What a jubilee is
A jubilee happens when a layer of water low in oxygen pushes bottom dwelling creatures toward the beach. An incoming tide of very warm, still water sets it up, often after an afternoon shower, and an easterly or northeasterly breeze moves the oxygen poor water toward shore. Flounder, blue crabs, shrimp and catfish crowd into ankle deep water so sluggish that people pick them up by hand. Most events last two to three hours.
Scott Bannon, director of the Alabama Marine Resources Division, says jubilees happen regularly in only two places in the world, and Mobile Bay is one. They are most common on the Eastern Shore, from Point Clear up past Fairhope to Daphne, and only now and then on the western side. The Grand Hotel at Point Clear goes so far as to call its beach the jubilee center of the world.
Old families on the shore still talk about the jubilee network. Someone spots crabs crawling up the pilings, the phones start ringing, and people head down with a floundering light, a gig and a washtub. In older days a bell carried the news. Many jubilees are small, a finger of bad water and a few dozen flounder, but the big ones can line the beach for miles.
The limits do not lift for the occasion. Flounder are five per person per day at a 14 inch minimum, shrimp are one five gallon bucket a day heads on, and blue crabs are one five gallon bucket a day at a 5 inch minimum shell width. Anglers 16 to 64 who gig flounder or cast net shrimp need a saltwater fishing license.
A colony on the bluff
Fairhope started as an experiment. Reformers following Henry George's single tax ideas chose the high bluff on the Eastern Shore and declared November 15, 1894 their Round Up Day, buying cutover land for $5.50 an acre. They hoped the plan gave them a fair hope of success, and the name stuck. The city itself was organized in 1908 with about 500 residents.
The colony left the town its waterfront: the beach park, the park land on the bluff and the quarter mile pier, all handed to the city in the 1930s. Early visitors came over from Mobile by bay boat. Just down the shore at Point Clear, the Grand Hotel traces its history to 1847, when F.H. Chamberlin built a two story hotel along the water.
