The Salt Line, Vol. 77: A Fishing Pier Gives Back Everything It Ever Snagged, an Interstate Resurfaced Entirely in 'East Of,' and a Magic Number Down to Six

It’s the last Sunday in August, the week before Labor Day, and the coast is in that strange in-between where the chair caravans are thinner but the people who stayed are committed. Nothing in this morning’s news feed has a cone in it. I’m not going to say anything else about that, because saying things about that is how you get a cone. The generator guys know. Here’s what the feed actually had.

⚾ The Magic Number Is Six, and the Biscuits Are Running Low on Dough

The Pensacola Blue Wahoos beat the Montgomery Biscuits 5-2 Saturday night — their 17th win in the last 20 — with Brandon Compton and Ethan O’Donnell both going deep in the second inning, solo shots, as if they’d agreed in the tunnel to split the work evenly. Compton’s was his 21st of the year. O’Donnell’s was the team’s 164th, the most in franchise history, which means this roster has hit more home runs than any Wahoos team ever and it’s still August. The magic number to clinch a playoff spot is now six. For the uninitiated, the magic number is the baseball way of saying “we could stop counting soon, but we’re not going to, because counting is the fun part.” It is also, coincidentally, the number of Biscuits fans who still believe.

This came one night after a come-from-behind 5-3 win on Friday in which Montgomery scored first and the Wahoos treated that as a clerical error, answering with four unanswered in four straight innings. A team named after a fish is bullying a team named after a breakfast food, on the last weekend of August, in front of people eating both. This is the Gulf Coast. We contain multitudes, and most of them are fried.

🚧 I-10 Is Being Resurfaced From East of a Thing to East of Another Thing

Per this week’s state road slowdown report, crews are resurfacing Interstate 10 “from east of U.S. 29 to east of Davis Highway.” I’d like everyone to appreciate that a multimillion-dollar federal highway project is being described with the exact directional precision my uncle uses for a boat ramp. Not at 29. Not to Davis. East of, to east of. Somewhere in there is an interstate, and somewhere in there is a paver, and if you’re driving in Friday for Labor Day you will find both by feel.

The report is titled “Weekly Traffic Report,” which means the orange cones in Escambia County now have a regular column. Same publishing schedule as me. Better traffic numbers, probably.

🎣 A Fishing Pier Has Been Asked to Return Everything It Ever Took

Here’s one for the two of us who’ve fished a pier at 2 a.m. and know exactly what it smells like: Gulf Islands National Seashore closed the Fort Pickens fishing pier from Friday at 8 p.m. until Saturday noon so divers could go underneath and remove “debris.” Debris is the Park Service’s word. What’s under a fishing pier after this many years is not debris. It’s every rig that “hung up on something,” every Got-Cha plug somebody swore was the only one they were hitting, every sinker that was your buddy’s fault, and at least one folding chair. The divers went down to retrieve the collective bad luck of every angler who ever said “I think I’m on the bottom.” You were not on the bottom. You were on the pier.

They also asked for volunteers at 8:30 Saturday morning, which means yesterday a group of strangers stood on Santa Rosa Island sorting other people’s lost tackle, and I’d have paid to hear the commentary. Think about it from the fish’s side, too. Every other night of the year that pier is lit, baited, and hostile. For one night the lights went off, the humans left, and every pinfish in Pensacola Bay got to swim up and look at the pilings like it was a museum — right before the museum got emptied.

🏈 Orange Beach Scored 56 Points and Then, Presumably, Went Swimming

WKRG has the Week 2 high school scores posted, and the one that matters on this side of the bridge is Orange Beach 56, Monroe County 0. Fifty-six to nothing is not a final score. That’s a boat speed. Up the road, Foley beat Spanish Fort 28-25, which is the kind of margin that means somebody’s dad is going to be re-litigating a fourth-down call at the Waffle House until Thanksgiving, and Gulf Shores handled St. Paul’s 34-10. Beach schools, three for three, on a Friday night when every one of those kids could see the Gulf from the parking lot.

Say what you want about building a high school in a beach town — the kids are not, in fact, distracted. The Makos picked a shark for a mascot and have been playing like they meant it. Somebody in Monroe County spent a long bus ride home Friday night discovering that a school with the Gulf out its back window is not a soft spot on the schedule. It’s the opposite. Those kids have been outrunning rip currents since they could walk.

So that’s the coast on the last Sunday of August: the Wahoos need six more, I-10 needs you to slow down somewhere east of something, the Fort Pickens pier is lighter by however many sinkers, and Orange Beach needs a harder schedule. Meanwhile the Gulf is out there doing whatever it’s doing, uncounted and unresurfaced — if you’d rather see it than take my word, the cam’s live right now, and it has never once needed a diver.

— Chris

P.S. Owners on the Key or in Orange Beach: your specials, your menu link, or a promo code for readers go straight on your page, and claiming it costs exactly what a pier cleanup costs the fish — nothing: /submit/claim/