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Dylan Thuras: Every summer, along a small thimble-shaped stretch of Alabama’s coast, something strange stirs up from the water. Something so odd and kind of spectacular, it feels unreal.
Watt Key: People that see it for the first time are spellbound. They just can’t believe it. You just never seen anything like it. I’ve told people before, it’s kind of like saying you saw Bigfoot. You kind of have to see it to believe it. Things will be just—they’re not acting normal.
Dylan: This otherworldly phenomenon happens in the dead of night when the rest of the world is still asleep. And there’s a name for this strange event: It’s called a jubilee.
Watt: Once we came in and said, “jubilee, jubilee!” then mom would get out of bed and go sit down next to the phone and start working the list.
Dylan: The call of “jubilee” spreads from house to house, neighbor to neighbor. And soon, everyone descends upon the beach in the darkness to greet the jubilee.
Watt: You see flounders and crabs, shrimp, stingrays, mullet, all these fish, they just come in in a wave. It’s sort of like D-Day.
Dylan: Fish and sea creatures, usually hidden deep in the murky waters, suddenly swim towards the shore like they’re being drawn from the darkness, a kind of invasion of the sea creatures.
I’m Dylan Thuras, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Today, we will venture out to witness the Mobile Bay jubilee, an almost magical phenomena where thousands of fish and all kinds of marine life swim towards the shore, where beachgoers wait to scoop them up by the bucketful. And we’ll hear how the jubilee brings the community together in ways that are way outside the patterns of daily life.
This is an edited transcript of the Atlas Obscura Podcast: a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.
Dylan: You might know the term “jubilee” as something that signifies an anniversary or a special event, some big celebration. Newspapers in Alabama first started using the term “jubilee” to describe this celebrated event in the early part of the 20th century. One record-breaking year, the catch was apparently so massive that flounders were thick enough that you could pluck them with a pitchfork, at least according to one of the papers.
Outsiders, to this day, are captivated by jubilees. For them—for me—it’s like the stuff of legend. For Mobile Bay locals, though, these jubilees are a family tradition going back many, many generations, long before there was even a word for them.
Watt: It’s always been a part of the culture here, but it’s so hard to actually experience one that a lot of people don’t believe it because they’re sort of an unbelievable event.
Dylan: This is Watt Key. He grew up in Point Clear. It’s a small coastal suburb about 30 miles east of Mobile. Watt is an author. His books include Alabama Moon, which is set on the bay, and all about exploring childhood adventure and the wonders of coastal living. You can see how Point Clear had a big influence on Watt.
It’s a real coming-of-age novel: willow trees draping down, seaside homes with names like The Hideaway. It’s always been the kind of place that draws people in. Today, it’s a resort town with spas and golf courses and luxury hotels. But when Watt was growing up, the tourists were of a different kind of ilk.
Watt: Traditionally, businessmen in Mobile would take their families over the bay to the eastern shore in the summertime to escape the heat, and they would leave their families over there, and then they would come back to Mobile to work.
I was one of the locals. I grew up in a house my grandfather built. We were not part of the wealthy crew. So jubilees to us were as important for entertainment as they were for actual—we would actually get food from the jubilees.
Dylan: Watt is the oldest of seven children, and every summer his family would wait for a jubilee. A good catch from a single jubilee could feed the family for a year. But jubilees are very hard to predict. The wind, the water, the temperature—it all needs to align in a perfect balance. Just the right mix of elements for a jubilee to happen. And no one knows when or where on the bay one might occur. However, if you know where to look, there are signs.
Watt: The first thing you look for is the evening before. It’s usually going to rain a little bit, a light rain. You’re going to have an east wind, and it’s going to be calm, and you’re going to have an incoming tide. And then probably 8:00, 9:00, 10:00 at night, you’ll start noticing little fish like catfish and eels swimming on top of the water, sometimes some crabs.
Things will be just—they’re not acting normal. Normally all of these creatures are hidden. And shining a light down there, catfish and eels are swimming on top, and they sort of get a reddish tint to their bellies. You can see the signs.
Dylan: It’s a knowing that really only comes from growing up there, something you feel in the air, something you learned through childhood spent watching the bay, tuned in to its subtle ebbs and flows.
Watt: All of the houses in Point Clear have docks that go out about a hundred feet, and there’s a bathhouse on the end, like a gazebo sort of. And we had a room out there with beds in it and a refrigerator and a little television, and so we would sleep out there in the summertime because you would get the breezes off the bay. It would be cooler out there than it was in our house. So we were ready for jubilees whenever they came, because we were already out there anyway. And you can kind of hear—it’s very quiet. You hear fish starting to pop.
Dylan: And that sound of fish leaping from the water, it’s like the starting gun of the jubilee. It signals its beginning. That means it’s time to go.
Watt: It’s calm, so the water’s very clear. And you go along with what’s called a flounder gig, and that’s basically like a broomstick with a big long nail on the end. If you want flounders and you just stab them, and you can stack them up like pancakes at the end of your gig.
I’ve towed a rowboat behind me and probably gotten as many as 200 flounders. It was me and my brother, and we ended up selling a lot of them to the seafood restaurant up the road. I was about 14, and so that was a big payday for me.
Dylan: Jubilees only regularly occur in two known locations in the world: Mobile Bay and one other bay in Japan. And they happen along a 15-mile stretch of Mobile Bay. There can be several jubilees in one summer, each one lasting just a few hours. And it’s because the bay has some unique qualities that this can happen there. It has a very shallow depth. It has the exact mix of saltwater and freshwater. And it has a very specific tidal pattern. All of these are necessary to create a jubilee.
In a way, the scientific explanation behind the phenomena is simple, if maybe a little grim-sounding. Essentially, the fish, the crabs, the everything, it’s all suffocating. During the summer, dense, salty ocean water mixes with the lighter freshwater from the rivers, and it can start to create layers that trap the oxygen in the deeper parts of the bay. And if enough plant matter flow in, they trap even more oxygen.
And essentially, they suffocate the sea life. And it starts forcing anything that needs oxygen in the water to start swimming up towards the surface, towards the shore, in search of more oxygenated water. And that is when they meet the Mobile Bay residents.
Watt: Everything’s kind of drunk and drugged, so they’re very sluggish. Otherwise, they would just scoot away, but they’re not acting normal. They’re definitely kind of sick. I remember catching some fish. There’s a little thing, like a flounder, we call a hog choker. They’re like little bitty flounder-looking fish, and they’re kind of cute. So I scooped up some water and put a little sand in there and put a hog choker in there. And I thought, well, I’ll have this pet hog choker. Well, eventually, within an hour, it died because I had put it in jubilee water that didn’t have any oxygen.
Dylan: It’s not just the fish that start acting differently. The jubilees bring out this whole other side of Point Clear, this sort of hidden network that comes to life after nightfall. Neighbors start gathering on the beach in darkness to catch this special fleeting moment. At one time, bells were even set up to signal when a jubilee was happening. They were rung to alert the community to come down and bring your buckets.
Watt: When I was growing up, most people just picked up the rotary phone and started dialing numbers. That was really my mother’s job. Once we came in and said, “Jubilee, jubilee!” then mom would get out of bed and go sit down next to the phone and start working the list. I was the oldest, so I was out there gigging as many flounders and scooping as many crabs and shrimp as I could.
Sometimes even though you have your list of people to call, sometimes in all the excitement, because it’s pretty exciting, you forget to call your list. He forgot to call our neighbor who lived two doors down. The neighbor didn’t come out until about 6:30 when the jubilee was over, and he called my dad a one-flounder friend. Sort of 50 percent joking, but 50 percent not happy.
Everybody’s in whatever they were sleeping in because you have to get out there and get out there fast. You see all these people who you have only seen dressed up. You’ve never seen them in their nightclothes. You feel like there’s something a little more intimate about it. You see the cute girl who was always just dressed up with her hair done, and then she’s out there on the beach in her nightgown. You feel like you’re seeing a side of people you haven’t seen before.
Dylan: And then it’s over. A jubilee retreats just as mysteriously as it appears. Some change in the tide, or maybe even a passing ship starts to mix the water. Eventually, life flows back into the ocean, and the fish and Point Clear residents resume their natural rhythms.
The jubilees still continue to this day, although some things have changed. Some locals say the catches are smaller than they used to be, and big grocery stores now provide bucketfuls of seafood on the daily, making the jubilee feel a little redundant. But for Watt, who has since moved out of Point Clear, he still makes a point to return to Mobile Bay with his family for the summers, to watch the water, and to wait.
Watt: The houses are much nicer now along the coast of Point Clear. A lot of them are vacation homes, and sometimes people just aren’t there. I’ll go try to get my kids up, and half the time they’re like, “Dad, we’ve already seen that.” I just go out there and watch and see who comes out. There’s definitely not as many people now as there used to be. So it’s mostly just the old locals like me, because it’s what I’ve always done. If you can catch it, it is magical.
Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.
Our podcast is a co-production of Atlas Obscura and Stitcher Studios. This episode was produced by Alexa Lim. The people who make our show include Doug Baldinger, Chris Naka, Kameel Stanley, Johanna Mayer, Manolo Morales, Baudelaire, Gabby Gladney, Amanda McGowan, Alexa Lim, Casey Holford, and Luz Fleming. Our theme music is by Sam Tyndall.