Jubilee

I grew up on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay at Battles Wharf.  I was born in 1941, a good time to have arrived. When I was a child, I was blessed with having Duke Cox as my mentor. He lived nearby off Twin Beach Road, and we would begin our fishing adventures when he’d walk to my house -usually carrying his mullet net in a croaker sack over his shoulder. I slept at the end of the screen porch and he would scratch on the screen to wake me up.

We had an old cypress cross-planked rowing skiff that limited our geographical radius only by the distance to which we were willing to row. We lived by the tides and the moon and kept mental notes on the exact conditions of every Jubilee that we encountered, to the point that we knew all the conditions that were necessary to create these unique occurrences. If the conditions were right, we stayed out all night and very seldom missed one.  

It was common practice back then for anyone discovering a Jubilee to wake everyone up and notify them what was going on. Some people even rang bells and hollered “Jubilee!”  Duke and I were just like Tar Babies: “We didn’t say a thing.” We may have seemed selfish, but knowing Jubilee conditions was serious business for us: we sold the flounders that we’d gigged to Mister Stern up in Fairhope, at his fish market.

Mister Stern up gave us top price for our flounders because we would gig ‘em in the head and didn’t mess up any meat. He would not buy “Jubilee flounders” – small ones that most people gigged during Jubilees - because he said their flesh was soft and their shelf life was short. We therefore only gigged the big ones. Duke said, “It didn’t make since to gig ‘em before they were ripe, anyway.”

Once a Jubilee had been discovered by the masses, Duke and I would just stop and stand in the shadows. He would pull out his can of Prince Albert and roll a cigarette, and we would observe a scene that was almost as interesting as the Jubilee itself.  Women who would not think of going out of the house with out the proper attire and make up were running around on the beach in their pajamas and bath robes, with their hair in rollers. People would run around with nets, gigs, pitchforks, washtubs and all kinds of paraphernalia. Duke once said, “You can tell a lot about a person by how they act during a Jubilee…the only other things that I know of that make people act such a fool is alcohol and sex."   It was time for us to head up to Mr. Stern’s Fish Market to sell our catch. 

A jubilee is a phenomenon that occurs only on the Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay Alabama. Jubilees have been occurring for as long as anyone can remember and for years were a complete mystery. During a jubilee flounders, crabs, shrimp, eels, and other bottom dwelling marine life congregate along the edge of the beach. A jubilee can be confined to a small area or stretched out for miles and it might consist of just crabs or just flounders or a combination of a variety of marine life. You never know what the bay might bring forth.  There are certain conditions that must be present for a jubilee to take place and even if conditions are right it does not guarantee a jubilee. A jubilee is thought to be the result of low dissolved oxygen in the water caused by decaying organic matter in certain parts of the bay on the eastern shore. There is a layer of water on the surface that reaches to the beach that contains more oxygen than the water on the bottom and marine life follows this oxygenated water to the beach in order to survive. The marine life affected by this situation is sluggish and slow to respond and this makes them easily harvested.

Jimbo's Cast Archive

August 2006- Outfitting Your Kayak for Fishing

July 2006- Choosing a Fishing Kayak

June 2006 -   "Why I Started Fishing from a Kayak"

May 2006 -    "Jimbo Meador, Angler Philosopher"