Texas

We have been fishing too hard to update the page. The fishing has been fun; we meet interesting people every time we go out. Texas is full of interesting people, a little different than my stereotype image of a Texan. Texans have a sense of humor. My first clue to the Texan sense of humor came early in our visit. The Texas Lottery people were red hot mad about a popular gag gift just before Christmas. Someone had started selling the scratch-off variety ticket as a gag gift. It was an accurate knock-off of the official scratch-off ticket, except all of these were $10,000 winners. Every morning the Lottery Office faced a line of happy winners. This apparently wore on for weeks.

A couple of nights ago the local Coast Guard got a mayday from a ship sinking in the Gulf. It came from the Brittany Bay, which was going down with 13 souls. The radio operator said that the passengers were lashing the 4 life rafts together, but the water was up to his waist and could not talk longer. He radioed his position and signed off. We are just upwind at the end of the runway at the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station, which also is home to the Coast Guard. Well, it has looked like the Berlin airlift here. They have been combing the relative calm seas with no luck. This morning the Coast Guard announced that they had not been contacted by any family members of the 13 souls lost at sea. Finding that unusual, they started calling marinas up and down the coast, trying to find the home port of the Brittany Bay. No one had ever heard of it. Oops

I took down the Chat page on our home page. I was never around to use it. I replaced it with a Tumbleweed Studio page. As evidence to the fact that I have too much spare time on my hand, I wanted something different on the page. I went with mouseOver buttons. After a little debugging, I got them to work. Check it out. We are just beginning to put our work on the page. We are also trying to find out how to make some money on eBay, the Internet auction service. We know people making a living selling lampwork beads on eBay. I have been scanning the lampwork beads that have been selling well. The beads that are hot now are lavender in color. Everything in lavender is selling very well. Tomorrow I am going to get out the torch and crank out some beads. Do a search on eBay using the key word: lampwork. Look for my Bug-eyed fish beads and other auctions in the near future.

Back to fishing. It is been a big part of our entertainment here. I have been taking photos that I hope to post soon. Sharks are starting to show up in the surf. Bob Hall pier, in the surf on the Gulf side of Padre Island, is where we fish most of the time. That is where I caught the Bonnethead shark when Larry and Donna McCoy were here visiting. That morning someone had caught a 6' sand shark from the pier. The tail fin was still hanging where they had cleaned the fish. Friends of the man that caught the shark were using the fins of the shark to try to catch more. I thought at the time that there was probably a market for shark fins, but they were already bait.

A few days ago we drove to Port Aransas to attend a birding festival. They had a show that we will try to get into next year. Port Aransas is where Whooping Cranes winter. After the show we went to the jetty where the big ships have to pass to get to the port of Corpus Christi (the 5th busiest port in the country). There were dozens of people fishing. They had been catching Black Drum. There is a 30" maximum length limit on these fish. Anyone catching fish were catching oversize drum. One man had fought a fish for two hours and never saw the fish. He pooped out and cut the line. We decided to try our luck so yesterday we headed to the South Jetty. Of course no one was catching fish, and neither did we. We left for the marina/park and watched the dolphins playing in the ship channel. It was a beautiful day, 85 degrees and sunny, so we headed to the Packery Channel. We caught a few Hardhead catfish, an inedible saltwater pest, so we left and went to Clem's marina. Clem's is located on the Intercostal Waterway. We fished there until 8:30 PM. We were out of gas, so we left, skunked. I suspect that the fish were about to start biting, but we had not eaten since brunch, so we called it a day. It is going to get to 90 degrees today, so we will try again today. Bob Hall pier, here we come.

The last time we were at Bob Hall pier, Susie got out of the truck and grabbed my good Nike ball cap. She was about to ask if I wanted the cap when a Gull delivered an air strike. It was one of those little black and white smart bombs, right on target. I walked around the truck and she was spitting and kicking up beach sand. It reminded me of how Curly acted when he needed Moe or Larry to feed him cheese (obscure 3 Stooges reference). It was water that Susie wanted. I found a bottle of water and after considerable spitting and rinsing she had returned to normal. We went fishing. Oh, for those of you that are concerned, nope he completely missed the ball cap, but thanks for asking.

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