James Russell Soley, Professor U. S. Navy, Confederate Military History, a library of Confederate States Military History: Volume 7.1, The blockade and the cruisers
Clement Anselm Evans, Ed.

[134] take a position close to the bar; and the blockade was reduced to a limited area. At this point, therefore, it could be maintained more effectually and by a smaller force than at almost any other place of trade on the coast.

There were two other entrances to the bay, one to the westward, with so little water as to be comparatively unimportant, and the other to the northeast, extending, like the Beach Channel at Charleston, close along the shore, and terminating directly under Fort Morgan, just as the northeast channel at Charleston terminated at Fort Moultrie. Though it was less than twelve feet deep at low water, and therefore does not appear on the map, it could be used, when the tide served, by many of the blockade-runners; and when they had once entered, it was next to impossible to cut them out. Additional blockading vessels were generally stationed at both these side-entrances.

Early in the war, the force off Mobile consisted sometimes of a single vessel, which might be found cruising eight or ten miles from the entrance; but after the first year a really efficient force was stationed off the port, and toward the end the vessels lay within two hundred yards of the bar buoy, often with a single gunboat posted inside the channel. Especially after the second escape of the Florida, the officers of the squadron were put on their mettle, and during the year before its capture, Mobile was a difficult port for blockade-runners to attempt.

The simplest operations on the blockade, however, were liable to a variety of accidents and incidents, and no service¹