Inside the Moon
Island Gardening A5
On the Rocks A7
Sports A8
The
Issue 595
Island Moon
The voice of The Island since 1996
September 10, 2015
Around The Island By Dale Rankin editor@islandmoon.com We can now collectively exhale fellow Islanders, Tourist Season 2015 is behind us and the 2015 Local’s Season has begun. We made it. We have now hit the sweet spot on the Island calendar and from now until the La Posada Lighted Boat Parade in December locals rule! Tourist Season 2015 went out with a bang and not a whimper on Monday as the drive down the Island Road from Port Aransas to SPID took a solid hour and the wait to cross the Port Aransas ferries was four hours. For visitors from San Antonio that turned a trip home from Port Aransas from a two-and-a-half hour drive into a three-hour drive, but for the drive home to Austin from a fourhour drive into a six-hour drive. As local business owners will tell you, visitors to The Island will not get out of a traffic line to patronize a local business; they are trying to get home and won’t make a stop until traffic clears. We certainly can’t build the church to hold the Easter crowd, but the Sunday School is starting to get crowded every Sunday.
Coyote season We are also entering what was the favorite time of the year for the Karankawa Indians in the Coastal Bend; the Cunas Season – that is the time when the pears on the Prickly Pear Cactus begin turning a deep, ripe red. According to Cabeza de Vaca who passed through the area in the early 1500s it was the only time of the year when the Karankawas had enough to eat as they feasted on the sweet red cunas. Now the coyotes are about the only Island denizens who savor the ripened cunas. If the dog droppings in your neighborhood have a slight reddish hue to them this season, they didn’t come from Fido and you need to keep your small animals indoors.
Sand and jetties Sand continues to pile up on the seawall. The sand that has been dredged from Packery Channel over the years that was supposed to be used to make the beach wider has instead served to make the beach taller. There is enough sand piled up along the seawall, more than four feet, to make the beach much wider if only it were pushed seaward instead of being piled up against the seawall.
Moscow Metro Dogs A13
Live Music A16
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Photo by Dale Rankin
Lessons from Tourist Season 2015 Traffic, beach restrooms, and people don’t like bollards
Paddle for Parkinsons
Photo by Scott Ellwood
By Dale Rankin As the last of the lobster tans is salved and the last set of red taillights disappear OTB we can now take stock of Tourist Season 2015 and see what lessons there are to be learned. The most common and obvious change this summer season has been the continuous volume of high traffic. In previous years we had huge peaks on the weekends with lighter traffic during the week; for the past two summers the midweek volume, while lighter than the weekend, is still more than the roads can comfortably bear. While it is true that you can’t build the church large enough for Easter Sunday, the size of the weekly Island congregation has outgrown the existing facilities. • The Island Road, State Highway 361 from Packery Channel to Port Aransas, is one dangerous piece of highway. The death of Corpus Christi Police Chief Floyd Simpson only served to reinforce what we already knew; something has to be done and quickly about this road. It is already effecting the lifeblood of The Island economy, tourism, especially in Port Aransas as each year more and more people simply refuse to drive this 17-mile stretch after dark on the weekends. On a drive from Port Aransas back to Padre Island on a Saturday night it is more likely that you will see a wreck or flashing police lights than not.
During the day the traffic is bumper to bumper, often at 70 mph in spite of the speed limit, going north, and in the evening the same in the southbound lane. By mid-afternoon from Friday to Sunday the northbound traffic is backed up on SPID toward the JFK Bridge and each Sunday from midmorning to 2 p.m. the southbound lane of SH 361 is backed up to the Port Aransas City Limits. The road is simply not wide enough to accommodate the traffic load. While it is true that you don’t build the church to accommodate the Easter Sunday crowd, it is also true that the longer nothing is done to correct the problem the more the trepidatious reputation of this road will grow.
Nail Guns Provide Island Soundtrack
New Island Houses Going Up Fast
• SPID from Commodores to the JFK Causeway is equally dangerous. Anyone who has tried to turn across
Summer continued on A13
Schlittertower!
SMA Science Student Advances to Broadcom Masters Final
By Dale Rankin
Nicolai Ortiz Makes Top 30 Nationally
And speaking of Packery Channel, a check of the channel sides of both of the Packery Jetties will find these rocks have been piled on top of the
The ninth annual Padle for Parkinsons was a success. More photos inside
The tower at the Schlitterbahn waterpark is nearing completion well ahead of the September 30 deadline.
It is difficult to find an Island street these days that doesn’t have at least one new house going up with more than one hundred added so far this year.
of the subdivisions on The Island allows for houses with a minimum of 1000 square-feet to be built, most have a minimum requirement of 2000 square feet.”
According to a count by MayBeth Christensen at the Padre Island Homeowner’s Association, there were 879 vacant dry lots on The Island in December, 2014, and now there are 778, and in the same time the number of vacant waterfront lots has dropped from 168 to 154. So since last December alone there have been 112 new houses built; 98 on dry lots and 14 on waterfront lots.
Building requirements on The Island are a bit more stringent than those required by the city. The stricter requirements primarily pertain to Windstorm related items such as hurricane straps, thicker lining on the walls of garages which face the water, and different shingles, but some also pertain to setback distances and square footage.
“Most of the new houses going up are three bedroom, four bathroom houses in the 2000 square-foot range,” Christensen said. “Only one
There are no current population figures available to correspond with the additional Island houses; the 2010 census placed the population of Padre Island at 9200.
A little Island history Nicolai Ortiz - currently a SMA 7th grade student photo by Renee Gage By Brent Rourk Writer’s note: this is the 4th article in a series that began last year when I first covered the Broadcom Science Fair at Seashore Middle Academy. Four Seashore students were selected to join almost 6000 others in the Texas Broadcom Fair. From there two students, Natalia and Nicolai Ortiz were selected to be a part of the Broadcom Semifinal group of 300 projects from around the nation. Last week Nicolai’s project was selected as one of the top 30 projects nationally.
original riprap where the original jetty structure has caved in. The placed rocks now make up about
News spread quickly last Wednesday afternoon at Seashore Middle Academy about one of its students who entered the Broadcom Masters Middle School Science and Engineering Fair. It was great news!
Around continued on A3
Student continued on A5
The Town that Time Forgot
Editor’s note: This is the first of a two-part series on the history of the port town of Indianola. It is based on the book Indianola: the Mother of Western Texas by Brownson Malsch. By Dale Rankin The port town of Indianola was born and died through suffering. The town was situated near sea level on Matagorda Bay near Port Lavaca from 1844-1886. During that time Indianola grew from a camp of immigrants running from suffering in Europe into a cosmopolitan port city. Before the first of two storms hit the city in 1875 Indianola was regarded as second only to Galveston in commercial and maritime supremacy and was a threat to the older port because of Indianola’s location nearer to the heart of
Texas, and points west, which were then being settled my immigrant Europeans. Indianola was the port for trade with Chihuahua and the eastern terminus for the shortest overland route to California. The town that became known as the Mother of Western Texas was founded after the earlier settlement of Matagorda, situated on the left bank of the Colorado River and which had the first newspaper in the state, failed due to raids by Comanche Indians and the development of a silt bar deposited by the river along the narrow eastern arm of the bay which prevented the approach to Matagorda by ships entering the bay through Pass Cavallo. Cargo had to be shifted to lighter vessels and ferried the final four miles of the route, which was expensive and tiresome.
Politics intervenes Then in 1839 things changed for the mid-coast region of Texas when a decision was
History continued on A15