Mobile Bay

• The Mobile River and Tensaw River empty into the northern end of the bay, making it an estuary. An Estuary is a partially enclosed coastal body of water, having an open connection with the ocean, where freshwater from inland is mixed with saltwater from the sea. 
• Dog River, Deer River, and East Fowl River empty into the western side of the bay, and Fish River and the Bon Secour Bay and River are on the eastern shore.
• The Mobile River is formed 45 miles north of Mobile by the joining of the Alabama River and Black Warrior/Tombigbee Rivers. The Mobile River serves as the gateway to the Tennessee/Tombigbee (Tenn-Tom) Waterway.
• The deepest areas of the bay are located within the shipping channel, sometimes in excess of 75 feet deep, but the average depth of the bay is only 10 feet, which is among the most shallow for a bay this size.
• It is approximately 32 miles north to south, 23 miles wide at its widest point, and about 10 miles wide at the City of Mobile.
• A combination of wind and tide delivers salty Gulf waters into the Bay from the south that mix with varying amounts of freshwater from the Mobile-Tensaw River Delta. Due to the shallow nature of the bay, dynamic climatic conditions, and man-made hydrologic modifications salinity conditions in the Bay are remarkably variable.
• The Bay is influenced by daily diurnal tide changes that average a little less than a foot and a half, with maximum changes exceeding two and a half feet.
• The Mobile Bay Ferry moves passengers and autos between Dauphin Island and Fort Morgan.
• The sandbar at southeast side of the mouth of Mobile Bay has been called Dixey Bar for probably more than 100 years. The clipper ship Robert H. Dixey was struck by a hurricane in 1860. Nineteen lives were lost and the ship was destroyed on the bar that came to claim its name. The story is told in a book by L. Tracy Girdler entitled “An Antebellum Life at Sea,” published in 1997. A subsequent hurricane created an island, “Dixey Island,” which lasted on the charts until another storm washed it away, leaving only Dixey Bar.

Channels and Waterways

Mobile Bay Ship Channel

• Prior to the channel, Mobile Bay was too shallow for heavy ships so small steam-power vessels called lighters took millions of bales of cotton from Navy Cove to Mobile.
• Once onboard, the pilot would navigate the ship over the Mobile Bar to a position four miles northwest of Mobile Point known as the Lower Fleet Anchorage. The anchorage had to be used because the mouth of the Mobile River was too shallow for ocean-going ships. At the anchorage the ships would transfer cargo to or from small light draft vessels that could transit the upper bay.
• It was not until 1826 that the U.S. Congress authorized money for the development of a navigable channel in Mobile Bay.
• In the year 1831, Choctaw Pass at the mouth of the Mobile River was dredged to a depth of ten feet. Smaller ocean- going ships could now berth at the docks in the city.
• In 1870, congress authorized the first of many improvements to the port. The obstructions were removed, three lighthouses were built, and by 1876 the ship channel was dredged to a depth of thirteen feet. This was still too shallow for modern ocean-going steam freighters, so the anchorage was still used.
• In 1896, the channel was dredged to a depth of twenty-three feet. Finally the need to lighter the ships at the anchorage had ended.
• The current navigation channel maintained by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers provides safe navigational depth of 45 feet from the Gulf of Mexico to the mouth of the Mobile River. The 45-foot channel serves McDuffie Terminals located at the mouth of the river. The channel then becomes 40 foot deep and proceeds north to the Cochrane/Africatown Bridge passing over the Bankhead and Wallace tunnels.

Intracoastal Waterway

• In the southern edge of Mobile Bay, access is gained to the Intercoastal Waterway as it makes its way from St. Marks, Florida, to Brownsville, Texas.
• Military engineers built the channel through south Baldwin County in 1934; their goal was to create a protected shipping lane between Mobile and Pensacola that was safer to traverse than the open Gulf. Called the Foley Land Cut, the manmade segment of the Intracoastal Waterway between Oyster and Wolf bays was originally planned in the early 19th century. The 7-mile canal, however, took more than 100 years to come to fruition.
• The canal is maintained for barge traffic by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The agency is also tasked with permitting any marinas on the waterway’s shoreline.
• Since 2004 the Intracoastal Waterway has been a center of residential and commercial development.

Pinto Pass

• In the late 1970s, the Corps spent $500,000 to $700,000 of tax payer money in the placement of an experimental floating dike across Pinto Pass, a tidally influenced river which runs from Battleship Park to Mobile River, and in 1800-1900s was navigable and a channel used for Mobile. – Myrt Jones

Mobile Bay Causeway

• Within the Delta, the Causeway prevents the exchange of water between a number of once open bays and the Gulf of Mexico.  Scientists believe that the modifications may have altered the ecological function and biodiversity of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta. Mobile Baykeeper, the Nature Conservancy, the Dauphin Island Sea Lab (DISL), and the Mobile Bay National Estuary Program (MBNEP) and several others partnered in 2001 to study the effect that hydrological modifications have had on the natural flow of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta.
• Many of the Causeway’s buildings were wiped out by Katrina’s storm surge.
• Battleship Park sustained extensive damage of between $1.5 million and $2 million and the storm left the USS Alabama listing

Mobile Bay Islands

Gaillard Island

• Gaillard Island is an 1,300–acre triangle shaped island located two miles east of Theodore Industrial Park and approximately ten miles south of downtown Mobile.
• In 1979, an island was created from the silty sand dredged to create a ship channel between Mobile Bay and Theodore Industrial Park.
• Although the dredge spoil island was opposed by environmentalists, Dr. M. Wilson Gaillard, a Mobile dentist and conservationist, envisioned the island as a nesting haven for both shore and seabirds.
• By 1981, when the initial construction of the island was completed, birds were already visiting the island. Although locals affectionately refer to the island as Pelican Island, it was officially named for Dr. Gaillard.
• The island initially had a 35–acre planted marsh located along the northwest dike. Today, most of the marsh has washed away. The Island’s dikes, especially the east and south dikes are exposed to high wave and wind energies owing to long wind fetches and ship/barge wakes. To protect these dikes, the east and most of the south dikes have been riprapped with stone. In addition, planting was conducted behind floating tire breakwaters on the northwest dike, and plant rolls and erosion control matting have been utilized.
• Upon completion of the Island, numerous species of vegetation colonized different areas over the past decade. Saltmeadow cordgrass, saltmarsh bulrush, salt marsh cattail, and American threesquare naturally colonized behind berms, while several other species established themselves in the marsh. Smooth cordgrass was the only species that was planted. Lastly, the upland areas were seeded with different species of grasses and planted with a variety of both native and exotic trees. Only a few tree species have survived over time. It wasn’t until the early 1980’s when some of the vegetation had reached successional stages that wading birds were observed on the Island.
• In 1983, biologists discovered four brown pelicans nesting on Gaillard Island. At the time, this was a remarkable discovery because it marked the first nesting of this species in Alabama. Early in this century, the abundance of brown pelicans declined significantly due to hunting. The feathers from pelicans were used in women’s hats. Although laws were later passed protecting the pelican and other species from the plumage trade, another threat in the 1940’s was to have devastating effects. The wide spread use of the pesticide DDT decimated the local population up until 1957. Eventually ornithologists determined that DDT contaminated fish eaten by pelicans were responsible for producing very thin–shelled eggs. Although the brown pelican was placed on the Endangered Species List in 1970, it wasn’t until 1972 when DDT was banned that the brown pelican population saw a resurgence. During the 1970’s and 1980’s the population steadily increased and by 1985, the brown pelican had recovered so well, in part due to Gaillard Island, that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service dropped the species from the state’s endangered species list. In 1998 the brown pelican was removed from the Endangered Species List. By 1999, the size had grown to 5,200 pairs, with the numbers now between 4,000 and 5,000 pairs.
• Gaillard Island is important to thousands of birds representing 15 different species of skimmers, stilts, terns, pelicans, egrets, herons, ducks, and rails that take refuge or nest along the six miles of coastline offered by the Island. Gaillard Island is the only Alabama nesting site for caspian terns, sandwich terns, royal terns, and laughing gulls. The first recorded nesting of herring gulls occurred on Gaillard Island in 1986. In all, well over 10,000 nests have been recorded or estimated during the 1997 and 1998 surveys. The Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources has conducted annual surveys of the colonial nesting seabirds on Gaillard Island since 1988.
• The Island is managed with nesting seabirds in mind by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Alabama State Docks which owns the island.
• The Corps manages disposal to protect nesting birds. Five pipeline corridors on the island’s southern end are used to deposit dredged material during nesting season. Outside that, any area on the island can be accessed. Dredged material is poured into the diked area and settles sloping toward the weir box in the north corner. While the material settles, the weir box allows clean water to drain into the bay.
• Source2: Gaillard Island: Seabird Haven, by Jeffrey C. Howe, Nature Photographer. District dredges up home for endangered bird, Tim Dugan, USACOE Mobile District
• The proposal was to come off the Mobile Ship Channel with another deep channel into the Theodore Industrial Park. A major problem was how to handle and dispose of the multimillions of cubic yards of dredged material from this huge project. The MBAS and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service objected to placing the material in Mobile Bay, which would displace over five square miles of productive bay bottoms and heavily impact on water quality and hydrology of the bay. There were no recognitions or studies made on the potential that this island would become a paradise for birds, but that is what happened. Coastal Alabama had not had brown pelicans since the early 1900s. Four pair of pelicans found a home on the newly formed island, and, being endangered, their little fledglings put the COE on notice. One district engineer, in essence, said, “to hell with the birds, we’re going to maintain the channel and place the material on the island.” This individual was told to cease and desist or be put in jail. The Fish and Wildlife individual, Larry Goldman, enjoyed putting this fellow in the Corps on notice. In order for this huge island to be stabilized, the public tax monies that have been spent on bulkheads, [to] plant trees, [and] vegetation, etc., through these twenty years has probably been in the billions of dollars, a major “sink hole” for public monies. No one knows to what degree loss of bay bottoms has occurred with the sinking and spreading of this mass of dredged material across the Mobile Bay bottomlands. No one knows to what extent this loss has taken on the downward decline of our seafood catch. – Myrt Jones

Pinto Island

• Families settled on Pinto Island during the Depression, and squatted there as late as the 1990s.
• In 1826, Congress appropriated $10,000 to improve Pinto Pass and make it more accessible for large shipping vessels, according to “Rivers of Alabama” by John C. Goodrum. But during the Civil War, Confederates defending Mobile drove pilings in the waters of Choctaw Pass and filled old boats with stones and sunk them in Pinto Pass. In 1876, engineers reopened one of the channels, but the account doesn’t say whether it was Choctaw or Pinto Pass.
• Officials can’t say for sure when the pass closed. Resident J.U. Hamblin says it was a dredging company that lowered the water level from 9 feet to around 3 feet. “A Louisiana company built this levee and it held one day and silted into this bayou and filled it up.” But it still was a passageway from the Mobile River to the Mobile Bay. Then the elder Hamblin says the corps dammed it up at its east end, though a corps official expresses no knowledge of this. J.U. Hamblin says he wrote a letter to then-Gov. George Wallace, who referred him to the corps, which in turn sent its representative for a visit. – PR 4/16/96

Blakeley Island

• For years, the Alabama State Docks, through Bob Hope (director) and Bill Black, “leased” north and south Blakeley spoil areas from “rich owners.” This was done routinely every year or two, costing untold amounts of tax payer monies in these agreements to have places for dredge material from Mobile harbor.
• Alcoa, in the 1950s, piped waste bauxite under the Mobile River to the six mud lakes with forty-foot dikes. The dikes constantly broke and the red mud (which was highly caustic) flowed into Polecat Bay. – Myrt Jones

McDuffie Island

• The Coast Guard’s quarantine station was on McDuffie Island.

Gravine Island

• Gravine Island is an uninhabited island in the middle of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta and reachable only by boat. But on the weekends, and particularly holiday weekends, up to a hundred boats crowd into a protected cove on the north end of the island. Sand was piled 25 feet high by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who needed a place to put dredge spoil. – PR 9/4/07

Gulf Barrier Islands

• The Barrier Islands of Alabama and Mississippi include Dauphin, Petit Bois (French “little forest”; pronounced “petty boy”), just over the Alabama line, Horn, Ship and Cat.
• The islands form the Mississippi Sound, a brackish estuary described by federal officials as the most “fertile” part of the Gulf of Mexico.
• Scientists say the islands are shrinking due to the impact of ship channel dredging
• Most have freshwater lakes that serve as a stopover for migratory birds and as a nesting ground for shorebirds.
• See Press-Register, June 15-16, 2008

Mobile Bay Lighthouses

• Middle Bay Lighthouse
  • The wooden lighthouse was built in 1885 and sits in the Mobile Ship Channel. Shaped like a hexagon and placed on steel screw pilings, it was patterned after several lighthouses on Chesapeake Bay.
  • A preliminary plan to move the 123-year-old Middle Bay Lighthouse to Battleship Memorial Park, restore it and put it on permanent display could cost about $1 million. The Alabama Lighthouse Association has proposed the move which has the backing of the Battleship Commission, and will be brought before the Alabama Historical Commission.
• Sand Island Lighthouse
  • Sand Island is located roughly three miles offshore from the primary Mobile Bay entrance. The island’s size exceeded 400 acres in the 1800s, but today, it is has shrunk to less than one acre.
  • The first tower, 55 feet tall, was built in 1838. Another was built in 1859 but destroyed by the Confederates in 1862 during the Civil War when they discovered that Union troops were using the tower to spy on them.
  • The current lighthouse of 132 feet was built in 1873 by architect Winslow Lewis. Throughout the 1890s and 1900s granite blocks were placed at the base of the tower to control erosion.
  • Lighthouse keepers lost their lives in the Hurricane of 1906 and in 1919.
  • In 1921, the lighthouse was automated, and the light was deactivated by the Coast Guard in 1933.
  • The second-order Fresnel lens was removed from the tower in 1971, and then placed on exhibit at the Fort Morgan museum the following year. In 1973, the 1925 keeper’s dwelling, which stood on iron pilings next to the tower, burned down.
  • In 2001, the Alabama Historical Commission rejected an offer of the lighthouse, reasoning that it would cost too much to save. The Town of Dauphin Island, in partnership with the Alabama Lighthouse Association, stepped forward and obtained ownership of the lighthouse from the federal government in 2003.
  • Options for the lighthouse include moving it to nearby Dauphin Island or attempting to replenish tiny Sand Island and restore the lighthouse in situ.
  • The lighthouse is not open to the public. You can go on a Lighthouse/Shrimping/Dolphin tour with Action Outdoors.
  • Officials with the Alabama Lighthouse Association say the first major repairs began in 2008, funded by by more than $1 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. It would cost $1.3 million to fully secure the 132-foot-tall tower, according to an engineering report, and millions of dollars more to make it accessible to visitors. Eventually, the association, which will continue fundraising for a full restoration, hopes to rebuild the surrounding island and open the tower to the public. According to the report, a 1.3-acre island with sand surrounded by a rock wall could be built around the lighthouse, allowing visitors to dock and disembark. That plan would cost $36 million, including restoration of the tower. Another long-term restoration option would be to add more rocks around the lighthouse to protect the foundation, which in total would cost $15.9 million, according to the report. – PR 12/25/07
• Mobile Point Lighthouse
• Alabama Lighthouse Association

Mobile Bar Pilots

• Mobile Bar Pilots navigate the bay’s sandbars for ships traversing Mobile Bay
• Throughout its history – even when it was under French, British and Spanish control – the mouth of Mobile Bay had its bar pilots. After the War of 1812, Americans took over as Bar Pilots.
• In 1818, shortly after the U.S. government settled pilotage rights to the Gulf waters with Spain, there were a half-dozen initial bar pilots, all young men from seafaring families.
• By 1822, bar pilots had established a base at Navy Cove – “Pilot Town“
• When an attentive pilot with good eyesight spotted a sail on the horizon, he’d run to his rowboat, and others chased after him, said Warren Norville, a Mobile Bay bar pilot descendant, historian and author. They’d race through the waves in their 18-foot yawls, aided by spritsails, to the arriving ship, and the first one aboard got the fare.
• In the year 1831, Choctaw Pass at the mouth of the Mobile River was dredged to a depth of ten feet. Smaller ocean- going ships could now berth at the docks in the city. A second pilotage system soon developed. The Bar Pilots would navigate the ships into the bay, and the Upper Bay Pilots would guide the ships to Mobile . By the 1840’s, the races from Pilot Town had ended. The pilots realized that it was more efficient to stay out in the gulf and wait for a vessel than to stay in port. There was one problem, maintaining a boat big enough to handle the rough weather in the open sea was expensive. In 1843 four bar pilots found a solution. They formed a consortium and purchased a large pilot boat and took turns with the jobs. Within a decade four other consortiums had formed to operate on the Bar, meanwhile the Upper Bay pilots joined together to form one association.
• The fee was princely. The early pilots enriched themselves as well as the budding harbor in Mobile Bay. Some built fine homes in Mobile and summer homes in Point Clear. At the turn of the century, a pilot bringing in a ship with a 12-foot draft earned $42 a trip.
• When the War Between the States broke out in 1861, there were sixteen bar pilots and seven upper bay pilots working. Many of the pilot boats were used as blockade runners during the war. In fact, two of the bar pilots were captured and imprisoned for attempting to run the blockade.
  • William T. Norville and “Black Bill” O’Conner, both from Pilot Town, were two of the more legendary blockade runners of the Civil War.
  • When Norville the blockade runner was captured, Farragut offered him a pension, a nice home and cash to pilot the Union fleet during the Battle of Mobile Bay on Aug. 5, 1865. He refused, choosing prison instead, according to descendant Warren Norville.
  • Bar pilot Jim Griffin assisted Farragut’s fleet, according to a 1959 commemorative book for the sesquicentennial of Baldwin County’s founding in 1809.
• During the Civil War, the Confederate Navy’s Capt. Horace Hunley sought to develop the world’s first submarine in Mobile.  Navy Cove resident George Cook offered to try out the second of the three experimental vessels with the help of helmsmen William Norville and Andrew Dorgan. The bar pilots were deeply involved with these experiments.
• By the time the war ended in 1865, all of the prewar pilot boats had either been captured or scuttled during the conflict. The sixteen bar pilots joined forces and formed the Mobile Bar Pilots Association. They purchased two pilot boats.
• In 1896, the channel was dredged to a depth of twenty-three feet. Finally the need to lighter the ships at the anchorage had ended. That year the bar pilots and the upper bay pilots merged and formed the Mobile Bar and Bay Pilots Association. Because of tradition, the pilots still used the system of changing out pilots in the lower bay. It was deemed a better job to pilot the ships from the bay to the port, so the nine senior pilots became town pilots and the junior pilots served as bar pilots.
• Mobile became the base for bar pilots after a hurricane in 1906 destroyed Pilot Town, killing one 86-year-old pilot and the four children and wife of another.
• The Seaport Act of 1927 placed the Mobile Bar and Bay Pilots Association under the jurisdiction of the Alabama State Docks Commission. The commission decided to put the pilots on a paid salary. The next year the No.2 pilot boat was destroyed in a storm. Because the pilots were on a salary, they did not have the money to replace the boat. This forced a change in the pilots work schedule. Now only one pilot was used to make the full transit of the bay. After much lobbying, the legislature removed the pilots from the jurisdiction of the State Docks. On March 9, 1931 the twenty-two pilots met at the Master, Mate, and Pilots Union Hall and formed the modern Mobile Bar Pilots Association.
• Because ships were now only using one pilot to reach port, the Association had too many pilots. The pilots decided not to replace retiring pilots and their number gradually declined to fifteen. Because of improved communications, staying at the sea buoy was unnecessary. In 1965 the pilots opened their new pilot station on Dauphin Island and the old wooden sailing vessel Alabama was retired. Today the pilots still operate out of Dauphin Island . Two launches are stationed there to ferry pilots to and from the ships.
• In the 182 years that American bar pilots have steered boats in Mobile Bay, only two vessels have been lost with a bar pilot aboard.
• In the 1840s, they formed the Mobile Bar Pilots association, which today represents 12 pilots who bring in about 100 ships a month
• Bar pilots today go seven miles out in the Gulf on 48-foot powerboats
• In the past, a bar pilot position was hereditary. Today it is stated that nepotism among the bar pilots is a thing of the past. Of the last five men awarded apprenticeship, only one has had a bar pilot in his family. Three of the current 12 pilots are descendants of the captains who were at Pilot Town.
• The three-member Alabama Pilotage Commission, appointed by the governor, picks those admitted to the apprenticeship, the formal training for becoming a bar pilot. The commission also sets the rates controlled by the state.

Mobile Delta

• The Delta has been an important source of transportation and timber. In this century, industries have found it a convenient place in which to discharge wastewater, and worse.
• Residential sprawl is threatening the eastern edge of the Delta along the Blakeley River. Experts say that 1,000 homes along the edge of an estuary pose serious problems for the environment, more serious than industrial discharges or forest clearcuts.
• Private owners, including paper companies, timber companies and families, have traditionally been major landowners of the Delta, which is estimated at 200,000 acres.
  • Kimberly-Clark Corp. was the main landholder in the Delta, until it put its land up for sale in 1999, with about 70,000 acres. Other significant owners include the Meaher family (more than 10,000 acres), AmSouth/Regions Bank and Alabama Power.
  • In the 1980s Scott Paper Co. worked with North Carolina State University to develop a logging plan for sustainable harvest of tupelo pulpwood from Delta swamps. Because the land was too wet for modern logging equipment, Scott found that helicopters were the only practical means of removing the timber.
• Public ownership of Delta land has increased, but at a pace slower than conservationists had hoped for.
  • Questions remain as to whether the tracts purchased were the best possible choices for protecting the Delta.
  • As of 1999, The Coastal Land Trust retained about 5,000 acres in the Delta. The Corps of Engineers had 22,000 acres, all designated for wildlife management and public hunting. The Conservation Department owned about 16,000 acres for those same purposes.
  • The federal agency overseeing conservation of the Delta is the Corps of Engineers, which systematically filled in Polecat Bay through the 1960s. The Corps actually contracts with the state Conservation Department to tend the federal land in the Delta. That means, most years, about $70,000 to help pay for the salaries of a wildlife biologist.
  • Blakeley State Park owns nearly 4,000 acres between Highway 225 and the Blakeley River. 
  • In 1995, the private, nonprofit Coastal Land Trust spent nearly $4.5 million on 1,500 acres of prime Tensaw riverfront just north of Byrnes Lake, nearly 900 acres of which is now held by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Alabama Power Co. owns an adjacent 1,800 acres
• Chemical companies and other industries with discharge permits own tracts along the Mobile River, but contribute heavily to its contamination.
• The most ambitious protection effort to date has been the county’s petition to get a portion of the Tensaw River named an Outstanding Alabama Water, a designation that would prohibit new industrial discharges into the waterway. The designation has no bearing on pollution from residential development.
• The Delta is a national landmark, a designation that carries no protection. At least three times in the 1960s and ’70s, the federal government explored making the Delta into a national wildlife refuge or national park. There was never sufficient local enthusiasm for the wildlife refuge. The idea for a Mobile-Tensaw Delta National Park surfaced in 1978. Fear of restrictions on hunting, fishing and timber harvesting resulted in fierce opposition from local sportsmen. Opponents held meetings and printed up anti-park bumper stickers. The Mobile Register weighed in with an editorial headlined, “National park in delta not needed or wanted.” The national park proposal didn’t stand a chance without the U.S. Rep. Jack Edwards being on board.
• During prohibition, the Delta reportedly was a hotbed of local moonshine-making. A handful of families continued to live in raised houses within the Delta through World War II, fishing and trapping for a living, and boating to Mobile for supplies.
• In the 1940s, the state Conservation Department introduced the nutria into the Delta. The voracious rodent was supposed to be another fur-bearing animal for trappers, but ended up so prevalent and destructive of native vegetation that nutria rodeos flourished for a time.
• These days the interior Delta is used mainly by sportsmen, some of whom have built fish camps on top of the shell middens left by the Indians long ago.
• Liberty Ships and other Navy craft were parked in the Tensaw River after World War II – called the “Ghost Fleet” or “Tensaw Fleet”
  • From 1945 to 1969, a reserve fleet of military vessels known as the “Ghost Fleet” sailed the Mobile and Tensaw Rivers as they waited to be decommissioned and disassembled. More than 800 World War II vessels eventually made their way out of Mobile as scuttled scrap metal and recycled wiring. Some were sold to private shippers and foreign countries.
• Little has been done to promote the Delta for eco-tourism or even make it accessible for those who don’t own a boat. It remains a place for sportsmen, and practically no one else. “We don’t have any major eco-tourism in the Mobile Delta,” said Semoon Chang. “That’s where the real interesting potential is.”
  • Meaher State Park, off the Causeway, is fairly small, has limited facilities and staff (just two full-time employees) and closes at 4 p.m. Blakeley State Park’s Delta access consists of a boardwalk along the Tensaw River.
• Fairhope physician Lynn Younge started an Outward Bound Discovery program for troubled youths in Baldwin County, leading expeditions with the youths into the Delta.  It is planned to be expanded into Mobile County. – PR 7/12/2007
• Upper Mobile Delta Map (2009)
• Mobile-Tensaw Delta and W.L. Holland WMA Map (2009)

Mobile Delta Rivers

• Citizen Guide to Alabama Rivers: Escatawpa, Mobile, and Tombigbee

Mobile Bay Waterbodies

Oxbow Lakes

• The U.S. Coast Guard has sided with the public in maintaining access to Doctor Lake, an oxbow off the Tombigbee River 30 miles from Mobile. The state has sided with landowner Earl Flowers. At Big and Little Chippewa Lakes, landowners cut trees across the sloughs and no one battled it. The state had no public backing, and now those waters are private. The trees stayed and dirt filled in around them. At Doctor Lake, Earl Flowers first built a 7-foot-high, unpermitted roadway across the slough that connects the fishery to Jim Burr Lake and the river. He claimed he built the road to harvest timber. But since the Coast Guard ordered removal of the road because it blocks navigable water, the property owner now insists that the lake is private. And Flowers has powerful allies. After the Coast Guard’s ruling in 2002, U.S. Rep. Sonny Jackson said that the agency should stick to drug intervention and stay out of disputes over fishing lakes. Additionally, the Alabama Department of Conservation and Resources has sided with Flowers. The state decided that the slough and Doctor are not tidal and thus not to be considered public, navigable waterways. It relied on a study commissioned by Flowers and findings that Big and Little Chippewa to the south, now blocked off, are not tidal. Yet, tides reach the Coffeeville Lock and Dam on the Tombigbee River, much farther north than Doctor Lake, said Casi Callaway, director of Mobile Bay Watch. Choosing not to conduct its own tidal study, the state said that it would reconsider its decision if shown that Doctor is tidally influenced.

Bayou Sara

• Until the mid 1880’s, Bayou Sara was known as Saw Mill Creek, from its junction with Gunnison Creek to Twelve Mile Island.
• Apart from the occasional fish camp, timber, and turpentine extraction, a small scale ship building operation, and numerous grist mills and saw mills, there was very little industry in the Bayou Sara area until well into the 20th century. Since the mid-20^th Century, industrialization has adversely affected Bayou Sara’s water quality
• Major tributaries include Hells Swamp Branch, Norton Creek, Gunnison Creek, MAWSS Pipeline Canal, and Little Catfish Bayou, and Big Bayou Canot.
• ADEM Survey of the Bayou Sara Watershed
• Bayou Canot was the site of the 1993 Amtrack derailing.
• The State bought 2,000 acres along Bayou Canot for $1.4 million, partly with a federal grant

Dog River

• Dog River was originally known by French colonials as Riviere aux Chiens
• The Dog River watershed drains more than 90 square miles. The river itself is about eight miles (13 km) long and is influenced by tides.
• Salt water enters the river through Mobile Bay, and the various natural springs from Cottage Hill and Spring Hill feed fresh water into the river.
• The average depth of Dog River is 4.5 feet.
• In the 1950s, in at least half of the watershed the city transformed streams into concrete drainage ditches to control flooding
• Major tributaries and sub-basins of the watershed include: Alligator Bayou, Rabbit Creek, Rattlesnake Bayou, Halls Mills Creek, Moore Creek, Eslava Creek, Robinson Bayou, Pearch Creek, Montlimar Canal, Bolton Branch, Milkhouse Creek
• Save Milkhouse Creek (www.savemilkhousecreek.org) is an organization formed to oppose the condemnation of land around Milkhouse Creek by Alabama Power for transmission lines.
  • “While much of the area the line will be built through is comprised of wetlands, Alabama Power is not applying for a wetland destruction permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Company officials met with the corps in recent months, according to Fogarty, but did not file a permit request. Company officials said they would in stead use a “nationwide” corps permit” – PR3/29/09
• A Mississippi construction company executive pleaded guilty to violating the Clean Water Act in 1999 after his company allowed silt from developments in western Mobile to clog Dog River streams. Republican U.S. Rep. Sonny Callahan, who has a house on the Dog River, aggressively pushed a dredging project through several policy hurdles to deal with his neighbors’ gripes, critics argue. The $4.1 million project was completed in 2002.
• Mimi Fearn, an associate professor of geography at the University of South Alabama, is president of the Dog River Clearwater Revival.
• The “Bay Oaks Study” (by Greg Spies) recognized that the area on the south side of the entrance to Dog River, the site called Grand View Park, to have been Mobile’s first port. The French had a King’s Magazine trading post on the other side of the road, across from Grand View Park, and there was an Indian village on this spot. – Myrt Jones
• Dog River Clearwater Revival

Polecat Bay

• The Corps of Engineers systematically filled in Polecat Bay through the 1960s.

D’Olive Bay

• D’Olive Bay was cut off from the Delta 70 years ago when highway engineers built the Causeway. Now D’Olive Bay is fed only by Daphne’s silt-choked D’Olive Creek, a stream so weak it can’t scour its own channel, much less a larger tidal bay.
• There used to be boatloads of bass, bluegill and shellcracker out of D’Olive Bay in the 1950s and ’60s. The Delta’s other smaller basins – Little Bateau, Little Bay John, Bay Grass – teem with fish and fowl. But not D’Olive Bay.
• In the 1970s Diamondhead Corp. built Lake Forest subdivision along D’Olive and Tiawasee creeks. According to a 1981 study by University of South Alabama geologist Wayne Isphording, Diamondhead allowed about 44,000 tons of loosened clays to flow into D’Olive watershed each year between 1971 and 1974, much of it from Lake Forest’s unpaved roads and poorly buffered home clearings. The dirt that passed through D’Olive Bay’s mouth clouded the entire eastern half of Mobile Bay with a 27-mile plume of suspended dirt. “The life of that bay was reduced by 500 years,” Isphording said recently. “It would have taken about 500 years to occur naturally what they managed to do in about 10 years in Lake Forest.” But even under public pressure and threatened state action by then-Attorney General Bill Baxley, Diamondhead refused to admit its erosion problem.
• The current average depth of D’Olive Bay is 1 to 2 feet now, whereas before it averaged 5 feet or more. The fish, the shrimp and the submersed grasses that sustained life in the small bay are gone. There are no spawning grounds left for shellfish to inhabit, and no shellfish for the fin-fish to eat. Both species were forced out as D’Olive filled up with 2 to 3 feet of Lake Forest dirt.
• A study conducted by the Geological Survey of Alabama studied the mud loads carried by D’Olive Creek and its two main tributaries, Joe’s Branch and Tiawasee Creek. Annually, those three creeks transport about 1,977 tons of mud to the bay. But even that impressive number pales compared to the loads carried by those creeks in the early 1970s, when Lake Forest construction was at its peak. A study conducted in 1981 estimated that about 44,000 tons of mud were dumped into the bay from D’Olive Creek each year between 1971 and 1974. Joe’s Branch carries sediment from the Westminster subdivision, the Spanish Fort Town Center development and some eroding Alabama Power right of ways. D’Olive and Tiawasee carry sediment from the Lake Forest and TimberCreek subdivisions, as well as new construction sites near Malbis and along the U.S. 90 corridor parallel to interstate 10. Average depths in the bay dropped from five or more feet in the late 1960s to about one foot today, according to recent studies. In many places, it was once more than 10 feet deep. Now, at low tide, much of D’Olive Bay is nothing but an exposed mud flat. As the area steadily shallowed, the once thriving Lake Forest Yacht Club was rendered nearly useless. David Yeager, the recently retired head of the Mobile Bay National Estuary Program, said that decades of lax enforcement of the federal Clean Water Act by state officials combined with rapid growth and nearly constant construction in the bay’s watershed are to blame for the tens of thousands of tons of dirt that have flowed out of D’Olive Creek. – PR 7/30/08

Yancey Creek

• Extensive damage was caused to Daphne’s Yancey Branch by a city of Daphne project billed as a “stream restoration.”  - PR 7/18/2007
  • The Fish & Wildlife plans instructed the city to create a stream channel about 12 feet wide and 18 inches deep. Instead, Daphne used federal hurricane recovery money to dig out a 48-foot-wide, 3-foot-deep channel.
  • Officials from Fish & Wildlife termed the resulting trough “a disaster”, and stream experts predicted it would result in exactly the kind of massive erosion the latest work is attempting to repair. The original work involved clearing hundreds of wetland trees, such as cypress, and did so much damage to existing wetlands along the creek it is unclear if they will ever recover, according to biologists. Almost overnight, the creek went from supporting beaver, largemouth bass, bluegill, turtles and crawfish to appearing almost devoid of life.
  • Yancey Creek in Lagniappe 10/23/07 by Pete Gleezer

Other South Alabama Waterbodies

Wolf Bay

• Wolf Bay has been designated an “Outstanding Alabama Water” by the EPA, the first estuary system to receive Alabama’s highest environmental designation.
• Wolf Bay Watershed Watch

Escatawpa River

• Citizen Guide to Alabama Rivers: Escatawpa, Mobile, and Tombigbee

Mobile Bay Environmental Concerns

Mobile Bay and Alabama Environment

• Mobile-Tensaw Delta Waterbodies with Reported Problems with the Clean Water Act: Cold Creek Swamp, Eightmile Creek, Gum Tree Branch, Threemile Creek.
• Mobile Bay Waterbodies with Reported Problems with the Clean Water Act: Bon Secour Bay, Caney Creek, Dog River, Fish River, Intracoastal Waterway, Rabbit Creek, Bon Secour River, Magnolia River
• Mobile Bay has endured the siltation and runoff that have come with decades of waterfront development.
  • More than 2 million metric tons of sediment end up in Mobile Bay each year, according to the National Estuary Program. One billion gallons of mud are dredged each year from the Ship Channel, according to the Corps.
• Oyster reefs in the northern reaches of Mobile Bay were permanently closed by the state in the early 1950s when the growing city’s sewage treatment plants began to discharge into the bay. Today, once-productive offshore are blanketed with sediment carried by runoff from upstream waters.
  • An Auburn University study of 70 acres of unproductive reef along the eastern shore of Mobile Bay found several low-oxygen events occurred in the area, killing off oysters that were planted for the 2000 study. Sediment was a likely culprit.
  • Chris Nelson, a vice president of Bon Secour Fisheries Inc., testified before the federal commission on ocean policy in 2002 on how upstream contaminants have led to the downward spiral of the oyster industry in Mobile Bay.
• Sewage Spills: Mobile Bay Keeper reviewed spill reports from 1994-99 at three sewage treatment plants — one flowed into a Dog River creek, another into a Mobile Bay tributary and a third straight into the bay. The conclusion: 3.5 million gallons of sewage was being spilled annually. Bay Watch sued MAWSS, alleging federal Clean Water Act violations. Federal and state governments then followed suit. In 2002, the utility agreed to make $60 million in improvements and do water-quality monitoring. In 2003, a severe storm caused the utility to spill 800,000 gallons in one day.
• Craig Sheldon and others had formed the Save Our Bay (SOB) club in Fairhope to stop Radcliff Dredging of dead oyster shells in Mobile Bay as they had been doing for a long time. In order to get to the layers of dead oyster shells (for chicken feed), a deep overburden of mud, grass beds, was removed and turbidity loads were unbelievable. – Myrt Jones
• Mobile Bay is one of the most understudied watersheds in the nation. From 1985-95, only 82 aquatic science and fisheries publications were devoted to bay research, Dauphin Island Sea Lab researchers say. Comparatively, several bays had more than 200 research publications in that time.