4th of July on the Island A6
Farah's Fishing A7
Free
High School Football A8
Turtles A9
Island Rule # 417: No Whining on the Yacht!
Live Music A18
FREE
The Island Moon
Issue 534
July 10, 2014
The voice of The Island since 1996
Weekly
Around The Island By Dale Rankin editor@islandmoon.com
The Island 4th of July Fireworks show blasted skyward to the cheer of the Island crowd last Friday and ended with a little fiery bonus when the grass on the spoil island along the Intracoastal caught fire and outlasted the fireworks show by about twenty minutes. The second annual Island Blast! was the main attraction for a plethora of Island deck parties and an armada of Island boats which huddled around the Padre Island Yacht Club. Fundraising is well underway for next year’s show which likely will be moved from its current location at the west end of Whitecap next to the Padre Island Yacht Club. No firm decision has been made for next year but organizer Jerry Watkins is looking to expand the event as it moves into its third year. So a big Island thank you to everyone who contributed to make the Island Blast! possible and we look forward to next year. We got through this year’s holiday weekend without the traffic jams and traffic accidents that have marked the last few years. The beaches from the seawall south were packed to overflowing on Friday with vehicles in Kleberg County stacked three deep and just far enough apart to get the doors open. Saturday was a little slower with some stretches of beach bereft of heavy traffic and then of course Sunday is the Great Exodus back OTB. Ferry lines in Port A stretched to two hours at some points and outbound cars stacked onto city streets. This problem, however, may be rectified in the next few days as a plan to add ferry lines on the south side of the ferry landings is expected to be in place soon greatly increasing the capacity of waiting vehicles without backing them into area traffic.
Seawall Driving Readers interested in the move to remove cars from all or part of the beach in front of the Michael J. Ellis Seawall should mark two dates on their calendars.
Photo by Richard Clark
Schlitterbahn Work Continues
Work continues at the Schlitterbahn water park with members admitted into the park at no charge and their guests for $5. Prospective members can enter the park for free, but need to buy a $10 one-day pass to use
Schlitterbahn continued on A5
GLO Land Deal Moves Closer to Reality
Gladys is hitting the roadsort of Since 2001 there has been one constant at the Padre Island Business Association in the person of Islander Gladys Choyke. Gladys has done pretty much everything there is to do at PIBA from serving on the Board of Directors to Executive Director and most recently working in sales for the PIBA magazine. Prior to that she and her late husband Jerry founded Isle Mail & More and her help was crucial in keeping the Island Moon alive after founder Mike Ellis had a stroke in 2007. Along the way she has also been very active in the Island Presbyterian Church and the Island Kiwanis Club, the La Posada Lighted Boat Parade, the 4th of July Watercraft Parade, and all kinds of fundraisers for Island charities. She and Jerry were also on the Island Advisory Committee which formulated the Island Overlay District ten years ago. For the past twenty years if there was anything going on Around The Island chances are Gladys was involved.
Around continued on A5
The Bowl located on GLO land in Kleberg County By Dale Rankin Turning 3680 acres of Island land owned by the Texas General Land Office into a county-maintained recreational area took a big step toward reality Wednesday when the Nueces County Commissioners Court approved a resolution that could place the land in the hands of Nueces County by the end of July. The land includes about 20% - about six miles - of the entire beach between Port Aransas and the Padre Island National Seashore (PINS). A plan for the Texas Nature Conservancy to purchase the land and turn it over to the PINS to become part of the park was sidetracked late last year when the former Superintendent of the PINS told the Island Moon that once the park took possession of the land the park’s plan was to restrict driving along the beach and force cars entering the park to use Park Road 22 and pay a fee; the beach is now free to the public. Newly appointed Park Superintendent Mark Spier told the commissioners on Wednesday that he has no plans to restrict beach traffic or charge to enter the beach if the park were to take possession of the land but the commissioners voted 3-2 along party lines to keep the land under local control, with Republicans Judge Lloyd Neal, Precinct 4 County
GLO continued on A5
New Funding Supports Research on Red Snapper Growth around Abandoned Oil Rigs in Gulf of Mexico
the pools. If they decide to join the country club, which costs $125 monthly, the $10 pass is deducted from their membership.
First is the Watershore and Beach Advisory Committee which will take up the issue at its meeting at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, July 10, at City Hall. The Island Strategic Action Committee (ISAC) has already approved a motion asking the Corpus Christi City Council to act on the matter and the Watershore committee is the last stop before a council vote. The second date is Tuesday, July 15, which is the next ISAC meeting, at 5:30 at Comfort Suites on Windward on The Island. Seawall driving is also on their agenda. District 4 City Council member Colleen McIntyre, who announced for reelection this week, is pushing a two-phase plan to remove cars from portions of the seawall beach which are less than 150 feet wide. She said she hopes to have Phase I of the plan in place by Labor Day.
Rigs to Reefs
A Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi program has been selected to receive new funding to support research on artificial reefs that shows how decommissioned oil rigs can help fish communities grow in the Gulf of Mexico. “We have found data showing a high abundance of red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico, living around these structures for years at a time,” said Dr. Greg Stunz, Director of the Center for Sportfish Science and Conservation. “Red snapper is the most economically important fish in the Gulf of Mexico, and these structures are key to supporting those populations.”
Researchers at the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies (HRI) at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi have collected data showing that decommissioned oil and gas structures converted to artificial reefs support a high abundance and diverse fish assemblages within the Gulf of Mexico. HRI researchers have identified 51 fish species from 20 families at 14 surveyed sites near Port O’Connor, Port Aransas, and Port Mansfield, Texas.). “The thriving fish populations are evidence of how converted platforms in these areas are sustaining vital
Rigs continued on A5
Get out your metal detector and go to huntin ‘
Where Be the Treasure, Matey?
All sorts of pirate swag is supposedly hidden in the Coastal Bend area The Island is littered with treasures lost and buried. Moon Mike left us with a treasure of a different sort in his collection of Island history books. One of them is a 1972 book, "A Guide to Treasures in Texas," by author Thomas Penfield who unearthed hundreds of buried-treasure stories, legends dealing with sunken treasures, stolen payrolls and life savings buried by their owners. Some of the might even be true. As Jimmy Stewart said in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. Among the treasures supposedly hidden in the Coastal Bend are: • Payroll for Spanish soldiers buried on St. Joseph Island's southern end. • Gold and ornaments for a Vera Cruz cathedral buried on St. Joseph's Island opposite Rockport. • A treasure chest buried on the
west bank of the Nueces River where the old Laredo-to-Goliad road once crossed.
emperor of Mexico, dumped in Laguna Madre just off Flour Bluff Peninsula.
• Treasure belonging to a member of the Russian nobility hidden on the western side of Mustang Island. Treasure buried in sand dunes on Mustang and Padre Islands.
• A Laffite fortune buried under a millstone on the northern tip of Padre Island. Gold, silver and jewels hidden by Hernando Cortez, later unearthed and reburied by Jesse James, near Three Rivers.
• A chest of gold and other valuables buried along the Nueces River on the Riverside Ranch. • Money, jewels and gold plates belonging to Maximilian, former
• Gold buried in Kleberg County from a Spanish ship stranded 20 miles south of Padre Island's northern tip.