Over the holidays, Leta’s family told me about a natural phenomenon more or less peculiar to Mobile Bay. From time to time during the summer months, low oxygen levels in the bay drive the resident fish and shellfish up into the shallows of the eastern shore. The swimmers arrive in such numbers that hungry Alabamans come down to the beach with washtubs to collect a jubilee of easy-to-catch seafood. Harold Loesch and Edwin May have studied the phenomenon and written it up in journal articles. Conditions that seem to promote the (usually pre-dawn) event: winds out of the east and a rising tide.
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