Hard Aground

Adventure Location: Rockport, Texas

For those who do not know about it, there is a great travel guide for Texas distributed by the TexDOT. WWW.TRAVELTEX.COM to get your own copy of the Texas State Travel Guide handed out by the TexDOT. A lot of tourist bureaus and some rest areas have them also. They are free.

Now for another question for my readers. Casting rods in general have different line guides than spinning rods. It is known to me that using a casting rod for a spinning reel is asking for a loop around the first guide from the reel to interrupt your cast with dramatic results.

When the bait casting reel was purchased, it was tried out on a rod with spinning reel guides on it and seemed to work fine. My wonder is if the rod had bait casting reel guides on it would it work any better????? For the life of me, it does not seem like it should make a difference. There are rods that have the guides spiral 180 degrees around the rod and they cast just fine. See http://www.flanaturecoast.com/billystix/spiral.htm

Does anybody have actual experience in this?? Please leave a comment. An idle mind just naturally has to dream up things to consider.

The Truck and OFM were out meandering around near the City of Aransas Pass and saw something odd in the distance. Naturally as an Adventure Blogger it had to be checked out. It appeared to be one of the recently arrived out of state Gulf shrimp boats listing heavily to port. So the Truck hurried us over to check it out. Now this is a very large boat. My guess is it is approaching 80-100 feet in length. It is known that they can carry huge amounts of shrimp back in to the market.

The wind was from the right and blowing toward the boat driving it onto the shoal along the channel. The boat was hard aground when the Team made it to right across the channel from the boat. This turned into an interesting hour of observation.
The crew was very active during this next hour. The boat reversed and moved slightly to the stern. Then the engines were put in forward and the boat wiggled forward a little. This was repeated many times. For nearly an hour they fought the wind, current and the tide trying to get the boat pointed into the channel. Sometimes the boat did not seem to respond to the activity and at other times it responded immediately. Finally the boat eased clear of the shoal and made it into the channel.

As the boat made its way down the channel it was obvious from the behavior of the boat something in the propulsion and/or steerage was not working properly. My guess is that that is why the grounding happened and it will soon be docked for some serious repairs. However it was getting late and time for the mosquitoes to attack, so the Truck was guided out of the marsh and onto the highway. We made it back to the Castle without any other incident.

Watching events is another way of trying to have tooooo much fun. TheOFM.