Ground zero, and after
Mexico Beach is a small city on U.S. 98 at the eastern edge of Bay County. Its history page credits the highway, finished in the 1930s, and Tyndall Field, built in 1941, for bringing people here. In 1946 local businessmen bought 1,850 acres of beachfront and began selling lots. The canal to the Gulf opened in 1955, and the city incorporated in 1967.
On October 10, 2018, Hurricane Michael made landfall near Mexico Beach and Tyndall Air Force Base as a Category 5 storm. The National Hurricane Center's report puts the surge in town at as much as 14 feet above normally dry ground, measured by a sensor on the Mexico Beach pier. Of 1,692 buildings in the city, 1,584 were damaged and 809 were destroyed.
The Census tells the rest. The city counted 915 residents in April 2020, and the 2025 estimate is 1,275, more than before the storm. Local businesses have reopened one at a time.
What never left was the fishing, and the reason sits a few miles offshore.
Reefs on a sandy floor
In 1997 local anglers and divers formed the Mexico Beach Artificial Reef Association, a volunteer group that works with the FWC to give fish more structure to live on. The town's tourism office counts more than 290 reefs built from over 4,000 pieces since then, from Reef Balls and pyramids to old barges, tugboats, shrimp boats and even concrete mixer trucks, sitting 2 to 30 miles out in 20 to 120 feet of water.
Those reefs are why a Mexico Beach cooler so often holds grouper, red snapper, amberjack and cobia. Two 1942 wrecks add to the map: the tanker Empire Mica, sunk by a U-boat, and the lumber ship Vamar, which went down just off the beach. A reef fish, blackened hard and laid on a toasted bun, is the lunch we would point you to first.
