As much as the wife and I are in Orange Beach and love it you should check out the forgotten coast. St George island and Apalachicola is a great deal compared to the tourist traps in Alabama and the Florida panhandle.
Amen to that. My father-in-law and his wife had a house on St. George Island for many years before he died. He used to make me promise not to tell anybody about St. George Island when we left.
I've never been there. What's it like? Kind of reminds me of Dauphin Island looking at it on the map.
It is so much better than Dauphin Island. I have been going to St. George every year for about the past 12 years. I went to Dauphin island once in that time and haven�t been back yet  . All around nicer, cleaner, don�t have to look at oil rigs all day. The state park is just out of this world.
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I've been going since I was a kid back in the early seventies. My Dad and I would leave early in the morning from PCB to St George island on the weekends in the late summer and early fall. We would launch our boat at the boat ramp by fishermans headquarters and go out of the cut and head west to little St. George island which was and still is totally uninhibited and surf fish all day Saturday and Sunday for reds, specs and pompano. We would beach the boat and camp out and I had the best time of my life with my Daddy.
I love this place so much that I introduce it to my wife eight years ago and we were married there four years ago next week. She loves it as much as I do. We have taken family and friends with us and they fall in love with it as well. Teenagers not so much because it is nothing like the other beaches. It's laid back and easy.
The great thing to me about this place it is not commercialized in any shape or form. No high rise condo's or traffic jams. The majority of the roads except the main one down the middle of the island is dirt. It's old Florida as I remember as a child. Fishing is great gulf or bay side and it's easy to do and be successful at either by surf, kayak or bay boat. If you go in the bay late afternoon at low tide you better know your way around or you will be pushing it off the bottom often. The tide fluctuates some eighteen to twenty four inches. I once rolled my kayak on the way out for an afternoon trip in the bay around four o'clock from a boat wave. I wasn't paying attention and it caught me off guard. I was about twenty feet from the shoreline and couldn't find all the gear that fell out so when I got back to the house at eight o'clock that evening everything was visible due to low tide and I was able to retrieve all my stuff.
We always stay on the east end because it is easier access to the gulf and bay. The house we rent is the next to last one going into the state park. It has a very long pier that you can net mullet or fish off of and is less than a hundred yards from the beach.

This pic is the north side of the state park at rattlesnake cove.

Better wear shoes when fishing in the bay because the Oyster shells will cut you but good. My dream is to retire there someday and have my own guiding business fishing from kayaks.