After grocery shopping this morning and some gabbing with the nice lady in charge of the campground, I wandered out to find adventure. Yep I found it as you will see later. In a big way. This afternoon caused some reflection after I returned. When this blog was started I was very afraid I would not be able to have anything to put into it each day. The reality is most evenings it takes 2 to 3 hours to cut the days activities down to a reasonable length for reading by my readers. My preference is to have my reports be no more than five minutes of reading. Long drawn out blogs turn me off. The only problem with that is there are days like today where I took bunches of pictures and after culling them down there are still way to many. On top of that today had so many parts of fun that it would take scads of pages to cover it all.
Ok. Here we go on part of today’s adventures. The Texas City Dike is a five mile long “jetty” sticking into Galveston Bay. On the west side very close to it is the Texas City ship channel. On the East side a mile or more away is the Houston ship channel. The Dike was built with a two lane road out to the tip and recreation places spaced at proper intervals. The fish catching here varies from good to excellent most days and at the end where the two ship channels come together the water can be very turbulent and is around 50 feet deep right adjacent to the rocks. The ships come by in fairly close to the tip when exiting the Texas City Channel as you can see from this picture.
The industrial plants in the back ground are a small part of the huge petro- chem system in the area. Notice the folks fishing. This is a light day for fishermen. As you turn back to the south, you will be looking straight out the ship channel into the Gulf of Mexico. The ships you see in this next pic are at anchor in an area just off the ship channel called Bolivar Roads that is a holding spot until the port has a spot open for them to come in and load/unload. If you look close to the left you will see the Bolivar Ferry going into the landing. It is a free ferry and I have had many a ride on it. On weekends there can be 2 to 3 hour lines to ride the ferry. Ferry rides are a whole story unto itself.
As I finished taking the previous picture, it became obvious that the wake off the last ship was going to make some spectacular breaking wave pictures as it hits the rocks of the Dike. So I got into position and got this very nice picture you see here.
As I was trying to get a quick second shot I suddenly realized that all I could see in the viewfinder was WAVE. The same wave in the picture went up I guess 4 feet above my head and came crashing down all over and around me knocking me stumbling off the rocks. I was able to keep my camera from a total soaking but it did need quick wipe down with a towel from the truck. I certainly had nothing dry on my body anymore. The really bad part is that I have fished at this spot for years and used to know better. You can be certain I relearned real quick. The top of the rocks are about 5 feet above the water and if you are down near the water when a freighter wake hits you WILL go swimming with the sharks in the channel.
On the way back to the mainland, I stopped at the pier where I used to buy shrimp often. The hurricanes have not been kind to it. The building is all gone and this lonesome bay shrimp boat is all that I found. It is a very typical small shrimper for working the bays. Those guys really earn their keep. I used to shrimp from an outboard boat and figure I earned about 4 cents an hour doing it. Like many things in life, I am glad I did it (but some things I wish I had done only once). The weather was a little chilly at 62 deg F but a lot better than the misery the folks up north are having. At least I can get out and have tooooo much fun down here. TheOFM
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