat has never sprung a leak.

In my first years on the water I don’t think I was aware of any boats other than Stauters. All my parents’ friends had them (mostly the popular 15-and-a-half-foot Cedar Point Special model). Stauters were to the Bay what oak-paneled Chevy station-wagons were to the parking lot of the A&P — they were everywhere. I do recall the first time I rode in a Boston Whaler and being thoroughly unimpressed, disgusted almost. The boat was cold, impersonal, and just plain ugly — a symbol of the overly efficient, industrial North. All utility and no style. And what was with this fiberglass stuff? The Stauter had elan; it was a patriot of our seas.

The history of Stauter Boat-Works has been told elsewhere, most eloquently in a Wooden Boatmagazine profile from the early ’80s. The company was started in 1947 by Lawrence Stauter and taken over by the Lami Brothers (the grandsons of Lawrence’s first-cousin) in 1979. The old boat works stood on the Causeway (you could rent Stauters for the day back then) until Hurricane Frederick showed up and reminded everyone who was in charge. In its heyday, Stauter was building an impressive 400 boats a year — and all of them by hand. The Lami Brothers continued to build the boats at the new location on Three Notch Road in Tillman’s Corner for another thirty-one years. Production ceased in 2010.

My father’s favorite memories of the Aqua Queen revolve around family and friends, of teaching us to ski behind it, as well as teaching the next generation of grandchildren. He has fond memories of taking it up into the Delta with friends in the ’80s and ’90s and finding the redfish honey-holes that seem so much harder to locate these days.

The Aqua Queen is not as ubiquitous as other models like the Cedar Point Special, and it draws inquiring looks as we cruise the bays and creeks around Perdido Beach and Josephine. It is a show-piece that is not ready to retire. In 2009 it placed third in the Pirates Cove Wooden Boat Festival — a contest that mostly features touring show-boats on trailers.

“I get a lot of thumbs up on the water, and that’s about it. And a lot of waves,” my dad says when asked about the reaction the Aqua Queen elicits these days. “I once got stopped by the marine police. I wasn’t doing anything illegal. He just stopped me because he wanted to look at the boat.”

— from Mobile Baykeeper’s CURRENTS.

The U.S. Supreme court is damaging our waters

The U.S. Supreme Court appears hell-bent on dismantling what remains of federal environmental protections in this country.   
 
By overturning the Chevron doctrine in its recent rulings — Loper Bright v. Raimondo and Relentless v. Commerce — the 6-3 conservative majority court has all but stripped the EPA of its authority to implement and regulate programs whose statutes are not expressly delineated by Congress, a task that many concede is beyond the capacity of the legislative branch.  
 
The nut of the Chevron issue involves judicial interpretation of ambiguous statutes in the federal code. Prior to its overturning, the Chevron doctrine was cited by lower courts as a way to defer to agency expertise on matters where ambiguous statutes — and the ways in which they are implemented and sometimes regulated — are unclear and beyond the ken of the judiciary. Many of these statutes are made purposefully ambiguous, due to the highly complex and ever-shifting nature of agency operations (just think Medicare) that move at warp speed and often require a swift pivot. 
 
In his opinion, Chief Justice John Robers wrote “the agencies have no special competence.” Under this logic, the expertise of a hydrologist at the EPA carries no significance from a legal standpoint, say, when it comes to the interpretation of an unclear statute under the Clean Water Act. Say what, John? 
 
Last year the Supreme Court stripped most of the nation’s wetlands of protection when it redefined WOTUS (“waters of the United States”) in Sackett v. EPA, arguing that the filling of wetlands requires no permit unless those wetlands are adjacent to a free-flowing waterbody (most aren’t). That decision greatly imperiled the waters of Coastal Alabama. Baldwin County is the seventh-fastest growing county in the U.S., and development continues apace. We’re already seeing an increased loss of wetlands as a result. That leads to increased runoff, which means there is far more mud and raw industrial poison flowing into our waters. 
 
For a democracy to even approximate competence, the principles of federalism must be somewhat intact. Here in Alabama, that often feels like a pipe dream. Many of Alabama’s officials act like they are the second coming of George Wallace, constantly braying the state motto “We Dare Defend Our Rights.” Yet some of these officials, who work at state agencies like the Public Service Commission and the Environmental Management Commission, are little more than shills, forever doing the bidding of corporate behemoths like Alabama Power. Exactly whose rights are they defending? 

Read the rest on al.com.

Pipe Dreams

Austin Maynard thought his surfing days were over. This would be in the year 2010, in the time of the BP oil spill. “They were saying we might not be able to get in the water for years,” he says. “This was my life, and I didn’t think I was going to be able to surf again. That was a surreal moment.”

It was a surreal moment for anyone who called Coastal Alabama home. For a time — 87 days, in fact — it looked like the Gulf as we knew it was no more.

For those who live along the Gulf Coast, the water is the region’s lifeblood, the source of what sustains us. Just how much it meant to its residents came into razor-sharp focus in 2010. Nothing concentrates the mind like a world-class oil spill, the worst of its kind in history.

“It taught me that we need to be very careful of what we’re doing, and be aware that this could affect the future,” Maynard says. “I had never really thought about it before the spill, even though I saw those oil rigs out there all the time.”

As a Mobilian, Maynard grew up on the water. He started surfing with his brother, back in middle school. His uncles and cousins were surfers, and the day he made the switch from a boogie-board to a longboard he was hooked. Soon, his skater friends were tagging along as he explored the local surf breaks, the spots where the waves break over a sandy bottom and become surfable. By the time high- school came around, he was checking the daily surf report and jetting down to Dauphin Island most days after school. Because Dauphin Island is essentially one big sandbar, the breaks are constantly changing, so he and his friends would traverse the West End of the island, always on the lookout for the new spots.

Before long, Maynard was a real-live surf brah. He’d started watching surf films and soaking up the culture; he notes in particular the 2004 documentary Riding Giants, which traces the careers of famous big-wave riders like Greg Noll and Laird Hamilton. “When I started surfing, it pretty much changed my whole life,” he says. “I just became obsessed.”

Posters of the modern-day surf gods adorned his bedroom walls. Guys like the Irons Brothers, Kelly Slater, Rob Machado, and Dave Rastovich. Maynard studied the moves of these masters. He liked the surfers with a fluid style, the ones like Rastovich and Machado who were really smooth on the turns and cut-backs, and who weren’t afraid to experiment with different boards. He also dug how surfing informed so much of their worldview. “They always spoke about the culture and the ocean, and the importance of respecting the water,” he says. “That was something I kind of attached to.”

It wasn’t long before Maynard himself graduated to a shortboard, which is better suited for speed and maneuvering, especially when the swells get bigger. For Maynard, there was no looking back.

Surfing the Gulf

The Gulf of Mexico is a calm sea. The waves that lap its shores are not like the bigger swells you see along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, or off the storied shores of Maui, where, along the surf-break at Pe’ahi, the waves on some days can reach between 30 and 80 feet when conditions are right.

Indeed, the Alabama coast is not known for its surfing. Its sugar-white beaches, some of the most prized in the world, are best for lounging about and swimming; for sunbathing and making sand-castles with the kiddos. For most of the year, the Gulf waters are warm and inviting, and you do not have to be an expert swimmer to enjoy them. Anyone can boogie-board or body-surf the waves, as long as the weather is reasonably good, and the rip currents are not too hazardous.

The Gulf is a relatively small body of water, compared to the greater oceans. The waves that roll in from the south have little time to gather the energy that make them surfable by the time they reach the northern coast. Surf conditions, for the most part, are the result of remote disturbances. The Florida Straits and Yucatan Channel — passages that mark the entrance to the Gulf — are populated with numerous reefs and shoals, which reduce most of the wave energy coming in from the Atlantic or Caribbean.

The topography of the continental shelf is also a factor. As you get closer to the coast, the seafloor of the Gulf begins to slope upward. That means a five-foot wave traveling in deep Gulf water is greatly reduced by the time it reaches the shore, due to the drag exerted on it by an increasingly shallow bottom.

Of course, this can all change during hurricane season, which runs from June through November in the Atlantic. When a northern front or major storm moves into the area, the conditions along the Gulf can approach those of America’s best surf spots. This is when the real action happens and the area’s hard-core surfers come out in full force – to taste the real thing for a few enchanted hours. You can find them surfing Alabama Point and The Cove in Orange Beach, or working choice spots in Pensacola, Fort Walton, and Panama City Beach.

For Maynard, surfing during storms can be thrilling, but it’s also offered some big lessons. “The power of the water humbles you, when you get too cocky and think you know it all,” he says. He recalls earlier attempts to surf during hurricanes, when he wasn’t quite ready and had no business being out there. “The ocean is way more powerful than you can imagine. It kind of puts you in your place.”

Read more at MobileBaykeeper.org.

Top of the Class: The Hummingbird Way

What happens when a former Executive Chef for the State of Alabama opens a restaurant in the heart of Mobile’s Oakleigh Garden District? And not just any restaurant, an oyster bar. One that specializes in fresh catch and local produce.

A lot of things happen. A beloved old neighborhood gets a vibrant business, local fishermen and farmers have a market for their catch and produce, and Mobile gets one of the best seafood restaurants in the South. Jobs, culture, and a thousand beautiful nights are created. Everyone wins.

This is what Chef Jim Smith, owner of The Hummingbird Way, has done for the Port City. So it is that I found myself having dinner there back in early November, enjoying a flight of raw oysters and feeling more than a twinge of regional pride for Coastal Alabama’s culinary culture, when the bartender flipped the channel on the TV and … there we were.

“I’m here in Mobile, Alabama, in the Oakleigh Garden District,” chimed Guy Fieri’s familiar voice. A shot of the restaurant and the grand live oaks that line the neighborhood floated across the screen. Fieri is the host of the Food Network’s long-running hit-show “Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives,” whose episodes on the Food Network have struck a chord with a national audience for almost two decades. His trademark spastic energy and no-collar vibe (think Sammy Hagar after the Red Rocker went blonde and you’ve got it) made for an odd mashup with the laconic nature of Mobile’s most historic neighborhood. It is as languorous as Fieri is not, but Fieri knows good food, and so it is no surprise that he has come here in search of America’s great eateries.

Read more from Mobile Baykeeper’s CURRENTS.