Orange Beach, Ala. – (OBA) – The rebuild of the Waterfront Park Pier in Orange Beach has some added features that should help attract more fish to the area in the coming months.

Local pier and shoreline fishing expert David Thornton said one of those features came about out of necessity to complete the project.

“I really thought that was fantastic and making the water deeper along the west side,” Thornton said. “They dug an access canal for the work barges.”

But that was not the only new feature added at the rebuilt pier. Per FEMA regulations, the federal agency will only fund enough money to replace what was already in place. In this case, that’s about $700,000, according to city Coastal Resources Director Phillip West.

If Orange Beach wanted more features added, it would have to foot the bill. The city decided to add features to attract more fish to the area around and under the pier including 24 disk reefs like the snorkeling reefs off of three beaches in town and lighting under the end of the pier. It cost the city less than $10,000 to make the improvements.

But it all started with the deepening of water to give the work boats more access to do the rebuild.

“The pier’s always been pretty marginal for fishing but now that we’ve deepened the water on the west side to accommodate the crane barge for the rebuild that was kind of the start of, ‘we can improve attractions,’” West said. “The mayor had talked to folks at the Reefmakers about the reef disks. We had researched the lights so all that together should greatly improve the attractiveness of that structure for sport fish. It should greatly improve.”

Thornton said the results might take awhile to change for fishermen at the pier but he’s convinced it will be a big improvement.

“I think that as long as it’s more than about four or five feet deep it’ll attract and hold fish especially white trout in the summer at night and maybe even in the day,” Thornton said. “They’re attracted to these drop-offs and lower areas and a combination of the two should help like white trout fishing, flounder, redfish. Anything that’s attracted to both the hard structure of the pier and the reefs and what grows on them.”

Waiting on that growth is what will take time and marine life slowly discovers the new features under and around the pier.

“It may take a year or so for how long it takes for barnacles and oysters to start growing but that is a definite plus,” Thornton said. “Anything that sticks above the bottom and creates some kind of an artificial irregularity that fish can orient around. Especially schooling fish like that one I mentioned.”

Thornton also said the new attractions at the pier fills a need in the area and he’d like to see more piers developed in the same ways.

“In my mind, it’s been sorely needed,” Thornton said. “Some kind of an inshore dock reef type of thing with fairly deep access. There’s some decent piers around but the problem is most of them are in water that is too shallow to sustain the fish that they are trying to attract. It ends up being croakers and pinfish and that’s pretty much it. It’s a fun place to take the kids but there’s not a lot of game fish available because of the water depth. And, that’s one of the keys and the other is hard structure that brings in more crabs and shrimp and stuff that the game fish feed on, minnows and mullet schooling around the pier is a big plus.”

As the fish begin to discover the new pier attractions, Thornton said local fishermen will have to learn their patterns and what time of year is more likely to have certain fish in the area.

“Every pier like in Mobile Bay, Wolf Bay, Perdido Bay – it doesn’t matter – they all develop their specific timing based on the micro geography of that particular area,” Thornton said. “Wolf Bay going into Bay La Launch and all is a good area because you’ve got deep water fairly close with the Intracoastal Waterway. So, you’ve got a lot of movement of fish in and around the Wolf Bay, Perdido Bay system but it’s not real predictable.”