First thing some deep thoughts, at least knee deep for me. My old buddy Mac up in Fredericksburg, TX straightened me out on what life is like. My complaint is that since quitting work, there was way more things to experience than I have life left to do. Mac explained it this way. You are standing knee deep in a stream called life. It is flowing past at a rapid pace and has sticks and leaves and other interesting things floating downstream in it. The best you can hope to do is grab a stick or leaf once in a while to look at and enjoy. There is no way to grab everything that comes flowing past. So relax and enjoy the sticks and leaves you do get to grab. The rest is for somebody else to enjoy.
WOW.
Today was spent for the most part looking for a place to get the kayak into the water and checking out fishing spots. The saltwater marsh where I thought that the kayak could be launched is nearly impossible due to extremely thin water for a long ways out. Carrying the kayak through the mud for hundreds of yards is not going to happen in my lifetime. In this picture, most of the water is only a very few inches deep like 4 or 5.
A little more back toward Corpus is a dredged channel named Packery Channel. It is where a few square miles of the marsh tidal flow enters and exits from the Gulf. In this picture the Gulf is at the end of the dirt you see. The channel dumps right out into the Gulf with the Yucatan as the next stop.
From where the picture was taken, if you look behind where I was standing, the channel goes under a highway bridge and fans out into a large salt marsh. There is a TPW boat ramp near the highway that seems good for launching my boat. Even with the twenty plus mph wind of today the channel was calm enough to play in.
On request by a reader of what does the rest of the campsites look like, here is a picture looking north from the front of my trailer.
It is not what I would call cramped, but is far from excess room between the rv slots. The rangers tell me that starting Memorial Day through Labor Day all the sites will be full seven days a week. Now that would be starting to feel cramped.
The author of this blog tries very hard to keep negative things out of the writing, however tonight I will talk of another stupidity like yesterdays kayaker. There was a fellow skin diving with a spear gun in the rip current next to the park jetty yesterday.
The waves were coming in with considerable force and the rip current was going out with a vengeance.
Later on as I was coming back from exploring the second jetty, I saw the diver getting ready to leave at his car without apparent damage to his body. At least he did not become another water fatality statistic. Maybe I am just a cowardly LIVE fool, but the risk/reward ratio for that kind of activity is way to far on the risk side for me. Not all the fishing was being done that foolishly. This bird was carefully working the swirls of water among the rocks and catching a huge number of small fish.
While I watched for a few minutes, the bird must have nailed a dozen tasty morsels for his supper. The bird was good. He seldom missed.
In the middle of the day today, the Port Aransas jetty received a visit while I searched for fish catching spots. The fogginess in these pictures is from the salt spray haze that is a constant at this coast. This first picture is from near the base of the jetty looking seaward at normal lens. This is what you would see with your eyes naturally.
The walk out to the end is about one half mile in my guess. Along the way I was reminded that the slime on the rocks will put a new crack in your butt if you are not careful. In spite of my excessive care, the slime nearly got me more than five times. Some of the fisher folks had very elaborate backpacks to carry all the stuff out for a day of fishing. One nice fellow said he had caught one mackerel and wanted one more before he left. This picture was from the sea ward end of the jetty toward the beach and shot through the equivalent of a four power pair of binoculars. The walk back in gave me more opportunities to rearrange my anatomy.
At this distance out form the shore, the raw power of the ocean swells can be felt as they crash into the rocks. It can be a bit unerving to stand on a chunk of granite six feet cube weighing a few tons and feel it quiver under the impact of a wave.
This evening the wind is blowing very hard and entraining sand. So when I took my evening walk, I came back to the trailer well sandblasted. Tomorrow promises to be a great day to try to have tooooo much fun. TheOFM.
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