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 screened porch, and he would scratch on the screen to wake me up.

We had an old cypress cross-planked rowing skiff that limited our geographic 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 we saw to the point that we were familiar with all the prerequisites to bring about these unique occurrences. If the conditions were right, we stayed out all night and very seldom missed one.

Whereas most places have four tides a day, here on the Alabama coast we only have one high tide and one low tide in a twenty-four hours. Once, on a test in the third grade, one of the questions was, how many tides are there in a day? That was probably the easiest test question I ever saw, so I answered, two tides a day. The teacher marked it wrong. I normally kept a low profile, but this was just too much, so I questioned her. She opened the book and showed me that it said there were four tides in twenty-four hours. I could not wait to discuss this with Duke, and when I did his reply was, “Just goes to show you that just ‘cause it’s writ in a book don’t mean it’s true.”

A jubilee is a phenomenon that, as far as we know, only occurs on the Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay, though there have been a few reports of jubilees on the western side of the bay but they are very rare. Certain specific conditions must be present for a jubilee to take place — and, even then, it does not guarantee a jubilee — and as a child I kept a log of them: Jubilees occur only in the summer, and usually the day before is overcast or cloudy, with perhaps a light rain. They only occur on an incoming, or rising, tide, with a gentle east wind and calm water. I noted through the years that there were more jubilees during a full moon or a new moon. I also noted that a squall, a ship wave, or anything that will stir up the water, is the end of a jubilee.