The northern Gulf of Mexico has a flat sand bottom for most of its length, which is another way of saying it has almost nowhere for a fish to live. So Alabama went out and built some. Over the last fifty years the state has permitted a reef zone off Orange Beach that now covers something like a thousand square miles, and into it people have dropped bridge spans, army tanks, chicken transport cages, retired barges, concrete pyramids by the thousand, and at least one cement mixer that appears on the charts and in no official record anywhere. Every one of those things grew a coat of barnacles and a population of red snapper, and the whole northern Gulf snapper fishery sits on top of junk that somebody sank on purpose.
What this means in practice is that the numbers matter more than the fishing. Public reef coordinates are published, which sounds generous until you understand that a published number gets fished by four hundred boats a season and the snapper on it get to be about eleven inches long and extremely well informed. The good spots are private numbers, found by somebody dragging a sounder across empty bottom for a hundred hours, and they are passed down like a deed. People put them in their wills. We were given three, on the condition that we forget them, and we have, mostly.
The bite itself is not subtle. You idle up, watch the sounder go from a flat gray line to a red cloud stacked twenty feet off the bottom, and then everybody drops at once. A snapper eats immediately and then does the one thing it knows, which is turn its head and swim straight back into whatever it lives in. There is no finesse to the first ten seconds. You lock up and crank and hope, and if you hesitate you get to reel a hundred feet of line up to inspect a leader that has been sawed clean through on a barge rail.
Our captain ran out of Orange Beach in a boat with three engines and a cooler the size of a bathtub, and he fished exactly the way people fish when the season is short and the rules are complicated: fast, cheerfully, and with a lot of counting. He knew the size limit, the bag limit, the season dates, and how many days the federal water was open that year, and he recited all of it before we left the dock in the tone of a man who has explained it to a great many people. Then he found a piece of bottom that was not on any chart and let us catch fish for two hours.
We kept our limit, which came fast, and spent the rest of the afternoon catching and releasing a fish that turns a deep coppery red when it comes up out of a hundred feet and goes almost pink in the sun. The mate filleted them at the cleaning station with pelicans stacked three deep on the rail behind him, and a man from another boat wandered over to ask where we had been. The captain said out that way, and pointed at the entire Gulf of Mexico.
Long days in the sun call for a hooded sun shirt. See our UPF 50+ fishing shirts, drawn from a photo of your own boat.