Fort Bayou Beach unfurls along the back bay shoreline of Ocean Springs, where the gulf-fed sound spreads out in silvery sheets beneath a sky twice as big as the land. You'll walk barefoot on compact sand studded with oyster shells, past boat slips and century-old cottages with screened porches that smell of salt and sunbaked wood. The tide pulls out so far in the afternoon you can wade to sandbars that weren't there at breakfast, watching mullet flicker in the shallows.
“You can walk a quarter-mile into the sound at low tide and still stand waist-deep in bathwarm water while pelicans fish beside you.”
Credit: FlickrLake Superior North Shore, Grand Marais, Minnesota
This isn't the kind of beach where you spread a towel and stay put. You'll drift east toward the bayou mouth where Fort Maurepas once stood, or west beneath the canopy of wind-sculpted oaks that separate sand from roadway. Great blue herons hunt in the spartina grass. Brown pelicans dive-bomb just beyond the breakers. Local families arrive at dusk with coolers and folding chairs, settling in to watch the sun melt into the treeline across the sound.
The water stays gentle year-round—no undertow, no big surf—just the steady rhythm of small waves rolling in from Horn Island, fifteen miles south. You'll find your own stretch of shore most days, especially midweek, when the only footprints are yours and whatever the gulls have left behind.
