Welcome to the area! (I’m about an hour and a half east of Gulf Shores)
Go ahead and do your swims in the Gulf. It’s where you’re going to be racing anyways, so might as well get used to it now. And shark attacks are incredibly rare. We’re talking about once every thirty years in that area sort of rare. There will always be dangers to open water swimming, but critters in that area aren’t really one of them as long as you aren’t out there with a bleeding wound.
Do you ever swim in any of the sounds? I guess I will just have to suck it up and head for the Gulf then 
Thanks for the help
I used to live in Mobile and one of the places that we did a lot of open water swims was in Fairhope. THere is a small park about a mile south of the pier that is a good place to swim. There was a small dock that went out a bit and we would start from there and swim out a bit then swim parallele to shore going north, then back south. The nice thing about the bay right there was it was only about 4 feet deep so you could stop at any point and stand up if you wanted.
You can also swim from the Fairhope pier. THere is a small platform on the south side of the pier to start from and swim south.
I heard that the area by Fairhope is relatively clean. However, I just read someone was hospitalized from swimming in the Bay last week; it made him extremely sick. That’s the only thing that worries me . . .
Once in a while in Choctawhatchee Bay, but I’m not crazy about the sounds because there’s a lot of boat traffic, and in most sport they’re relatively narrow. In terms of bad things that could happen to you in the water, getting run over by a coal barge or idiot jetskier is a lot more likely to happen than any shark encounter.
Mobile Bay isn’t bad when it’s been sunny out. The swim for Grandman sprint tri is by that park in Fairhope. But when you get one of those summer stretches where it rains every day for ten days straight, (like August this year so far) you get chemicals and fertilizers washing from land into the bay, and that leads to algae and bacteria bloom in the water there. And it can take a couple days for the bacteria levels to get back down below safe levels again.
The Grandman Tri is done at the Fairhope pier in June. I believe the water there is tested weekly. Jeff or Erika Pollock could give you some info on that (if you haven’t met them yet, you will).
BTW, from another Colo-forn-ado ex-pat, congratulations on your move. You’ll never want to go back if you stay here at least a year. Just remember, you don’t have to dig your car out from under 3 feet of humidity in the morning to go to work.
And–a good buddy of mine got a severe case of blood poisoning in Chatfield Reservoir. He stepped on something and cut his foot & spent 10 days in the hospital on IV antibiotics.