Inside the Moon
Texas Women Anglers A2
Issue 646
Fishing A11
Grom Roundup A7
The
Island Moon The voice of The Island since 1996
September 1, 2016
Around The Island
Moon on a Spoon A15
Live Music A18
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Reeling in Big Bucks
By Dale Rankin editor@islandmoon.com Onto each Island a little rain must fall and in our case “little” is the right term. We got just enough rain over the past few days to confuse the dogs but not enough to put more than a little dew on the lily. Our water came from below as the storm in the Gulf to our east pushed two feet of tides well up on our beaches forcing the closing of beaches inside Padre Island National Seashore. As we sit here during this writing we are playing chicken with the ominously-named Tropical Depression Nine – which sounds like something you would apply to your nether regions to get rid of a rash.
Reservoirs Up! The good news is that the rain up north in the watershed of our water-supply lakes raised the water levels there to points we haven’t seen in quite a while. Choke Canyon is now at 43.7% capacity which is 8% higher than last year at this time, Lake Corpus Christi is at 81.3% capacity, up 18% over this time last year, and Lake Texana is overfull at 101.3%.
Rusty old dredge We’ve had several questions about the rustic ship making its ponderous way up and down the ship channel in Port Aransas the past week. While the paint-challenged vessel might look like it came straight out of Waterworld it is really the 8432 ton, 351-foot dredge Stuyvesant from Mobile. It is cleaning up some shoaling in the ship channel. It is called a Trailing Suction Hopper Dredge that drags a sled along the bottom and sucks up the silt and stores it in onboard bins until the ship goes out to open water and drops the silt back into the water. The rusty sides are a result of the overfull bins belching out
saltwater over the sides. Think of the stains as the red badge of courage. In the background of the photo you can see the mothballed drilling platform that arrived a few weeks ago and is being stored on Harbor Island. Now this may be a Fish Story, but the word around Port A is that the platform brought part of the ecosystem that lived under its steel columns that support it, including a population of rather large Red Snapper which a few locals have been helping to reduce. The person who told us that said to keep it to ourselves, but as we told him, there is no way in the world you are going to keep that a secret in Port A.
Sneak thieves Judging from the police reports it looks like we’ve got some sneak thieves working the area around Longboat. They hit three locations between midnight on Wednesday and early Thursday grabbing what they could find lying around in vehicles. The car thieves hit three cars on two blocks of Longboat 13900 block Longboat between sundown on Wednesday and into early Thursday. The newly forming neighborhood watch should help to stamp out this kind of crime once they are up and running.
International Bacon Day! Monday, September 5th is International Bacon Day. Need we say more? Say hello if you see us Around The Island.
Standaman reels in big bucks at the Texas Women Anglers Tournament. Story, winners and photos on page A-2.
Cruise Ships Impact Island
Cruise Ships in the Coastal Bend By Dale Rankin When supporters of bringing the cruise ship industry to the Coastal Bend packed the Ortiz International Center at the Port of Corpus Christi last week there was unanimous support for the idea. A veritable Who’s Who of local officialdom each brought their unique perspective to the idea and presented an encouraging picture of what the industry would mean for the area. For details see the Island by The Numbers story in this issue. The occasion was a public hearing of the select Joint Interim Committee to Study the Cruise Industry. The bipartisan panel from the Texas Legislature was chaired by State Senator District 18 Lois Kolkhorst, whose district includes Port Aransas and Mustang Island south to Packery Channel, and pushed by State Representative Todd Hunter District 32 whose district includes Port Aransas and Padre Island, and State Senator Juan “Chuy” Hinojosa, District 20 whose district runs from Kleberg County north to Packery Channel and includes Padre Island. The committee is considering filing a bill to allow for a cruise port terminal somewhere on the Texas coast between Calhoun County in the north and Cameron County in the Rio Grande Valley during the next legislative session. The issue will go back to Austin for the potential drafting of a bill which if approved by the Texas Legislature would allow private cruise lines to begin operating
out of the Coastal Bend. What was not discussed, and was not part of the EDC study, is exactly where in the Coastal Bend the ships would be based. The question was addressed obliquely by Kolkhorst who predicted South Texas would have a cruise ship terminal within five years. Several officials at the hearing stressed that the clearance from the water to the bottom of the new Harbor Bridge will be higher than the top of the current bridge. The consultant hired by the Port of Corpus Christi to study the issue told the crowd that ships could not begin passing under the new bridge until demolition of the current bridge is complete, meaning that ships would not begin entering the port until at least 2021.San Patricio County Judge Terry Simpson, told the gathering that dock space for cruise ships in the meantime is available near Ingleside for use as a temporary berthing place until the new bridge is complete. But none of the speakers directly addressed where the proposed terminal might be located. “We are still too early in process to start thinking about that, said Iain Vasey, President and CEO of the EDC. “We are just now looking at what the industry would mean to us, the location is something the legislature would likely have to take up if and when they draft a bill.” The hearing left little doubt that the
Cruise Ships cont. on A4
Cruise Ships by the numbers Editor’s note: A joint committee of the Texas Legislature held a public hearing Thursday at the Port of Corpus Christi to discuss the possibility of bringing a cruise port to this area. Here are some of the facts presented at the hearing. From the Corpus Christi Regional Development Corporation (which conducted an economic impact study on the area if a cruise ship port is added) $37 million in in-direct spending would be created by two cruise ships carrying 214-417 passengers each located in the Coastal Bend 3 sizes of cruise ships in United States takes from a list of 153 cruise vessels operating at U.S. ports: • Small vessel (25th percentile) MSC Melody @ 1250 passengers • Median vessel (50th percentile): Grandeur of the Seas @ 1950 passengers • Large vessel (75th percentile): Rhapsody of the Seas @ 2435 passengers 7-8 days average length of cruise leaving from Galveston and New Orleans $24 million in direct spending would be generated by two cruise ships carrying 214-417 passengers each located in the Coastal Bend $10 million in payroll/508 jobs would be created by two cruise ships carrying 214-417 passengers each located in the Coastal Bend
$85 million in economic benefit/863 jobs would be created by two cruise ships carrying 214-417 passengers each located in the Coastal Bend 554 jobs would be created if the ships were mid-sized ships 25%-50% increase in traffic at Corpus Christi International Airport with two cruise ships 25% of hypothetical passengers live within distance of Corpus Christi
cruise driving
178,000 (53%) of the estimated 335,000 cruise passengers in Corpus Christi are likely to arrive by air. 800-1200 miles the distance from which new visitors would travel to Corpus Christi $60,000 per week would be generated from parking at cruise ship terminal $3 million per year from parking at terminal 13% Return on Investment for parking garage at cruise ship terminal 13.7 million people departed from cruise ports in Florida in 2015 $69 billion generated by the tourism industry in Texas annually 600,000 jobs created directly by the Texas travel and tourism industry 1.1 million jobs created directly and indirectly in the Texas travel and tourism industry 150,000 Texas businesses in the travel and tourism industry
Numbers cont. on A4
A little Island history
The Deepwater Saloon Lives! 100 year-old building found under Sportman’s Lodge
By Dale Rankin Besides the jetties themselves, the building of the jetties brought two lingering structures to Port Aransas. First there was the Tarpon Inn built in 1886 to house workers during construction of the jetties and has become an icon that survives today. The other structure is a little harder to spot because it is buried under another structure and in fact was only discovered when the destruction of the newer structure began last month.
In the early part of the 20th Century when jetty workers came to town to start work on the North Jetty most didn’t speak English and were less than welcome in the saloon at the Tarpon Inn and they needed a place to relax after work. Port Aransas was still called Tarpon, Texas in those days and was a small, insular town that didn’t particularly cotton to rubbing shoulders with ferry workers in the local watering hole. This was a problem because there was a prohibition on building new bars in town – at least on dry land.
But where there is a will there is a way and it didn’t take long for an enterprising local to build the structure you see here and place it, not in deep water as the name suggests, but just far enough out to not be left high and dry at low tide. It was named the Deepwater Saloon and served its purpose well for many years but then vanished into the fog of local history; until about a month ago. When the Port Aransas Art Center began demolition of the Sportsman’s Lodge on Alister Street last month in
Deep Water Saloon circa 1910 History continued on A4