We've not had any storm effects yet, but my friend, Don Pieprzica from Highlands High days, has found the trout to be liking the oncoming storm, Don also.

Progress on the roof continues. This picture of the 300 building does not show that the back is completed. They are just trying to seal in what is done and install flashing just in case tropical storm Don comes to visit. The 100 building is 95% complete and the 200 is 90% finished.
These piles of shingles on the 700 building will probably have to be taken down if the storm gets too close. The plan was to do the 700 building next.

There has been some discussion lately about the end unit bay windows that are not level. As far as I know all fourteen are sloping down and out. When Bill Tidwell owned both 105 and 108 he tried to level the floor on the bay window in 708. What is left of his attempt is this post under the window of 708. They tried jacking it up, but the whole wall is slightly down and this prevents leveling. I know in my place the slope is noticeable and always has been The problem comes in when a building inspector checks a condo before a sale and notes this deficiency.

The roofing started at a hectic pace, but they are going to have to slow down. The picture here shows how the parking was impacted.
I try to be out on the property between 7:15 and 7:30am every morning to set the day's schedule for Larry Rabe as well as the workers doing the fascia repair. Wednesday morning I was out at 7:25 and looked over at the 100 building and saw the roof workers on the roof removing shingles. I went to the foreman and reminded him they were not to start before 8am. He said, "I thought we just could not hammer before 8". They immediately came down until the agreed start time. The dumpsters shown here appear large enough, but I guess they appear smaller when tossing bundles of old shingles from the roof. There have been a few misses. This together with the high winds recently have created a much larger mess than we ever anticipated. Another problem is that the contract calls for hand driven nails. That's a lot of banging. It seemed as if they were right on top of 201 all day Thursday. The hand driven nail situation also is resulting a large number of nails being dropped on upper decks and lower decks and in front of the buildings. The situation is pretty chaotic. The insurance company allowed about $50,000 for a project manager for this, but one was not hired and that money was used to cover part of the deductible. In retrospect, we should have hired someone to coordinate all of this. I'm simply overwhelmed. The foreman told me he could roof 100 squares a day and be out in two weeks. This is proving to be logistically impossible for them and for us. We are now looking at doing the 300 building next week and the 700 building the following week. Where it goes from there is anyone's guess. There are just too many variables.
Many have questioned why this is being done in the peak of the rental season. Scott sent a notice to owners explaining that the initial information from the insurance folks was that we had one year to do the repairs. The plan was to do them in the fall off season. Then the board learned that we could not renew our insurance in August unless we had substantially completed the roofing project. This accelerated the bid process, and left us with only a small window to begin the work, highly inconvenient, but necessary.
As of Thursday afternoon the 100 building was nearly completed. Everyone seems to like the brighter color. Stainless steel flashing is being used and drip edges are still being worked on. Work has stopped for the weekend, but will resume at noon on Sunday, after the usual guest checkout time. I have coordinated with the various rental management offices and I believe next week will be much less stressful for all.

Work began on schedule today for our roof replacement. Roof replacement is a messy and noisy process. The old felt, nails, and debris were flying everywhere. I guess the Phase II rental office had not told their guests what to expect although I had visited with them last week about the process. A guest in 105 was pretty unhappy and called a desk clerk who called me to complain vociferously. She was irate, but I had little sympathy.
While it would have been much less disruptive to have put a new roof over the old, our owners voted to go through the process of removing the old roof knowing renters would be inconvenienced. Our board and myself have to see that the needs of our HOA are paramount to rental operations although we will make every effort to work with management companies as best we can.
Phase II has chosen to put up two misleading large signs that say,"Kontiki Beach Resort." There is no such animal, but it leads people to think we are one large resort and they do not understand that we are an independent HOA and some of our our owners have chosen to rent there units with various management companies. Our HOA has no affiliation with any of the companies. The Phase II rental operation has taken liberties in the past that show they are not totally cognizant of our independence. It's a learning process and things will get better. The board could not have chosen a more cooperative company to work with and they have assured me they will make every effort to accommodate renters as best they can. I have told them though that they are not to take any directions from anyone other than an HOA board member or myself. There were 18 workers here today and they may finish in two weeks instead of the six weeks we were talking about just a few days ago. Let's all hope so.

The new wall near 101 has been completed. The cost was over $1,000, but we had to stop the erosion under the condo. Now we need to replace a lot of the washed out sand. Of course, if the owner of the land next to the wall had taken care of his property the wall would not have been needed. Maybe he will be generous and share the cost of the wall with us!
Steve(202) and Cheryl came by this morning. They said they caught six keeper trout off their back deck at their house on Bayshore yesterday morning. I guess Ray and I were in the wrong place when we went to Copano yesterday to catch one keeper.
Ironically, the main circuit breaker for the Carter's condo(202) went out this evening. Fortunately, Ray(601) had brought us four from San Antonio in February and we had three left. This type of breaker is not usually available in Rockport. Larry Rabe came out and repalced the breaker. The renters had called the Phase II rental office and they called Larry Rabe. At least he called me before he came out. I need to talk to them about who to call when they have a problem. Larry Rabe does not work for them and they need to call me and I will decide what to do if it is an HOA problem. We have had a problem for years with the Phase II rental office obligating our HOA for expenses. Other rental management companies operating on our property understand the proper process.

Yesterday morning Ray(601) and I decided to try our luck in Copano. He has such a luxury class boat the trip was great, but not so much the fish bite. I did set a water speed record however. My boat will not exceed 40mph on a good day with a tail wind. His big four stroke Suzuki hit 48.6mph without really trying. We went to the west shoreline of Copano first and tried near the duck blinds just before Turtle Pen. We picked up two small trout and moved on to Turtle Pen itself. We tried there with no bite at all. We moved to Shell Point and found one lonesome 17 inch trout and then nothing more there at all. We went to some old gas wells, Lap Reef and Redfish point and still nothing, but we had a great time.
I had some perch left over when we got back and let a friend use them off the crossbridge last evening. He caught one 18.5 inch trout and was happy about that. I've had two poles out there since before daylight, but the crabs seem to beat any game fish to the bait.

Murlin(506)and Dollie chat with Mingo as he tries to control the weekend assault on our property by guests and interlopers. I have never seen such large crowds as this summer. About 11:30pm Friday evening three large pickups came down the entrance road with fishing tackle. They got within 50 yards of Mingo and all three changed their minds about entering our property. For the last ten years there has been no effort to curb the influx and many people have learned they can stay elsewhere and come to Kontiki to use our pool and pier. Even renting guests have their tricks. I saw on Saturday evening that two separate groups had taken their parking permits and made xerox copies and presented them to Mingo. I guess they figure they have asked for all they can expect from their management company and they have more people coming. I see another problem developing. When one management company puts people on the black list, they just shop on the internet for another management company renting units here and rent through them. We had one group last week that were about as out of control as it gets. I think they shopped around. They were seen at the pool area just before it was vandalized. The pool rules sign was torn down and all three steps on the pool ladder were stomped and broken. Five rod and reels disappeared off the deck of 402. I can't emphasize enough how important it is for all our owners to work toward building and operating our own property management office. The years we operated out of unit 704 were so successful and that is the only way we can ever achieve control of our property and return profits from rental commissions to our HOA. As it is now, the greatly increased operational costs for the summer season are borne by every owner equally, but the owners who rent are doing really well it would seem.

Finally, my first keeper anything not caught from a boat for 2011. Fishing has been tough. At least I had three grandsons here to show the fish off. The trout was 18 inches and caught at high noon in the mitigation site on a perch. We ate it the same day too.

Work is almost completed on building the retainer wall to prevent the washout under condo 101 and along the beach. One of our owners who owns the land to the left of the retainer wall has not maintained his property and the erosion here is leading to our washout problems. Had we known that the pending sale of unit 101 was going to be so costly to the HOA, we could have waited on the wall, although the owners would likely have demanded that this wall be built just as they have demanded immediate repairs to everything found by the inspector who looked at their condo. The HOA has spent about $1,000 so far on this unit, but more items are pending.
The roofing project has now been rescheduled to start early next week. It had to be put off from this week as we resolved the issues raised by the engineer who reviewed our attic ventilation problems. Replacement of the rotten fascia boards is progressing. The 700,100, and 200 buildings have been completed except for painting. Work on the roofing will start on the 100 building. I will meet with the roofer on Monday to get things coordinated.
We are still running on one lift station pump. The new pump failed six weeks ago and is still in for repair. The last report was that the repair will cost $2,200 and they are not covered under the warranty. Actually, we not yet been invoiced for the initial purchase so we are looking at about a $7,000 cost that was not budgeted. I'm just anxious to get the second pump up and running because if the lone working pump failed, I don't have any idea what we would do. The last time we checked for a replacement pump, we heard we would have to have one imported from Sweden.
We have been working with a water leak problem in the 700 building this week. An upstairs unit had a bad gasket on the bath tub that allowed a lot of water to leak into the unit below. There was a lot of damage. Fortunately, the upstairs unit is managed by Coastal Bend Management and they are just super. They arranged all the rapairs in both units.

Good news. The permit to open Cedar Bayou has finally been issued by the Army Corps of Engineers. Lynn Edwards of Rockport has worked on this for over a decade.
Here is her thank you note for all those who helped. I might note that Hugo Bermudez is also working for us to resolve our breakwater problems.

What we all have waited for, THE PERMIT HAS BEEN ISSUED!!!!!!!!! I would like to take this time to thank some very special people for their hard work on obtaining this permit. With out them we would not have gotten this far.
Vladimir Shepsis, Hugo Bermudez Coast and Harbor Engineers, Carlos Swonke Blanton & Associates. They are the true hero's here. They never gave up. I will let the world know just how special they are and what they did that and never ask for anything in return. My heart felt thank you to each and every one of them. To you that have played a huge part in this fight to make things right. God Bless you and my sincere thank you for hanging in there. You all are awesome.

We had a near disaster in the 100 bulding last evening. I thought I was taking a picture of a fire charred deck, but now that I look at it, the whole center of the pictures is the ground under the hole. The guests in this unit had brought their own barbecue barrel. This morning they reported a fire on their deck.
The top picture is of the fire damage outside the closet door. The other is of the area with the closet door open. In the top right hand corner is the briquette that caused the fire, according to the fireman who looked it over. It appears that somehow the briquette was under the the edge of the closed door where it could not be seen and it smoldered all night. We were very fortunate that a full blaze was not present. No one seems to know how that briquette got to where it was.

Randy(308) sent me this article from the Victoria Advocate. I can relate to the part about the winds in April and May.

Coastal Bend fishing is heating up for summer Hello Anglers! Fishing along the Coastal Bend arena from Port O'Connor to Baffin Bay continues to be like the weather - hot!
Calm conditions the past two weeks have allowed fishermen and fisherwomen to cover all areas of the bay system.
North shorelines, mid-bay reefs, well platforms and the Gulf surf have been holding more trout than I've seen in years.
The trout population is in excellent shape and will continue to get better with all the massive numbers of juvenile trout in the bay system.
A juvenile trout is a trout under 15 inches. When a female reaches 12 inches she is considered a mature trout because of having the ability to lay tens of thousands of eggs.
This year could be a record spawn for speckled trout not only because of the high numbers of juvenile spawners in the bay systems but because March and April were two of the windiest months on record allowing the larger trout to spawn and not be caught.
During those two months, 90 percent of the water was unfishable because of the high winds.
Now, we just need rain to keep the salinity levels down so that our large trout population will not migrate to another bay system in search of fresh water.
One major factor that would really help keep the salinity levels from becoming too high in the back bays would be the opening of Cedar Bayou.
I haven't mentioned anything about this over the past few months because of all the last minute road blocks that seem to come up each time the permit is about to be issued. But this past week I just received word that all agencies have approved this project and the permit to open Cedar Bayou will definitely be given to Aransas County before or by August 1. Lynn Edwards said she would call me when she could see and touch the actual approved permit. She has been fighting for this moment for well over a decade.
This project will cost between $6 and $8 million. Aransas County is hoping to receive money from the BP Disaster Relief Fund for the Texas Coast to help fund this project.
"If" all goes as planned, Cedar Bayou Pass could be opened by this time next year. Just remember I said "if."
I will keep you posted on any new information that I receive on the progress of this project.
Fishing mainly out of Rockport the past few weeks continues to be an adventure. I love the challenge of trying to put familiar or new faces on catching fish under all kinds of conditions.
From the most experienced wade fisherman to the first time rookie, everyone enjoys being on the water and loves to catch fish. This year with the undersized fish in the bay the action has been steady at least for half of the day.
This summer I have had a mixture of customers. Half of my groups have fished in the boat and half have been wade fishing trips. On most of my wade fishing trips we have been starting with top waters. The past month the best top waters have been the black-w-chartreuse head Top Dog Jr. and the white with red head Top Dog Jr. The top water bite has been good for trout up to 22 inches until about 9:00 a.m. on any shoreline with adequate bait.
Then we switch to croakers and will work the grass lines and walk the shell reefs. When fishing in the boat we target any shell that is covered by four to six feet of water.
We give each area at least 15 minutes before moving. I have never seen as many trout on the shell reefs as I have this year.
Any bay system that has shell usually has speckled trout on it. We've still been using the pink Salt Shaker with the solid red Mustad hook 16 inches below the Salt Shaker.
The time is "Now" to catch speckled trout on the Texas coast. Pray for rain, get a bucket of croakers, lube up with sunscreen and Go Get 'Em!
Good Fishin'

Captain Danny

Work continued last week on the replacement of the rotted fascia boards in preparation of the new roof project that is scheduled to start this week. There is just a lot of rotted fascia as well as soffit and decking that are in bad shape and termites, as always, are just everywhere.
There was a full house this weekend and I did not see a fish caught. The crowds this year seem larger both in number of condos rented and bigger crowds in each condo. We are hauling off 32 cubic yards of trash each week, a Kontiki record, and the dumpsters are filling up for each pickup. I know my family has contributed its share. We had sixteen people here last weekend and twelve this weekend and we have made many trips to the dumpsters.

Randy(308)is selling his boat. He has purchased a new one and asked me to list his here to see if someone might be interested.


This is a 1997 Bay Hawk 179 ST with 1996 Yamaha 85 horse motor with 4 blade stainless steel prop.
The trailer is a 1997 Sportsman.
Asking $4900.

We are trying to wrap up a few projects this week prior to the start of the roof replacement next week. In the photo above we are using some of the posts and shoreguard from our old pier to extend the retaining wall sixteen feet to prevent further erosion of our beach. The owner of the land next to us, where our pier is attached, has allowed erosion to lower the elevation of his property and now water drains off of our beach and toward the HEB beach. This has also caused a washout at the corner of unit 101.

Some of the posts will be used to shore up the bulkhead around the mitigation site. These will be cut off the match existing posts. There is a large washout of the bulkhead near the entrance road. This will be repaired also.
When Larry Rabe arrived this morning there was large geyser of water near the boat washing area. Somehow during the night the pipe had been broken or burst. No one had noticed. We lost a lot of city water, not well water. He had to shut off the whole complex for a while to repair the break.
There will be an engineer here on Thursday to access the ventilation problem in our attics. He will prepare his report on Friday in time for the roofer to put in place the best system to more adequately vent the attic spaces.

Three Colors tennis court repair service came out Thursday to repair the divots made by the washers when washer toss was played by renters on the tennis court. The cost or the repair was $350. I understand a bill has been sent to the rental management company of these guests.
I had some friends coming in for the weekend to stay next door to me. They were sure they had a reservation. I told them the guests that were there had a parking permit that showed they were not leaving until Sunday. My friends called on Thursday to verify their arrival for Saturday and were assured all was well. Today when they arrived, sure enough, a double booking. This is the busiest week of the year and if this the only glitch, we will have done well.

Cold weather always benefits the plants with bulbs. This last winter has led to really nice Lilly displays. This one is just outside my place.

So much rotten wood and so little time. Here Larry Rabe works to remove all the rotted wood of the AC stand for unit 706.

New employee Larry Skelton helped Larry Rabe on Wednesday to refurbish the palm frond top of the cleaning station roof.