Inside the Moon
Sand Art A4
St. Paddy's Day A2
Spring Break A2
The
Issue 675
Island Moon
The voice of The Island since 1996
March 23, 2017
Around The Island
By Dale Rankin What happens on The Island leaves on Sunday. So take a deep breath everybody, Spring Break 2017 has come and gone and we are still here.
Circus A9
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Requiem for Spring Break 2017
Spring Break 2017 was More a Whimper Than a Bang
As Spring Breaks go this one was just about right; enough visitors to keep Island businesses busy but not so much that it jams up the roads. The new traffic light at SPID/Aquarius did in fact back up traffic on several occasions, but it did not produce the rash of traffic accidents some had feared and it also spaced out traffic to make it easier to get across SPID during daylight hours. New to the Spring Break chorus this year were half a dozen calls in Port Aransas for traffic jams caused by “eight people on six person golf cart, wheel fell off, blocking traffic.” This was a new one and either signifies that the Island golf cart fleet is falling victim to the harsh climate or our visitors are getting…ahem…better fed.
Island people One of the great things about living on our little sandbar is the variety of people we get to meet. We have to be one of the most diverse 15,000-person communities around. Islanders had to work hard to get here and stay here and they arrive with all kinds of great stories to tell. The slogan at the Back Porch Bar in Port Aransas is “Beach Bums to Billionaires” and that pretty much applies to both ends of The Island…although thousandaires might be more abundant.
Bob Hall Pier looking south Friday afternoon
The nexus of the Port Aransas Spring Break scrum beach traffic to one row of cars and just enough beach for one traffic lane. In past year that was the entrance to the beach north of Packery Channel and traffic from there south to Zahn Road was one way. CCPD this year changed that to two-way from Access Road #3 to Zahn and it worked very well.
By Dale Rankin Last weekend our Island was one long silvery slithering snake of disjointed but interconnected parts with a scrum of crazed and sunburnt college kids worshiping a vertical pole in its belly. Spring Break 2017 has come and gone, some schools are still out but the March 18 weekend was the big one, and the consensus is that as Spring Breaks go this was a mild one. The first weekend dicey weather scared away the weak hearted but by mid-week we were in full Spring Break bloom. But on Saturday and Sunday when Island streets and roads are usually parking lots our roads this year were still moving and the beaches were full but not jam packed
At any rate we lost one of our resident inventors recently when Rick Hunts and Bunny pulled up stakes and headed for the Hill Country after a fight with loud shotguns along the Laguna. Rick was a carpenter in San Diego in 1987 when he received U.S. patent for the Flowbee, a device which sucks hair straight out from the head then cuts it to a desired length. By 2000 two million Flowbees had been manufactured in Rick’s factory which is still located in Flour Bluff America. Rick is the second inventor of note on The Island following in the footsteps of a former resident whose invention was putting a pimento in the middle of an olive. We might need to put up a statue of that fellow!
Fishing A11
backed up between the bottlenecks of Zahn Road and the south end of Port Aransas. This was the first year that the road work on the south end of Port Aransas was complete and the four lanes with good sidewalks relieved the pressure on traffic flow and made a huge difference in getting in and out of Port Aransas.
It is safe to say that college Spring Breakers have abandoned the beach between Corpus Christi Pass and Zahn Road. The crowd there was almost exclusively families with kids, which is a big change from the snake-hauling, pit-bull leading crowd of years past. There was little trouble there and traffic flowed easily.
as in recent years. For the previous two years State Highway 361 between Padre Island and Port Aransas has been a parking lot in both directions as traffic
Our friend Mo
Mayor Endorsement Forum April 10 The Island Strategic Action Committee will hold its endorsement night for candidates in the May 6 city Special Election on Monday, April 10 at 6:30 p.m. at the Holiday Inn. All registered Island voters are encouraged to attend and vote for the candidate of their choice. The candidate will be given an opportunity to address the crowd and at the end of the night the votes from the membership will be tallied and the top vote getter will receive the endorsement of the membership.
Spring Breakers abandon North Packery beach Until last year’s Spring Break SH 361 between Zahn Road and Beach Access Road #3, just south of Corpus Christi Pass, has been a weekendlong traffic jam due to breakers trying to get onto the beach. This year deep sand south of Access Road #3 made driving there difficult and reduced
The beach along the Michael J. Ellis Seawall is narrower than it has been since the dredging of Packery Channel.
Bring your voter registration card with you to speed up the process. Candidates have until March 27 to file. You must be registered by April 6 to vote. Early voting takes place April 24-May 2, and Election Day is May 6.
Break cont. A2
The IUPAC was formed to unite the approximately 7200 Island voters behind candidates in city races.
A little Island history
Two Fishermen from Kingsville and a Clay Pot of Spanish Treasure
We want to send out a get well soon wish to our old guitar playing friend Mo from Port A. He has been in intensive care for almost three weeks now. It was only a month ago he helped us liberate a cable spool (that’s Mo on the right) which had washed up on the Kleberg Beach and wrestle it into the back of the pickup. Here’s hoping we see Mo back on The Island soon. We still have a sort-of weekend of Spring Breakers but nothing to worry about. It is now safe to move about The Island. We’ve hit the sweet spot of the Island calendar everybody get out there and enjoy it, and say hello if you see us Around The Island.
Editor’s note: Bobbie Kimbrell is a long-time resident of Flour Bluff and retired commercial fisherman. Our story last week about pirate captain Jean Lafitte prompted this response from him. By Bobbie Kimbrell In reference to the Pirate Story in the last issue of the Island Moon, that brought to mind some of the stories that I have heard or read about in the 73 years that I have lived in Flour Bluff. One of the stories, which is fact, concerns two surf fishermen from Kingsville. One day in the early 1950s, I was visiting my dad at the Red Dot Bait Stand on the Intracoastal Canal when up drove the two surf fishermen. They had spent the night surf fishing and sitting around the campfire. One of the fishermen told my dad to come
outside and look at the size of some of the redfish they had caught. They had two redfish that weighed at least 40 to 50 pounds apiece, the largest I had ever seen. After I went back inside the two fishermen continued talking to my dad for a long time. Every time those two fisherman went fishing they would stop at my dad’s bait stand and buy some mullet or shrimp and usually drink a couple cups of coffee before taking off for the beach. A couple of years later I was visiting my dad again and I asked if those two fishermen still come by and catch those big redfish. My dad said, “No, they haven’t been back over here since the time you were here two years ago. So I asked my dad, “I wonder why they don’t come back here anymore?” “It might be because they told me they had found some Spanish gold
coins,” my dad said. “A lot of them, and had quit their jobs and bought a new home where they lived before living in Kingsville.” So my dad proceded to tell me that the fishermen had told him. He said that after it got dark the fishermen set out their huge cane poles with long lines in the edge of the surf then made a campfire between two of the dunes. One of the men noticed a clump of tar setting on top of a little hill of sand. He tossed the tar into the campfire and watched as it flared up and made black smoke. After it quite burning the noticed there was something still there. So they raked it out of the fire and it was a Spanish gold coin. So
they remembered that from reading about the Spanish treasure ships that most of the coins were put in clay pots and sealed with tar. So they broke out their shovel and started
History cont. on A4