Inside the Moon
Father's Day at the Yacht Club A4
The Island in 1969 A2
Beach Wedding Season A7
The
Issue 636
Island Moon
The voice of The Island since 1996
June 23, 2016
Around The Island
Live Music A18
Fishing A11
Photo by Brent Rourk
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Dead Crabs Washing up on PINS
By Dale Rankin editor@islandmoon.com Corpus Christi and The Island got some national attention this week when the Travel Channel aired a story about the building of the Schlitterbahn Waterpark as part of its Extreme Waterparks series under the title “Jeff Henry: Madness Continues.”
Fourth annual Island Blast is on! Island skies will light up again this year as the fourth annual Island Blast 4th of July fireworks show will take flight at the west end of Whitecap on Monday, July 4th.
Crews from Travel Channel followed Henry around off and on for almost a year leading up the opening of the park for the 2015 season. At that point, according to information in the show, the park was $30 million over budget and 18 months behind schedule and had busted three Grand Opening dates. Since its beginning 653,000 square-feet were added and the show chronicled Henry’s quest for additional funding. Along the way he salvaged the tower from the USS Duluth cruiser that was used to evacuate people from Vietnam and a giant tank mover which holds as many as eighteen tanks that will, according to plans in the show, be integrated into a ride called the Falling Skies ride at a park elsewhere. Overall the show presented a happy ending but not before creating some drama due to lack of funding for the project, redesign, and expansion of the park along the way with a sound
The event is the brainchild of Islanders Sharon and Jerry Watkins who hit on the idea of an Island fireworks show after attending a similar show in the Rio Grande Valley. The $16,000 show is funded entirely through donations. The show goes up just after sunset. Watkins said he is hoping to add a new feature to this year’s show; a pair of floodlights located near the launch site to show spectators where the fireworks show will be.
Photo by Shelli Shanti For the past week beaches in the Padre Island National Seashore have been inundated with dead Ghost Crabs. “It is nothing chemical or anything like that,” said PINS spokesman Patrick Gamnan. “It’s pretty much just the cycle of life. These are small crabs and currents and storms have just killed them.” He said the Ghost Crabs are but the latest mutation of crabs to wash up on local beaches. “We’ve had Blue Crabs and Calico Crabs and now it’s Ghost Crabs,” he said. “In some cases the currents are so strong that only pieces of crabs wash up. Every species and creature has its cycle when they are numerous and if
bite from Jeff, “This is a disaster on so many fronts it isn’t even funny.” Ultimately the show ended on an upbeat note leaving the impression that the park was finished and met its opening date in 2015. That makes for a happy ending to a show but the reality is somewhat different. It is no secret that there are still some problems with the park. The latest news has been the surfacing of an inspection report issued in March on the still unfinished Shoot the Chute ride which currently stands unfinished on the south end of the park. Citing lack of soil testing before construction of the supports and questioning the ride’s design the inspector refused to approve a permit for the ride and used language that sounds like the structure may be untenable. The top two floors of the building at the site are still not open to the public three years after construction began and park attendance has yet to meet projected expectations. Estimates are that it will take a minimum of $5 million to finish out the park; and then there is the issue of lost revenue due to the park not being finished by the 2015 season. The contract between the three original partners is private so the exact contractual language is not public, but it is known to contain a liquidated damages clause which holds the builder – Henry Brothers Construction – at least partially responsible for money left on the table due to construction delays. The Henry family, which owns the brand, originally owned one third of the park but bought an additional one-third interest when an original partner dropped out. Again, the exact language of the contract is private but it requires a vote of all three partners for certain major decisions with the Henry family holding two of the votes and Paul Schexnailder the third. The contract also contains a Binding Arbitration clause for settlement of managerial disputes and that process has already begun but could take as long as a year to reach resolution.
Around continued on A3
Fire in the Sky on the 4th of July
those high populations are at a time when sea conditions are harsh then they are killed. It’s just nature. They get battered around in a storm and they die.” A similar phenomenon has been happing on beaches in California. Ed Buskey, a scientist at the University of Texas Marine Science Institute in Port Aransas, said this week the big rains Texas recently experienced have caused freshwater inflows, which in turn created areas of low oxygen in the Gulf of Mexico, affecting bottom-dwelling creatures such as crabs and starfish. By mid-week the number of crabs washing ashore up and down The Island had slowed.
“We’re still working to see if we can get the lights, he said. “If we can get them a couple of days early we may even put them up early to remind people that the show is coming up.” Watkins has also requested that the spoil island adjacent to the field where the show is staged, adjacent to the Whitecap Wastewater Treatment plant, be burned by fire department officials on Thursday, June 30. Two years ago that spoil island was set on fire by falling fireworks and was allowed to burn itself out. Last year an attempt at a controlled burn there failed due to wet conditions.
Fireworks Continued on A4
On the Rocks
Island on the move!
Two Large Projects Underway on The Island
Shark Fishing at Bob Hall Pier
Tagging a shark By Jay Gardner I don’t even know where to begin this week. This is a topic I have written about in the past, and yet, here we are again. There is a relatively new group that has taken over the end of Bob “Haul” Pier in their personal bid for glory regarding catching and killing large sharks. Unfortunately, this is just yet another group of uninformed
Lake Padre Excavation work is underway at two sites on Padre Island as the Nueces County Coastal Parks Board and developer Paul Schexnailder push forward with two separate projects.
A little Island history
At Balli Park, near Bob Hall Pier, the Parks Department is adding 52 sites for recreational vehicles and 20 new sites for tents and pop-up trailers. The work is Phase I of a $9 million threephase plan. Phase I will double the size of the existing park at a cost of $3 million.
Editor’s note: This is the latest in a series of stories based on the memoirs of Islander Louis Rawalt who moved to The Island with his wife Viola in 1926 after being given six months to live by doctors. He lived here for more than 50 years.
“We currently fund 63% of our operations from money that we generate through fees,” said Coastal Parks Director Scott Cross. “Our goal is to get that number up to at least 85% and we believe we can do that when we finish with this plan.”
In the last issue he and his friend Shorty had made their way to their cabins 40 miles down the beach in the face of the oncoming hurricane of 1933 to get belongings before the storm hit. They didn’t make it back in time.
Scott said he is currently pursuing money through the state from the settlement in the British Petroleum oil spill.
By Louis Rawalt,
“We believe we are in a good position to get some of the settlement money,” he said. “Because our project is fully designed and permitted. We are
Projects continued on A5
folks who are the latest rendition of the “Tragedy of the Commons”. And it’s the sharks that pay the ultimate price, as this group is very vocal in their right to kill every shark landed. No doubt, “back in the day” things were different. People thought that
Sharks Continued on A11
1933 Hurricane Cut 35 Channels Through The Island
Fortune was kind to us that night. By following our recently made tracks back up the center of the island, we laboriously made our way to the north end of Padre. There we found the waters of the Laguna Madre lapping over the plank
The Nicaragua troughs of the causeway. Could we make it? The choice had to be made quickly. We would try. So I nosed the Model-A onto the planks, and we inched our way over the water. Wind tore at us, and rain poured down in torrents.
In was daylight by then. A liquid, gray daylight in which everything blended and wavered like the scenes in an underwater film. At the ship channel we found that the swing bridge had been torn
History continued on A6