This was our marina at mid afternoon with some boats still out. The busy Memorial Day crowd had boats and people everywhere.
The pier fishing was fair. Thursday and Friday nights the water was perfectly clear and trout were everywhere. Most were a bit too small. I did catch a 17 inch trout without trying too hard as I don't fish much when there are people at every light. An electrician came out Friday and terminated the wiring that was damaged at the end of the Phase I pier. The breaker had kicked out and simply turning it back on got the lights that were still up back working.
I went out in my boat this morning. There were boats all along Saint Jose Island. We tried perch and DOA and the only fish we caught were under several areas of feeding gulls. We had no keepers at all.

Edward and Hector came out and cleaned up the complex and all the debris from the mitigation site. It looks much better. They trimmed up these oleanders behind the 700 building to allow people to walk on the sidewalk. They were blooming well, but getting way too big.
They trimmed some along the 300 building, but there are some left to trim. You can see here that when vehicles park around the end of the 200 building, there is no place to walk through.

This article from the Houston Chronicle was sent to me by Randy(308).

Mystery and surprise play big roles in fishing's attraction.
We never really know what's out there under the water — what's going to grab a bait or lure, or when.
We can have a good idea.
But sometimes the fish on the other end of the line turns out to be anything but expected. They can be enigmas.
One of those mysteries manifested itself recently along the middle coast.
My friend Will Leschper and a couple of his friends were wade-fishing around Traylor Island, which sits on the boundary between Aransas and Redfish bays near Rockport. They were throwing lures and pecking away at speckled trout when one of the anglers, Ron Coulston, stuck a fish that wasn't a trout.
The fish was a brute, peeling line from Coulston's reel like a bull redfish or maybe a shark.
It proved to be none of those; it was something totally unexpected and out of place in a Texas bay.
It was a ling. A 42-inch ling.
Ling — cobia or lemonfish — are a pelagic species, a fish of the open Gulf of Mexico. Occasionally, anglers fishing beach-front piers or jetties will catch a stray ling. But ling are rare in Texas bays.
What was a ling doing in Aransas Bay?
Over the past 30 years, I've heard of several instances of fish showing up in waters they're not supposed to inhabit and even personally encountered a couple.
Aquatic surprises
• A handful of anglers fishing the Trinity River immediately below the Lake Livingston dam have reported catching southern flounder, a marine fish.
To get to the Livingston Dam, those saltwater flounder have to swim over 100 miles upstream in freshwater — something they are not supposed to be able to do.
Also, a handful of sharks — almost all of them bull sharks, a species with a pretty high tolerance of freshwater — have been taken in the Trinity River near the Livingston Dam.
And I've had a personal experience with an unexpected saltwater fish in the Trinity. Fishing for crappie and bass in the lower Trinity River near Liberty several Octobers ago, I caught a small tarpon. A fisheries biologist verified it.
• In the wake of Hurricane Alicia in August 1983, an angler fishing in Galveston Bay near the Galveston Ship Channel hooked and landed a sailfish, a species almost never seen within 40 miles of the Texas coast.
The great escape
• In the early 1980s, an angler fishing for speckled trout and redfish along the Galveston Jetties landed a large striped bass.
Texas bays may once have held a modest striped bass population, although evidence supporting that contention is debatable. The state recently started a stocking program aimed at establishing a population of stripers, anadromous fish that live most of their lives in saltwater but spawn in freshwater rivers, in bays along the upper coast.
The capture of the 20-pound-class striped bass on the Galveston Jetties was amazing enough, as no striped bass had been caught in the bay in decades.
But there was something else about this fish. It was tagged.
The tag, with its identifying number, revealed the fish's history.
The striper had been tagged and released in Toledo Bend Reservoir on the Texas/Louisiana border.
The fish had escaped the reservoir by going over the dam and into the Sabine River.
Following its instincts, the striper traveled down the Sabine River, into the Sabine Lake bay system, through Sabine Pass into the Gulf and down the coast to the Galveston Jetties.
If not for the tag it wore, the striper would have been another unexplained angling aberration — like a 42-inch ling on the Traylor Island flats.

Randy(308) sent this article from the Houston Chronicle.

If you are what you eat, gafftop catfish are Dyson vacuums.
Early results from an ongoing study of the diets of predator fish in Texas bays indicate the saltwater catfish with the long wispy fins and the liberal mucous coating on their bodies may live up to the unflattering name many anglers give them. These “snot sharks” may indeed be the most indiscriminate, opportunistic predator in the bay.
“It's really pretty amazing some of the things gafftop eat,” said Mike Stahl, a Dickinson-based coastal fisheries biologist with Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. “It looks like they'll eat just about anything they can get in their mouth.”
Coastal fisheries crews conducting gill net samplings in Galveston Bay remove digestive tracts of a selection of the fish they capture and bag them with identifying codes.
The process gives fisheries managers insight into the prefer-ences and importance of forage species to predator fish such as speckled trout, red and black drum, flounder and gafftop. With the addition of gill net samplings on open-water reefs, as well as the long-running shoreline-based gill net surveys, researchers look to compare the diets of fish captured in the different habitats.
The “gut checks” of gafftop have produced some interesting contents.
Gafftop are much like other bay predator species, feeding primarily on forage fish such as menhaden, croaker, spot, mullet, bay anchovies and other small finfish. And like most other inshore predators, they also eat eels, shrimp and marine worms.
But gafftop don't stop there. The fish, which usually weigh 2-8 pounds, seem to not be afraid of attacking larger and less vulnerable creatures.
“We've found huge Gulf toadfish in gafftop guts — I mean big toadfish,” said Bill Balboa, Galveston Bay ecosystem leader for TPWD's coastal fisheries division.
The well-named toadfish (sometimes called oysterfish), with their large heads and truculent behavior (they're aggressive beasts that will inflict a nasty bite), seem unlikely gafftop victims.
Gafftop guts also have yielded large blue crabs and stone crabs, both of which can also put up a good defense. Perhaps the strangest items found in gafftop guts have been birds.
“We found a whole bird — it was identified as a rail — in one,” Stahl said.
But maybe the most telling insight into what gafftops will eat is tied to their relationship with their smaller, more abundant and almost universally loathed relatives — the hardhead catfish.
“Gafftops do eat hardheads,” Stahl said. “They are about the only thing that will eat them.”
That insight alone should raise gafftops' standing among saltwater anglers.

After Hector and Edward put the rest of the pier back into working order, they boarded off the last section. Since there is no more lighting beyond this point, we don't want anyone to take a long walk on a short pier at night.
What I suggest is that we take the two bigs lights off this post for the summer and attach them to this last section. One could be put at the old platform facing east and one at the end of the pier facing north. This would well light the last section and be a minimal cost for a big benefit. The wiring is already in place. The two lights are mounted on the 4x4 that is through bolted to the pier post.
It is difficult to get action items accomplished when our HOA board finds it difficult to meet on a timely basis. They seldom find themselves at the same place at the same time, or even in the same state for that matter.

J.R. was here before 7 am this morning to survey the pier damage. Here is Hector as he helped Edward retrieve the lumber from the water. They both had to get in the water and haul the boards up on dry land.
The boards were stored behind the maintenance shed for now. The last time we did this the whole stack disappeared over night. This looks like a lot of timber for just the end of the pier. Edward and Hector replaced all the boards that had popped up on the pier walkway.These nails show pretty clearly that the platform was under designed in a effort to save money. The other and older platform suffered no damage at all. This lumber can be used to rebuild the platform, but heavier hardware will be needed. Rob is back in California or I believe he would make a strong effort to help us rebuild.

While fishing off the pier last evening, I felt a slight tug on the line and pulled up my lures to find this. Some sharp toothed fish had taken two bites out of my sassy shad. Most likely it was a Spanish Mackerel. They have razor sharp teeth.

There is still a lot of debris left over from the Wil Petty bash last weekend. Much of it is floating in the mitigation site as we see here. J.R. tells me he is kind of letting it go because he plans to bring on a full time employee for us next Tuesday and this will give them something to start on. Our HOA really needs a policy in place for parties like this. Probably a deposit up front would help to insure that our grounds are left in good order.

We had an unusual weather event today. Late in the afternoon the wind came up suddenly. There were showers in the area, but none here. I think it could be called an outflow boundary. These AC covers were rearranged.
The beach beside 101 was covered and the water was flowing north toward HEB.
The two pictures above and below show how much water was behind the 300 building. This was not rain water, but water that had splashed over the bulkhead. The water was hitting the sliding glass doors when the wind caught it just right.

This picture show how high the plumes went into the air. I drove down beach road when the winds stopped and there were no other piers damaged and only a little debris on the road. I think this was a very local event.

The boards here are just popped up and can easily be nailed back down.
There are a lot of boards floating all over the place. I called J.R. to tell him about these. There are even some in the channel. They could be a boating hazard. These boards are less than a year old and can probably be salvaged.
This all that is left of the end of the pier. Rob said that the center post was so deep that when everything else washed away, that post would still be there. He was right. We are probably looking at more than $10k to repair all this. I would suggest we close off the pier at the washed out section and add a few lights for fishing from the linear part of the pier. At the annual meeting the HOA can decide what action to take.

My friend Ric Mudd, Highlands Class of '76, caught these nice trout last Saturday at Hog Island and South Bay.

Scott brought in some new pool furniture this weekend.

This google earth picture is about a year old and the piers were not completed or repaired at this time. What is visible is the water depth. The darker color is deeper water. This shows that the water is much deeper off the end of the Phase I pier. It is about 8 feet deep off Phase I pier and only 3 feet off the new pier.(The new pier is just below the "google earth" logo.)

One of Justin's better ideas was to place grass into the area next to the Phase I pier to prevent erosion. This was done last fall and looked pretty weak earlier in the spring. J.R. has had Edward water and feed the area lately and the difference can be seen. We have had two cases of high tide and high winds this spring and the grass has prevented the beach from washing out. The water cascades over the bulkhead and usually washes the sand off the beach back into the bay. There has been some washout, but nothing like we usually experience. To date no new sand has had to be hauled in and that is a real savings.

Most of our signage is starting show a lot of wear and tear. Justin had Scott Culberson prepare some boards for new signs before Scott left and they are still in the maintenance shed. The "No Cast Net" signs in the mitigation site are in bad shape too. I did hear an owner, Lynne(206), volunteer to letter the new boards. With so many new owners, I'm sure there are talented folks out there who can help us in a lot of ways.
I would like to see a sign at the entrance that says "Private Road, No Exit". I've seen so many vehicles enter the property at public street speeds or higher and just circle through and exit back to Fulton Beach Road. I believe they think they are just driving on a public road and trying to see where the road leads.

FROM THE ROCKPORT PILOT

The Rockport-Fulton Chamber of Commerce May Business After Hours will be hosted by Kontiki Beach Resort Thursday, May 20, from 5 p.m. until 6:30 p.m.
In addition to food, and live music, tours of the resort will be given, as will several giveaways.
Richard Durham will talk about the arrival of the “Tall Ships” July 1-5. Bay Blazer president Dana Daniel will announce upcoming Chamber events, introduce the speaker, and conduct the door prize giveaways. Attendees should place a business card in the basket for a chance to win a door prize.
For more information contact Rose Rau at the Rockport-Fulton Chamber of Commerce 729-6445.

We had a pretty busy weekend. It started off stormy, but improved later in the weekend.I had a nice visit with former owners Brad and Andy Phair. They went with guide Tim Redden on Friday. The wind was still strong, but Tim put them on fish in Estes Flats at Baker's. They brought in 12 trout, with the largest being 28 inches, and 8 reds. Their son Randy's girl friend caught the biggest trout. Brad went to Jennifer Dong to buy some shrimp that I have commented about. He left with over a hundred dollars worth.
Clay Wright(703) got some good fishing in. He found some nice trout while wading at the Navigation District park behind the airport. He said he saw a lot of drum being caught from the Legget Channel at the Rockport Beach.
Maghsoud Tahmoressi(407) and his son, Michael, got some fishing in from the pier. Michael is attending UTSA. The only two keeper trout that I saw caught this weekend both came from the first light on the north pier. One of those was my 16 inch catch. There were a lot of smaller trout around.
Jeannine Vater(401) told me about a mattress she purchased for their sofa sleeper. The mattresses that come with those things leave a lot to be desired. She sent me the link from Overstock.com and the mattress had gone down from the $300 she paid to $240. I ordered mine Sunday evening. She said they are memory foam and four inches thick and make a real difference in comfort.

Wouldn't you know it. The guys work all week to get all the sprinklers repaired and working and when the weekend guests arrive they park on the lawn to unload supplies.
Fishing last evening was dismal. I tried every light with no success. Tonight was much different. The conditions seemed the same with blustery winds and high tide, but the trout were back. I caught trout until I got tired. I caught four keepers, but no one else was on the pier to give them to so I kept one for lunch tomorrow.
Word on the street is that Chris and Karra may come to Rockport soon. That's always a good thing as items that need attention usually get taken care of. Maybe they will take part in the Wil Petty fund raiser, "Cast for a Cause".
Nick tells me that the insurance company has mailed refunds of the premiums that were paid by the HOA for owners that the company erroneously claimed had not paid. This only took nine months to clear up. I can only imagine how long it would take should we have a loss claim. As far as I know, Janet(306) and Randy(308) are working to get quotes for insurance from other insurance companies.

Work continues today to replace rotted foundation posts. After we received a settelment from our lawsuit against the original developer over the use of improperly treated foundation posts, the remaining money was set aside for future post replacements. Recent boards used this set aside money for other purposes. As I recall there was about $28,000 in the fund at one time.
Fishing success off the pier seriously regressed last evening. I made at least five casts from each light with not even a bite. The Fischers(guests in 212) caught one keeper trout, but picked up three keeper drum fishing in the mitigation site in the late afternoon. The largest was 23 inches.

The winds are still strong, but the fishing is improving. There were a lot of small trout on the pier last evening. My friend Joe Fischer caught two keepers and I gave him one. It was still not a good as last week, but much better than the weekend.
Sean spent all day here again working on the sprinkler system. He borrowed an underground locator and was able to locate all the electrical valves and controls. Even the broken wires were located. Most of the broken wires were a result of the security camera installation last year. He has everything working now except the section that was covered by the concrete at the south end of the pool. Sean tells me he has a bid proposal for J.R. to automate all the watering operations on the complex. When we consider all the employee time spent turning on and off all the valves on the property, outside the central area, the cost could be amortized quickly. I hope J.R. can make the numbers work.
Ed worked on the water lines along the road and has all the sprinklers up and working, but not all are working efficiently. There is still work to do, but that is part of the bid that Sean put together.

The weekend fishing from the pier was a bust. Thursday was still fine, but then a north wind picked up on Friday and everything changed. A few small trout were around Friday and Saturday I went out at 2:30 am and caught one small trout and one small red and called it an evening. Last night I didn't bother to try as the water was still stirred up from the north wind. Even boats that went out from here during the weekend did no good.
I heard from former owners Bradley and Andy Phair today. They are coming in Thursday and will go out with guide Tim Redden on Friday. I hope Tim can find the fish. The wind is really bad now and forecast to get much worse. At least it is now from the south.
Sean came by this morning and replaced the timer on the sprinkler system. We had a Hunter unit and he put in a Toro unit. J.R. is putting a priority on watering and the grass is looking much better, just in time for the Wil Petty crew to arrive and put up their big tent and party on the lawn weekend after this weekend. Ed and I spent some time today trying to locate the sprinkler heads across the street along the HEB fence line. There are about 16 there that have not been used in some time and will need some repair before they can be used.

My condolences go out the Madsen families(107&105). Mrs. Madsen passed last week in Kerrville. She almost made it to 93. The funeral is this week in Houston.
Monday J.R. had workers here to clean up the beach. They cleaned under the beachside condos and repaired the skirting access gates. He is concentrating on low cost, high impact projects.
I have an electrician friend staying 707 this week. He and I checked out the Phase I pier lights that have not worked since January. SESCO worked on them a couple of weeks ago and replaced some parts, but still no lights. Mike had his instruments and located the problem right away. He saved us some more electrical repair money. The lights were on for the first time on Monday evening and guests in the 400 building reported catching a lot of trout.
Mike and I went out on my boat Monday afternoon. The weather was great and we found a few trout, primarily at Half Moon Reef. The boat ran great after sitting idle for the last three months.
Burger King is coming back to Rockport. One is opening up in the old Starbucks. There was a Burger King here at one time in the current Panda Bay restaurant.
The asking price for condo 104 has been lowered from $262,000 to $249,000, according to the Rockport Pilot.
An employee at Seaworthy tells me the Speedy Stop on the Lamar side of the causeway still sells gas without ethanol. That is so important to boat owners. The ethanol gas can cause problems with boat engines.
I talked to Kevin Jameson at the Aransas Appraisal office this morning. They have had some problems with their website. They have taken down the new values for property and posted the values from last year. They hope to have it fixed soon. He did say there had been some mistakes with some of the values for Kontiki.
Last Thursday my friend, James Green, caught a 22 inch Spanish Mackerel off the end of the pier. Fishing has been about as good as it gets off the pier. Sunday evening Vic(708) caught some nice trout. He baited one hook with both a shad and glass minnow at the same time and caught an 18 inch trout. Later I caught a 20 inch and a 19 inch trout. The 20 inch trout had a recently ingested 8 inch gar in its stomach. I've been giving away trout to others on the pier. I don't know that I have ever seen so many keeper trout caught off the pier. Last evening I caught a 17 inch red on a trout killer off the crossbridge. That was the first red of any size that I have caught with a lure in a long long time. Last evening, about 3 am, two very inebriated individuals came out on the pier without fishing gear. I was not out there, but the guest that was said it was a little scary. Pop had already left.
My flounder light arrived from New Zealand today. The wind has come up and I'll have to wait for a better time to use it. Monday evening the water was very clear and big trout could be seen everywhere. The wind was light and moths were all over the light fixtures. On occasion a moth would flutter into the water only to be snapped up by a trout.
This blog had a lot of activity last week. There were 257 hits from 32 cities in Texas. The city of Clifton sent 11 hits and even Elmendorf sent 8 hits. You have to be from San Antonio to know where Elmendorf is. I know the mayor, Tommy Hicks, fairly well. Maybe he was looking at it. There are just not that many people in Elmendorf. There were hits from 17 other states with Washington leading the way with 15 and California with 14.

Another good article sent from Randy(308).

Sawfish too big for their own good
By SHANNON TOMPKINS
Copyright 2010 Houston Chronicle
April 28, 2010, 9:42PM
Scattered fragments of one of the largest, most viscerally stunning pieces of Texas' coastal history today hang mute, gathering dust on walls in homes and garages or relegated to dark attics, closets and a few museum cabinets.
They are impressive remnants, resembling 3-4-foot broadswords studded along the perimeters with a couple of dozen 1-2-inch ivory spikes. Looking at them, it is wholly understandable that these objects — the dried rostrums, or bills, of sawfish — were the Aztecs' inspiration for their obsidian-edged war swords.
Those old, dried rostrums are all that remain of Texas' sawfish.
The last sawfish documented in Texas was caught (and released) in Aransas Bay in 1984 by Texas Parks and Wildlife Department coastal fisheries staff conducting a gill net sampling. One had been caught in 1979 and another in 1978. They were the last three.
Since then, the only physical evidence these huge, distinctively shaped fish lived — thrived — in Texas bays and near-shore coastal waters are yellowed newspaper clippings telling of behemoth sawfish hauled from the bays, old black-and-white photos of 400-1,500-pound sawfish, and the desiccated “saws” people hacked from the fish and kept as trophies or souvenirs.
Those old saws tell stories. They illuminate their past and, perhaps, can brighten their future.
Ted Bates owns two sawfish rostrums, appropriately called “saws” for their likeness to the blades of double-sided crosscut saws.
“They were from sawfish my father caught,” said Bates, a 70-year-old Palacios native.
The larger of the two saws came from a particularly huge sawfish. That's saying something, as the fish grew to perhaps 18 feet or more.
“He caught it in 1950, when he was shrimping around the mouth of the San Bernard (River),” Bates said. “It got tangled in the old cotton nets they used — tore it up.
“The fish weighed 2,200 pounds. They had to use a double block (and tackle) to lift it.”
The other rostrum is smaller, if a 3-foot saw can be called small. The fish that produced it weighed “only” about 1,000 pounds. Like the larger fish, it was captured when it ran afoul of the senior Bates' shrimp nets near Pass Cavallo.
It was those nets — shrimp trawls, gill nets and trammel nets — that doomed sawfish.
Well, nets and behavior and biology of the fish.
Florida haven
Sawfish are narrowly specialized creatures. Members of the fish family that includes sharks and rays, sawfish look to be a cross between the two. The top part of their body is shark-like in shape. Their underside is flat like a ray's.
That flat ventral side allows sawfish to rest on bottom, like a ray or a flounder. They feed by attacking schools of baitfish, slashing with that studded rostrum and gobbling the killed and wounded.
Their behavior, along with the rostrum, made them especially vulnerable to nets. Although not targeted by shrimpers and netters, sawfish lived in shallow water and were slow, lethargic beasts; they easily became tangled in the mesh.
Sawfish are slow-growing, slow-maturing fish with very low reproductive rates.
“Most of the information we have — and it's not a lot — say sawfish have to reach 10-12 feet long before they become sexually mature,” said Tonya Wiley, a fisheries scientist with TPWD's coastal fisheries division and a long-time sawfish researcher.
Some research indicates it may take as long as 30 years for a female sawfish to reach sexual maturity. Sawfish, which give live birth to their young and seem to do so only every other year, produce only a handful of “pups.”
“They have a dozen or two pups, at the most,” said Wiley, who worked eight years on sawfish research in Florida. “They certainly aren't like other fish that produce millions of eggs.”
Through the first half of the 20th century, sawfish were common in bays along the Texas coast and the rest of the Gulf Coast. A 1943 report termed sawfish “frequently taken” and “plentiful” in Texas bays. As late as 1953, they were “abundant” in Texas, according to another report.
But by the early 1960s, they were fading — fast. Unable to reproduce fast enough to replace the adult fish being inadvertently taken by nets and different habitat, sawfish disappeared.
“It happened so fast, it was al-most like people looked up one day and they were gone,” Wiley said.
A remnant population holds out in far southwest Florida, centered around Everglades National Park, where netting of any kind has been prohibited for decades.
“If it hadn't been for Everglades National Park, we almost certainly wouldn't have any sawfish remaining in this country,” Wiley said.
Those remaining sawfish, placed on the federal Endangered Species List in 2003, and the old rostrums squirreled away along the Gulf Coast coast are being used to learn more about the great fish and, perhaps, show a way to rebuild their numbers and range.
Part of that effort centers on collecting any historic information on sawfish — photos, personal accounts of catches or encounters, articles, etc.
Part of that effort centers on collecting any historic information on sawfish — photos, personal accounts of catches or encounters, articles, etc.
Unanswered questions
It also involves finding owners of some of those old rostrums and soliciting them to allow Wiley to take a small piece of the saw to study the genetics of the fish.
Most pressing, the DNA profile of the “historic” sawfish population can be used to determine if the remaining sawfish are experiencing a genetic “bottleneck,” where there are so few remaining fish and genetic variability is so compromised by inbreeding that the population faces a dire future.
But it can help with other questions, too.
“It can help tell us if there were distinct populations of sawfish in the eastern and western Gulf — if the sawfish in Texas were different, genetically, from the ones in Florida or if they were one population,” Wiley said.
If they were genetically different populations of the same fish, it would mean that the “Texas” population is almost certainly extinct.
But if the sawfish are genetically the same, it could be a ray of hope. If Florida's smalltooth sawfish population can be stabilized and increased and if scientists/fisheries managers can learn enough about their natural history, biology and habitat requirements, it's possible that reintroduction of sawfish might be considered one day.
The two rostrums that have been in Ted Bates' family for more than a half-century are among the handful of Texas sawfish saws from which Wiley has taken tissue samples for the DNA/genetic profile project.
“It's people like Mr. Bates who can play a big role in helping us learn more about sawfish,” Wiley said. “And we can learn so much from just a little piece of tissue and from the historic information people can share.”

Randy(308) sent this interesting story from the Caller-Times.

COASTAL BEND — Local kayak angler Joey Ramos invited a longtime friend on a Nueces River adventure Saturday to catch a few redfish. The trip turned into an unforgettable night of terror.
The pair of experienced kayakers agreed to launch from Labonte Park and paddle downstream a short distance to Rincon Bayou, a partly enhanced channel that runs though the Coastal Bend Bays & Estuaries Program’s Nueces Delta Preserve. This 5,500-acre private preserve hosts free educational programs for area schoolchildren and teachers. If you’re there without permission then you’re trespassing.
Ramos simply knows the waterway as a slough south of the park where he catches redfish. He’s fished there at night once before and many times during daylight. This would be the first visit to Rincon Bayou and most likely the last for his friend, who asked that I not use his name.
The pair launched before dark, around 7 p.m., with a few bottled waters, snacks, some extra tackle and their cell phones. Their fishing rods were fixed with glow DOA shrimp imitation lures.
Ramos had fished here several days earlier. He easily had caught a limit of redfish and wanted to share his good fortune with a friend.
The sun was setting by the time they reached a railroad trestle spanning the bayou. But there was enough light to see four young men on the tracks above the bayou. Each was holding a can of beer. One of them had reddish hair and a goatee. They appeared to be in their early- to mid-20s, Ramos recalled.
“They didn’t look particularly friendly,” he said. “Nobody said anything, not even hello. They just stared at us with an empty look.”
Ramos paddled under the trestle first then waited for his friend on the other side.
After the pair rounded a bend in the river, they commented to each other about the strange encounter and the unfriendly group.
“We just got a weird vibe about those guys,” Ramos said.
Within 10 minutes it was nearly dark. Their plan was to fish near a set of big black culverts that had been installed to allow the bayou to flow under a caliche road, which is on the Nueces River Preserve. The bayou just before the culverts gets a little deeper and often holds redfish, Ramos said. The pair stood up in their kayaks and began casting lures into the gut. The bayou was quiet except for an occasional mullet splash. The moon was bright.
Suddenly the crack of a high-powered rifle broke the silence and buckled the anglers’ knees.
“It sounded like it broke the branches near my face,” Ramos recalled. “I told my friend that I thought somebody was shooting at us, but he didn’t think so. He said it was probably just an innocent misfire or a ricochet.”
As a precaution they immediately sat in their boats and began to paddle out. Bad plan.
Twelve shots rang out in succession. They heard lead punching through the bayou’s surface around them and ducked instinctively at the sickening whir of a single bullet overhead, a distinctive sound they had only read about or seen in movies before then.
“It sounds like death. It’s a nasty hissing sound I’ll never forget. I remember thinking it was two different caliber guns,” Ramos said. “I knew right then that they were aiming at us.”
But his partner still wasn’t sure. He turned on his flashlight and waved it in the air.
“He was yelling ‘we’re here, we’re over here,’” Ramos said. “I told him to turn it off, you’re giving us away.”
And as soon as he did, another eight bullets whizzed past. The direction of these shots was different from the first.
Maybe the shooters were on the move. Ramos wondered whether they were coming closer. He wondered whether they were being stalked.
“We need to get off our kayaks right now,” Ramos said he told his friend. “So we beached them on the bank, got out and hid behind them.”
Half submerged and shivering, the pair stretched out on their bellies or sides and clung to their hollow plastic boats. They were cold, muddy and terrified.
“We just laid there and didn’t move for a while,” Ramos recalled.
Ramos’ buddy retrieved his cell phone and dialed 911. The light from their cell phone must have illuminated their position. Another barrage of gunfire broke branches and splashed into the bayou around them.
So they hunkered farther into the muddy bank to make the necessary call for help.
While Ramos’ friend tried to explain where they were to a dispatcher, Ramos called 911 on his own cell phone to help. Confusion and panic combined to frustrate the desperate anglers. It’s difficult to explain a remote location such as this without roads to go by.
“I tried to get them to get the coordinates off our cell phones,” Ramos said. “But the calls were being transferred between Nueces and San Pat counties. They thought we were on the main river. We gave them a description of our truck and where we had parked.
“You can’t imagine how frustrating it was,” Ramos said. “We were being shot at while we were talking to 911. Our lives were at stake and we couldn’t figure out how to let them know where we were.”
Eventually Ramos heard one of the dispatchers suggest this was a job for Texas Parks & Wildlife.
Ramos recalled a feeling of hope and relief when he heard one of the dispatchers say they should call game warden Kevin Mitchell. Of course, Mitchell would know how to find them. This is his territory. And Ramos had reported a poaching violation to the game warden a while back. He even had Mitchell’s number programed into his cell phone.
“So I got off the phone with 911 and called Kevin and told him what was happening,” Ramos said. “He knew exactly where we were and he said he was on his way.”
All they could do now was wait. No more than 3 minutes of silence separated flurries of gunshots for the next half-hour. Conversation on the bayou was sparse, though both men called their wives.
“I didn’t know if I was going to make it out of there and I wanted to tell her I love her,” Ramos said. “At first I think she was in denial of what was happening.”
A 911 dispatcher interrupted the call to say TPW was on the way. Afterward, Ramos called his wife back and during this conversation denial turned to alarm when she overheard the gunfire that had her husband and the father of her children pinned to a muddy bank in the dark.
Meanwhile Ramos’ fishing partner, whose wife is expecting a sibling for their toddler this summer, was not taking the news well.
Ramos could overhear his partner trying to calm his wife’s fears.
“It was sad, scary and intense,” Ramos said. “Such a helpless feeling. We couldn’t move. God must have been with us.”
More than an hour passed since that first shot. Ramos estimates that the shooters fired about 100 rounds.
Ramos called Mitchell again just to get an update on his arrival and to let him know the situation hadn’t changed. Mitchell, who was coming from Sinton, told him he would be there soon but that he couldn’t talk. He needed both hands on the steering wheel.
The end of that called was punctuated by yet another 20 shots of what sounded like semi-automatic gunfire.
“This time the shots were directly in front of our face, hitting the water right in front of us,” Ramos said.
Mitchell called as he had promised. He was on the property. He told the pair to shine a flashlight in the sky when they heard his pickup approach. They obeyed the order of their savior.
Mitchell shut off his engine and scanned the area with night-vision optics. No shots were fired for a minute or two.
Mitchell called out to the two men across the bayou. They floated across clinging to their kayaks and met Mitchell on the opposite bank. He was carrying an M4 rifle.
For a while they hid behind Mitchell’s pickup. Several minutes passed and a single gunshot came from the distance. It was not the final shot of the night.
Mitchell brought the grateful pair to the ranch gate. There they heard two final shots. They sounded far. Mitchell, joined by game warden Nicole Spatz, returned to the property to search for the shooters. But they escaped.
Spatz and Mitchell loaded the kayaks and the exhausted anglers into separate pickups and returned them to Labonte Park. No bulletholes were found in their bodies or their boats.
If you have information about this crime, please call TPW at 289-5566.

Sean worked all day long trying to get our sprinkler system up and going. He rang my doorbell at 9am to help him find all the buried components. I know where most of them are, but the grass has grown over a lot of the valves and shutoffs and this makes it interesting. I used my flounder gig to probe one that I had seen only once before. I did find it. The wiring was laid into the trench with the pvc pipe. The shell in the soil has likely cut into the wiring and is causing our problems.
Sean dug a lot of holes and trenches, but could not find the breaks in the wiring. To add to this, concrete was poured at the end of the swimming pool two years ago with no regard for the water system beneath.
Someone walked off with Sean's locator tool and a new one is $900. He will have to buy one to locate all the buried wires and pipes. He called the original installer, Mr. kissinger, to see if he had any schematics left. That didn't work out. Mr. Kissinger said he had not been paid the last time he worked out here and had disposed of the plans for our system. We had a copy in the file cabinet in the maintenance shed, but that too is gone.
We have a hodge podge of water lines and sprinklers on the complex. The original wastewater system that we used to treat our own sewage still has water lines buried all over the place and all sizes. We then converted to a higher pressure system of well water with manual valves and parts of the old system. The automatic system inside the traffic area was installed about eight years ago. What we have now is a hybrid mess.
Sean is going to evaluate the entire system and get a bid together for J.R. I hope we can revamp the entire system and convert completely to well water and fully automated.
In the meantime we really could use a good rain!

Yesterday was one of those clear days when you can see forever. Clicking on this picture to enlarge it will allow you to see Long Reef. The San Jose shoreline is visible and Long Reef is the light colored area on the horizon in line with the right side of the end of the pier.

J.R. had these Honeysuckle bushes planted along the side of 608 yesterday. He happened to have them on hand at a great price. His connections continue to save us money.

.
If my floundering light had arrived, tonight would be the night to use it. The water is so clear today the old sacks of contrete that used to be our "bulkhead" can be seen covered in moss and seagrass. We still pay the GLO an annual land lease fee for leasing the land under the sacks. It's a small amount, but it would seem the GLO would pay us for adding the marine habitat. The top picture shows where the shoreline turned back toward HEB. I think we can see where our condos would have been had the State of Texas had not given us the unique variance to reclaim the land once it started to erode into the bay. I've posted this before, but it still is interesting to see how the shoreline has changed.

These Eurasian Collared doves are back nesting in our palm trees this year. I've been putting some corn out for them to dine on. The go after it. The seagulls and grackles leave the corn alone surprisingly.

Sean came out yesterday and replaced the water storage tank and that solved the problem with the sprinkler system. The grass had developed some patterns from the low pressure. The sprinklers would not pop up and only the area near the sprinkler head received any water. Consequently, green circles were formed. Soon the all the grass will recover as the well water is applied more generously.

J.R. has identified this water tank as the problem with our sprinkler system. The grass is in need of water at this time and he will likely have his friend Sean Ward get it repaired tomorrow. The tank contains an air bladder that is pressurized through a schrader valve at the top of tank. This produces water pressure for the water well system.
It was a pretty busy weekend here. I counted eleven owners enjoying their condos. It was almost like summer time with children's voices filling the air as they played on the beach and in the pool. Fishing of the pier was pretty good again. I counted ten keeper trout on various stringers last evening and I may not have seen some.
Fishing from boats has not been as great. Pat(602) fished the south areas on Thursday and caught only hardheads and gafftop. Some friends of Pat had three boats in San Antonio Bay on Saturday and did not limit, but caught several drum, reds, and trout. Alan(108) went out with his cousin on Friday and Saturday with no keepers. They have not yet come back from today's trip.
Rosemary and Gus(203) came in for their twin's birthday today. They are seven years old.
Scott and his family and I went to the nautical flea market at the Rockport harbor yesterday. They expected a crowd of seven thousand. I think they were all there while we were there. This was the ninth year for the flea market and it was bigger than ever.
Randy(308) couldn't get his boat to start yesterday. So they fished from the pier and did well. I will take his boat to the shop for him this week and see what the problem is.