Surfriders
Photos by Jeff Dolan
Issue 540
Free
The voice of The Island since 1996
The Island Moon
Weekly
August 21, 2014 Around The Island By Dale Rankin
Growth in Region's Largest Industries Creating Bottleneck Increasing Port and Tourist Traffic Causing Major Delays
editor@islandmoon.com
By Dale Rankin
We’ve had Big Doings in our state’s capital this week but here on The Island the only person we would like to see indicted is the person who is in charge of the humidity control. There are many Texasisms which describe this phenomenon, most of which began with “It was hot enough to…” But there is only one Texasism that applies here; it’s too hot for snakes.
It is a busy stretch of water where the two drivers of the Coastal Bend economy come into direct and potentially dangerous contact on an hourly basis.
Friends, when it’s too hot for snakes there isn’t anything higher on the “Texas Hot Meter” than that except standing in the middle of a midsummer South Texas brush fire and we can only hope we don’t have one of those. With the dry conditions hereabouts and the wind predicted for the next week by the Weather Wonks it will be too hot for the snakes to stay in the grass. As of this writing there are a couple of tropical disturbances way out in the Atlantic. They don’t look like they will become real storms but maybe the butterflies will flap their wings just right and send a little falling water our way.
Deep powder brings sand crabs The dry weather has left driving on area beaches these days a test of the nerves. It reminds us of driving along Devil’s Backbone in the Hill Country in an ice storm; you drive from one spot to another and coast along through the deep stuff and hope you don’t hear that dreaded whine of the tires spinning fruitlessly as the car stops. It is a sinking feeling both literally and figuratively. The deep powder sand up and down the beach has kept the Sand Crabs busy unsticking cars. While no records of such things are kept, last weekend the limited driving space on most beaches combined with the onrush of beachgoers out for one last trip to The Coast before the start of the school year may have set a record for stuck cars. Up and down our beaches the wheels barely had time to stop, fruitlessly throwing sand before a Sand Crab would roll up in a Bubba Truck with his tow rope in hand. Twenty bucks seems like a cheap price to pay when you are crankcase deep in blow sand that has no bottom. If you are going to the beach, especially south of Bob Hall Pier be sure to take a full ice chest because you might be there awhile.
A few updates The good folks over at P.I. DOG continue their efforts to bring the Riley P. Dog Park to Padre Island. The land is available, adjacent to the water tower on the south end of The Island; all that’s needed is the money. To see what we are missing take a couple of hours and take your quadruped to the dog park in Port Aransas. Let’s hope we have one on Padre soon. Also, the Labor Day Weekend marks the Paddle for Parkinson’s event which takes place on Saturday, August 31. Mona and the good folks who put this event on have been working hard. We’ll have more in the next issue as the event gets closer. Take heart fellow Islanders, only two more weekends and the tourist invasion will melt away like ice on Devil’s Backbone and we’ll have our Island back. In the meantime, say hello if you see us Around The Island.
Tourism and the Port of Corpus Christi are the growth cornerstones of the area’s economy and as both expand the waterway which is the lifeblood of both is experiencing unprecedented congestion as ships, barges, and ferries transverse the waters of the ship channel between Port Aransas and Harbor Island. At any given time about twenty ships wait offshore to enter the port through the channel. According to Ray Harrison, Harbormaster for the Port of Corpus Christi Authority, average wait for a ship is two days at a cost of about $60,000 per day. Behind St. Joseph Island, in the Lydia Ann Channel another flotilla of barges are beached up, often pushed against the shore by tug boats with running engines, waiting to enter the port.
Port continued on A4
Kleberg County Approves Sale of GLO Land on The Island to Nueces County
Inside the Moon
By Dale Rankin The Kleberg County Commission’s Court has approved the sale of 3680 acres of land adjacent to the Padre Island National Seashore which, according to current plans, will place the land under the control of Nueces County. The Kleberg County administrators last week voted 3-2 in favor of the sale of the land to the Ed Rachal Foundation who will in turn donate it to Nueces County to be used as a natural area. Under terms of the sale no development is allowed on the property. The land borders the National Seashore on its northern boundary and runs from the Gulf beach to the Laguna Madre.; it includes about 6.8 miles of beach which is roughly 20% of the beach between the National Seashore and Port Aransas. The land was purchased in the early 1990s with a federal grant which covered 80% of the purchase price, with the remainder coming from the GLO. Precinct 4 County Commissioner Joe McComb said this week that the exact purchase price is still to be worked out because final negotiations were abated pending the agreement between Kleberg and Nueces counties; however, the Rachal Foundation has said they will meet the cost. The cost will likely be in the neighborhood of the 20% - the GLO’s share - of the original purchase price which was $3.6 million. McComb said all the paperwork for the sale is now in the hands of the GLO. “Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson has said he wants to have this done before he leaves office in January,” McComb said. The deal with Nueces County supersedes a previous deal that would have sold the land to the Texas Nature
GLO continued on A3
Timon’s Ministry – A Fish Story with a Happy Ending By Linda Walsh The timing couldn’t have been better. It was Shark Week when the television-viewing public celebrates all things shark when fishermen Ryan Spring and Terry Samuels pulled a monster shark from the Gulf of Mexico and donated it to Timon’s Ministries for their lunch program. The story was broadcast on television news programs across Texas and shone the spotlight on the good work done at Timon’s on a daily basis.
Shark meat donated to Timon's Ministries
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Timmons continued on A2
Port Expansion A6
GLO Tract 3,680 Acres
Fishing with Farah A7
Sports A8
A little Island history
Island Legend Godrey Roberts Lost His Teeth on a Cast Net
Texas Women Anglers Tournament A11
“I’ll just get my cats and get on the roof and if she rolls over, well, we’ll just be on the bottom” By Jackie Bales “Well are ya gonna just stand over there in them trees just starin’ at me”? It was Ol’ Godfrey Roberts, former Port Aransas Post Master and now a reclusive mystery to me. The year is 1959 and I’m eight years old. Living across the street I was compelled by curiosity to discover just what the old man was doing out there in his back yard. I stepped from the little stand of salt cedar trees to look at his work. “A net-knot is a special kind of knot,” he informed me, “Tie it wrong and it’ll slip”… “You run a row across and then four rows down and then widen it by two on each side. This gives you the taper”… He was building a cast net from scratch with a net needle that he had whittled out of wood. He was building triangles to be laid out to form a circle. He stitched in a
History continued on A5
General Mark Wayne Clark A13
Live Music A18