The Longest Day: Seven Weekends Until the Buses Run

The sun came up over Perdido Pass this week and stayed up longer than it will any other day all year. Most folks read the solstice as the start of something. I read it as a clock.

Here's what nobody tells you in June: summer with the kids out of school is a whole lot shorter than summer itself. Count it on your fingers — by the time the Baldwin County buses roll again in August, you've got about seven weekends. Seven.

So this week's Docklines isn't a kick-back-and-drift letter. It's a plan: how to read the water before you load the cooler, put the kids on the tube, snorkel the reefs right off the beach, find the bite, raft up at the newly restored Perdido Islands — and the new rules you'll want to know before you idle in — then wash the salt off and let somebody else cook.

The light's as long as it's going to be, starting today. Be the family that's already loaded and gone.

It's a beautiful weekend on the Lower Alabama coast, and next Sunday is Father's Day. You know the old line — make hay while the sun shines. On the water, that means you get on the boat when the chance shows up, because weather like we've got right now doesn't sit around and wait on you. So here's my pitch to the families reading this: find a way to turn Dad loose this weekend, or during the week, or anytime before next Sunday. Give him a morning to himself out on the water, then circle back and make the rest of the day a family thing. That's the whole trick to a good Father's Day down here.

The Raft-Up, the Regatta, and the Sandbar

It's a big weekend on the water. Saturday, the Children's Cup Regatta sails out of Fairhope Yacht Club; Sunday, the Drop Anchor Song Fest drops anchor off the Montrose Crescent. Two good reasons to put the boat in — and both of them mean a lot of hulls anchored close together for a good cause. The part nobody hands you on the way out of the marina? The unwritten rules that keep a crowded anchorage from turning into a bad afternoon.

So we wrote them down. Our full guide breaks down how to set a raft-up so the whole thing actually holds when the sea breeze fills in, where to drop your hook when you're watching a sailboat race (hint: not on the mark), and the captain-tested sandbar manners — two anchors, no glass, leave only footprints — that keep the best spots on this coast worth going back to. It's the difference between being the captain everybody's glad pulled in next to them and the one whose stern anchor dragged into a stranger's cockpit at 2 PM.

Read the whole thing before you cast off this weekend. The Raft-Up, the Regatta, and the Sandbar is live now on the Docklines blog — give it a read, then go show up right.

👉 Read the Full Guide at docksideguide.com

Dockside Guide Lands in Mobile Bay's Summer Fun Issue

Pick up the May issue of Mobile Bay Magazine and flip to page 24 — that's our founder, Thomas Toombs, at the helm.

The story Amelia Rose Zimlich tells in "A Guide to the Dockside Life" starts where every good Dockside Guide story starts: on the back of a napkin, on a Saturday afternoon, with a buddy and a boat and the beginnings of a list. Roughly 40 places between Mobile Bay and Perdido Key later, that napkin became the resource you're reading right now.

If you haven't pointed your bow toward Perdido Key yet this week, it's time to fire up the chartplotter. The 41st Annual Interstate Mullet Toss and Gulf Coast's Greatest Beach Party kicks off tomorrow, April 24 through 26, 2026, on the beach behind the legendary Flora-Bama Lounge & Oyster Bar Gulf Shores, that glorious, ramshackle temple to coastal misbehavior straddling the Alabama–Florida line. For our Docklines readers, the geography couldn't be more convenient: the Flora-Bama sits right on the Gulf, a short run from Perdido Pass, and for boaters willing to drop a hook offshore and tender in, you'll sidestep one of the ugliest parking headaches on the Gulf Coast while securing a front-row seat to fish flying through the April sky.

There's a moment that happens every time I pull into Cotton Bayou and the docks at Zeke's Landing come into view — a moment I've never been able to fully explain to someone who hasn't been there by boat. The charter fleet is staged in the center section, forty-plus hulls pointed toward Perdido Pass and ready for tomorrow's run. The restaurant is open. The Mo Fishin’ Bar has music drifting across the water. Somewhere behind the dry stack facility a forklift is lowering a center console back into the water. Jarett or Brad are sea trialing a boat with a prospective customer. A family just off a dolphin cruise is walking up the boardwalk with their faces still lit up. And I'm sitting at the helm thinking: this is exactly why Dockside Guide exists. Because you cannot know this place from the road. You have to come in from the water to understand what's actually here. 

To the uninitiated, pulling in from the water can feel like entering a busy port city. Here’s how to navigate the ecosystem. Zeke's Landing has been anchored on Cotton Bayou since 1980,.....

The Signs That Tell the Story

Inside the rafters of Tacky Jacks Fort Morgan, the hand-painted ghosts of every bar and restaurant that ever called this marina home still hang from the ceiling — stapled dollar bills and all. If you’ve ever walked into the downstairs bar at Tacky Jacks on Fort Morgan Road and looked up, you know the ceiling tells a story that no menu ever could. Stapled to the rafters are dozens of dollar bills, scrawled with names, dates, and messages. But look a little closer and you’ll notice something else: old hand-painted signs — five of them — for restaurants and bars that no longer exist but once made this same waterfront marina their home.