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Different Beach

Wonderful day. Watching huge, grey storm clouds roll over the Houston Metroplex all day while we basked in the sun along the shore, Jake and I had a blast rolling up the Texas coast. I did prove myself wrong, though: Freeport is about an hour further from Katy than Galveston is. But the kid enjoyed pointing out every damn (oops), I mean every cow between Katy and the coast. No fish, but also no sunburn, poisonous bites, or major avoidable injury. Only casualty was my 2 year old cell phone that I wanted to replace anyway. Just a bit of advice – saltwater ain’t good for electronics.

The Texas Gulf Coast is one of those things about Texas that you can’t really get your head around until you actually go there. It’s no crap like 350 miles or so of decently sandy beaches. No rocky ledges, not so many marshes directly on the Gulf, nothing but uninterrupted beach as far as you can see. There are some areas, such as the south end of Matagorda Bay where there isn’t a light for miles and miles. (If I get my kayak fixed, I’m probably headed down this way for a long weekend in the fall.)

One of my favorite things about Texas is its Open Beaches Law, which basically says that if it’s tidal, it’s open to the public. Makes it easy to find places to kayak camp. I’m also in favor of the law currently suspended law stating that if erosion puts your house on the beach, well, you’re moving, and you’re not entitled to compensation. In most cases, I’m all in favor of compensating for government takings; but in this case, building on a beach 2-3 feet above sea level on shifting sand in an area prone to hurricanes – well, the stupid deserve to be punished.

I’ve got my gripes about the Open Beaches Law too. Large stretches of the shore are filthy. In a way, it’s the tragedy of the commons. Folks just leave their trash below the high tide line, knowing that it’ll be washed away and become someone else’s problem. So there’s always trash on the beach. Some of it is due to the petroleum work offshore, but from personal experience I know that the Coast Guard has gotten extremely anal about enforcing refuse and discharge laws. Hopefully, much of what’s washing ashore now was disposed of years ago, and the situation will improve with time.

I don’t know if the condition this week was due to trash bins overflowing when the hurricane came ashore between Freeport and Matagorda, but there were lots of beer cans and other detritus (I found a driveshaft if anyone’s having drivetrain problems). Were it just me, I would have been especially depressed.

But with a three year old in tow, it’s still a magical place. Jacob was completely into watching the shark-tooth clams get washed out by a wave, then wiggle themselves back into the sand, only to get washed out by the next wave. Tiny fragments of oyster shell were treasures. And we did pick up trash for 10 minutes or so, making it a game. Hopefully it’ll stick with him like it did when Grandpa Bill played the same game with me.

We then swung by the bait shop and picked up a pint of live shrimp, then went over to the bay side of Follet’s Island. Wading the shallows on the inland side of the Texas bays is a wonderful experience in any season. Despite not spending nearly as much time down on the coast as I wish I could, I’ve seen more ducks, gulls, pelicans, plovers, stilt-legged birds and other stuff I can’t identify than anywhere else. Despite my best efforts, I’ve caught a couple trout and a couple redfish, paddled my kayak with dolphins –

(Sidenote on paddling with dolphins – On the one overnight trip I’ve made to Espiritu Santo Bay, I was coming through a cut not too far off the main channel out of both Port O’Connor and the rest of Matagorda Bay, and saw a couple of dolphins surface and exhale. Thinking that was pretty cool, I paddled over to see if I could get a closer look. The dolphins were coming my general direction, and I started to get more excited, thinking about all the cheesy good-feelings you associate with dolphins. When they were about 100 meters out, I finally realized ‘Holy crap, these things are HUGE.’ Suddenly, my 17’ plywood and fiberglass kayak seemed tiny compared to a couple hundred pounds of grey bottlenose. And I started having flashbacks to Treehouse of Horror XI where the dolphins took revenge on humans. By this time, though, there wasn’t anything I could do. About 3 dolphins swam right up to the boat, and we cruised along together for a couple hundred meters, the dolphins rolling and breathing next to me, always staying 10 meters or so away. The coolest thing was seeing them bring their heads out of the water to take a ‘high look’, and having the chance to look them in their eyes.)

In any case, the way to fish the bays is to wade. I love it since it takes me back to being a kid, spending days wading in farm tanks trying to catch bluegill. You just kind of wander around on the flats, looking for tails, or bait fish boiling on the surface, or wander up to one of the channels and weight your bait to see if there’s any fish holding on the bottom.

I plopped Jake in a cheap plastic boat from Wal-Mart, tied the boat to my belt with the bucket full of shrimp, and we set out. He was trolling with his kid’s rod, and periodically rolling out of the boat and into the water, enjoying the crap out of wearing a life jacket. Didn’t catch crap; only had a couple of decent bites, but I think the kid’s hooked. I think his favorite part was chasing the hermit crabs in the shallow water near where we’d parked. Might have been mine, too…

He doesn’t usually sleep in the car; he was passed out all the way from Galveston to Katy.

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