Inside the Moon
Island Trash Report A5
Deep Sea Roundup A6
Gathering of the Nations A7
Sports A8
Photo by Bill Johnson
The
Issue 587
Island Moon
The voice of The Island since 1996
July 16, 2015
Around The Island By Dale Rankin editor@islandmoon.com
Angler killed in offshore accident
As you wander around our little sandbar this week you have probably noticed the arrival of large numbers of high school aged kids arriving in school buses. They are FFA members from across the state as a substantial number of the 109,000 members of the 1,032 chapters in Texas are in town for their convention. On the FFA Bucket List is a selfie on the beach and a trip home with a lobster tan. These are good kids who come down for a little fun and we welcome them to our Island. On Wednesday morning as we were preparing to go to press the phones started ringing to report the presence of a small army of Corpus Christi’s finest who set up at the bottom of the JFK Causeway to help Island commuters remember the speed limit on their way OTB. The officers on the Island side of the bridge identified the sinners and their peers on the Laguna side wrote the tickets. We’re not sure if/when they will be back so slow down everybody.
Just passing through
Dangerous passage We are now well into the Summer Tourist Season and as the rain has left us the tourists have arrived en masse. The Landing Strip between Port A and Padre is pretty well jammed from Friday through Sunday noon and it is a treacherous piece of business folks as drivers entering the road and turning across traffic often take dangerous chances because, well, that’s about the only kind of chances there are to get on that road. Plans call for passing lanes to be in place by this time next year which will help but in the meantime be very careful when you drive that road, all it takes is one bad decision by one driver for things to turn deadly. We will close on that happy note. Get your OTB business done on Thursday everybody and we’ll see you at the Ski Basin. Say hello if you see us Around The Island.
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Surfers take notice!
Endless Summer Creator and Texas Surf Museum Celebrate Anniversaries with Celebration July 24
That November Brown and two friends, Mike Hynson, and Robert August from South California caught a flight to West Africa with camera gear, surfboards, and round the world tickets in hand. David Sotello, 31, died on Saturday, July 11th while enjoying his favorite childhood hobby of deep sea fishing. Sotello fell overboard from the charter fishing boat Wrecklamation about 15 miles offshore of Port Aransas and suffered deep cuts to his legs and side. The boat captain and three of his friends rescued him from the water and he was airlifted by a Coast Guard helicopter to a Corpus Christi hospital where he died a few hours later. The Coast Guard is still investigating the accident.
Their adventure eventually led them to Cape St. Francis on the shores of the Indian Ocean where they found what they were looking for; a righthand pointbreak peeling endlessly down the beach with rolls so long Brown couldn’t film one with a single 100-foot roll of film which lasted nearly three minutes. The perfect wave.
Deep Sea Roundup Page A7
Robert August, Mike Hynson, and Bruce Brown, on location. The result was the classic surf film The Endless Summer made for $50,000 and released in 1966. On Friday, July 24, Brown, Hynson, and August, among others, will be in Corpus Christi as the Texas Surf Museum celebrates its tenth anniversary and the 50th anniversary of the film’s release with a Luau dinner and live music at the American Bank Center. The Texas Surf Museum, located at 312 Chaparral Street downtown next to the Executive Surf Club, is the only surf museum on the Gulf Coast and
Bon voyage amigos. Have a good sail. We have been getting a lot of questions hereabout concerning the Aransas Queen gambling boat up Aransas Pass way. We haven’t been out yet but we do have some friends who work on the boat and several readers who have been out. The word is to pick a calm day if you are going out as the boat isn’t that big and doesn’t do too well in heavy seas.
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In the summer of 1963 California surfer Bruce Brown had a dream. He wanted to travel the world in search of the perfect wave and share the experience though a film.
And speaking of Bucket Lists we were hanging out on Tuesday along the Laguna Madre watching the sunset when these two fellows sailed up. They are father and son Juan and Avelino Martinez from Veracruz whose Bucket List included a sailing trip from Galveston to Veracruz. They flew to Houston and spent two weeks in Kemah looking for a sailboat. It took two weeks because Kemah is one of the largest marinas in the country and there are said to be more than 10,000 sailboats there and as most anyone who has a sailboat knows pretty much every sailboat out there is for sale. They ended up settling for the first one they looked at and though neither knew anything about sailing they set off on their adventure. It was their fourth day out when we ran across them and they spent the night here on The Island before heading south.
Gambling Boat
Live Music A18
Special Meeting Called for Island Development Plan By Dale Rankin The Island Strategic Action Committee (ISAC) will hold a special meeting at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, July 22, to develop an area development plan for The Island as part of the Plan CC 2035. The meeting is open to the public and will be held at the Veranda Restaurant at. The ISAC is an advisory committee to the Corpus Christi City Council and its Chairman, Greg Smith issued a statement to members on Wednesday. “The workshop item will be a discussion of the draft 2035 Comprehensive plan as it pertains to Padre and Mustang Island.” The second draft of the 2035 plan is currently available for review on the city’s website and will provide the framework for five more localized plans for areas around the city. At the last meeting of the ISAC city staff
ISAC continued on A3
was founded in 2005 by Surf Club owner Brad Lomax and longtime South Texas surfer Pat McGee. It became a non-profit corporation last October and the July 24 event is its first major fundraiser. The museum currently has on exhibit the film gear used to shoot Endless Summer on loan from the Surfing Heritage and Culture Center in San Clemente, California. Endless Summer has become one of the highest-grossing documentaries of all time and has spawned two sequels, The Endless Summer II (1994) and The Endless Summer Revisited (2000) and it is the only surf movie
The original camera equipment used in the film is on display at the Texas Surf Museum ever to become what Hollywood refers to as a franchise. Tickets for the event are $125 and available by calling 8822364. They are limited to 400 and as of this writing over 300 have already been sold.
A little Island history
Dredging of the Laguna Madre
Editor’s note: Bobbie Kimbrell moved to Flour Bluff, where he still lives, in 1943 and was a commercial fisherman until his retirement in the 1990s. By Bobbie Kimbrell The dredging of the Intracoastal Canal in the Laguna Madre started in 1946, give a take six months. Before that time about the only dredging of channels in the Lagoon was the Humble channels that were dug in the Upper Lagoon for oil well locations. The farthest channel south ended at about where Glen Oak Drive ends at Laguna Shores Drive. The rest of the channels were short and in the vicinity of where the JFK Causeway and the Humble Bridge are today across the Laguna Madre into Dead Man’s Hole. It was a narrow channel and although filled in now it is still usable to get into Dead Man’s Hole if you keep your outboard boat on a plane at high speed. Even the part that runs from the Intracoastal Canal toward the Hum ble Bridge is still visible by air. In the early 1930s the Pure Oil Company dug a channel from
the King Ranch Shoreline to about the middle of the Laguna Madre and then dug another channel about onehalf mile north.
commercial fishermen used the barge in their fishing operations.
A large house barge was anchored in the channel for the housing and eating and living quarters for the roughnecks who drilled the oil wells. Hurricanes through the years damaged the house barge and eventually a hurricane did away with it. Throughout the years after the Pure Oil Company quit using the house barge different groups of
The Pure Oil Channel is about four or five miles south of Pita Island. In 1944 the Naval Air Stations started dredging of the Crash Channel that started at the NAS and ended about where the JFK Causeway meets the shoreline of Padre Island. They also dredged the Sea Plane water runways out from the
Pure Oil Channel
Guns continued on A6