The big fear among local residents along Surfside Beach was that after the recent Jeep Weekend participants in that event would leave mounds of trash. It didn't happen, at least not where we were and seemed that most people packed the trash out. There was a good bit of wash up trash Plastic stuff and coming from I don't know where, down the Brazos River, off passing ships or from foreign shores bourn by the ocean tides and currents.
The original use of these various bits had been pounded to an unrecognizable state by waves and sand. I'm a pretty smart guy, my momma told me, I've read a lot of books, had a couple of successful careers, got a college degree and played in bands where I broke a bunch of guitar stands but even the most anti education non vaxer who swims in sewage will tell you that plastics in the environment are bad. A recent NYT article is one of many that alerts us to the dangers and this Smithsonian article says that the human brain may contain a plastic spoon's weight of these man made nanoparticles.
It was so handy that to illustrate my point I found this plastic spoon washed up at my recent beach camp. Always nice not to have to stage a photo or use AI.
This barrel which was clear and looked to be full of water washed up one day and the next morning due to only having one tide a day so not much water exchange and it was still there. .
About 15 minutes after I made the photo a Brazos County clean up crew showed and while two guys loaded the barrel a third picked up the bigger hunks of stuff washed ashore around the perimeter of the truck and tossed it in the trailer. A hit the high spots clean up and better than nothing.
This looks all the world like a jug of urine which brings to mind a car trip I recently made with a friend who carried a jug for just such purposes. As far as I know he is a recycle and reuse type and wouldn't throw his jug in the ocean. I don't know what he does with the piss
On the right note the blue top off a plastic container. Literally hundreds of these wash up. I emptied a plastic jug this morning and put it in the recycle box and tossed the cap in the landfill trash. Good or bad?
Once when I worked in a nursing home I often gait trained the patients down the hallways which each had a glass exit door at the end. Out one door I could see a plastic grocery bag hung high in the branches of a tree. On a flier attached to the door I wrote in very small letters the date I first spotted that bag so I could monitor how long it hung there each time I walked the hall and how long it took for wind and weather to shred it into nanoparticles so the neighborhood could get it's dose. I moved on before the experiment was complete.
I think there's something there in that spoonful in the brain story. Maybe a poem, a song, a sci-fi story about how shady actors learn to embed behavior altering drugs in plastic which then turn to nanoparticles and are ingested by an unsuspecting population. Oh, wait a minute, we have people thinking stuff like that already.
We opened beach front camping season 2025 on the Gulf of Mexico this past week arriving on a Sunday afternoon as Jeep Weekend, which is mostly centered on Boliver Peninsula and Galveston wrapped up and the usual weekenders on the Brazoria County Free camping beach were packing up to park in our usual spot with the camper and settle in for few quiet days.
Conditions could have been better. It was windy. There was seaweed washing up on the beach. The wind blew the sand all up in our gear so much that we stopped at the carwash before we ever got home. Like Cathy said though, "I'm glad you get the beach," we both enjoy it no matter what.
This stretch of beach, which on a weekend is host to the great Texas freedom and pastime of driving on the beach can be bumper to bumper on a weekend but by Sunday evening/Monday Morning it's empty as when Cabeza de Vaca washed ashore and that's how we like it.
Going back last year we have caught fish three out of five camps here at Carl's Secret Spot and this trip produced about 15 hard heads, under size sheepshead and whiting which though they don't get much acclaim are a good eating panfish with no restrictions. I'd like to have a bucket full of small ones, cornmeal and a pan of hot grease. We threw these two on the grill.
Hopefully hurricane season will be calm because though Cathy will beach it anytime I like the calm, clear water of late summer for better beachfront fishing right where I camp. I think I have the tide heights figured out. When predictions start to get above two feet the water is coming close to where the camper is parked. At 2.6 it's time to get out. The high water mark in this photo is 1.9.
There is always something to do though. I subscribed Cathy to the Major League Baseball Radio app. We listened to an Astros game everyday. I started a good book by Cormac McCarthy. We watched the birds and these gulls, I think they are mostly Bonaparte's Gulls, pick little shrimps out of the seaweed washing ashore. We didn't see any big ships, maybe the limited visibility or the Trump Tariffs so I didn't track who they were or when they were coming from. There was a chlorine leak at a plant 10 miles away, contained by the time I heard about it.
World class hard head catfish, which are good for exactly nothing. They will fin you with their flopping, steal all your bait and they do not even make a good cut bait to catch sharks on.
Oh yeah we sat by the fire.
We have other, bigger, more exciting trips and visits to friends planned but we will try to hit the beach between these adventures whenever we can.
We were headed back in from a quick trip to the catfish hole. It was all the boys on board and we had dropped the girls and the kids at a lakeside playground with the instructions to be back, including travel time in one hour. We were barreling across the lake and arriving in the campground cove when a boat starts waving us down. We thought "motor trouble." It was a fancy rig with half a dozen people on board and an eye catching wrap on the hull. He had trouble alright.
It was a crappie guide boat. The guide, a white guy had 5 black customers, probably a family, booked for an outing. As we pulled up he asked, "what kind of electronics do you have, mine are not working." Guides these days have something called live scope so you can see if the fish is there and go fish somewhere else if they are not. I replied that I just a had a standard old Hummingbird depth finder, not too fancy and he asked if I could located the Texas Parks and Wildlife fish reef sunk just inside the point coming out of the campground cove. I said I could.
Actually my depth finder is pretty fancy and has more features than I use. In addition to showing the depth, temp and of course bottom features in several adjustable ways it makes GPS points. With the help of my engineer son, that's what it took, I downloaded the Texas Park reef way points on Lake Sam Rayburn to my desktop computer, put it on a mini card, inserted it in the depth finder and I have all the fish reefs on my lake marked. There are about four depending on my launch sport are near my usual fishing areas. Sure enough I led the guide right to the spot he was looking for. He threw out marker buoys and they began to fish.
I told his party as we cruised away my guide fees are cheap. After landing I could see the spot from camp and they fished awhile and then returned later to fish more. I don't know if they caught anything but the next day I took this photo as the guide was fishing the spot again.
Crappie trips for four are usually in the neighborhood of $400. I know some guides include fish cleaning for a $1 a fish. Most of the time these guides build underwater brush piles to hold the fish and a limit for 4 people is 25 fish each. They get their limits so he makes $100 for cleaning fish. If I'm just filleting small fish vs cleaning cats 5 pounds and up I can clean a fish a minute. That's good wages.
I've probably cleaned several hundred fish this year alone for free. It obvious I don't even know how to make money.
Grandma's Campout Birthday Weekend and Catfish Massacree...
Cathy's birthday is coming up (hint, hint) and all she wanted was a big campout. We loaded up the Wolf Pup camper (don't worry we made two trips to get the boat) and headed 20 minutes down the road to Hanks Creek, a Corps of Engineer Park on Sam Rayburn Reservoir. We stayed 5 nights and the Zamora family including their friends, Travis, Veronica and kids reserved a campsite across the road for one night. Rose and grand kids Warren and Coraline drove up from Lake Jackson and stayed at our house a couple of nights for some good family fun had by all.
Final count on the fish was somewhere in the neighbor hood of 42 catfish and 20 white bass. Anyone that picked up a fish rod caught fish. The catfish bite was red hot in 4' of water next to the bushes and I found the white bass schooling on flats in the exposed north wind, busting up schools of shad in half acre sized schools that quite biting about 7:15 AM every morning.. Naturally on the third morning I talked Cathy in to joining me but the wind shifted to the south and they were gone. Fortunately the catfish had missed us and bite faster than you could bait a hook. We ate all we could and brought home three frozen packages of meat. There's a really great freezer in our camper and we will probably eat some of this on trips this summer.
The white bass liked a little crank bait from my dad's old tackle box that's probably 45 years old. I call the color pattern "Parrot."
Even Miguel, who is not all that mad at fish till they are served hot from the grease caught a fish. Amazing thing is that we saw only a couple of other boaters in this pass behind Miguel in the photo during the whole trip. I've fished here going on 50 years and depending on the time of year it's full of some kind of fish just waiting to be caught.
Boys out on the boat. The girls gave us an hour counting drive time and we boated 5.
Milo, who was holding a rod or be damned like everyone else actually hooked a fish his mom had to reel in but in this photo he has the "man, my cousin caught a big one" look on his face.
We had a great site. The trip began with a storm that prevented us from fishing Friday evening (camper is cozy) and was followed by three days of sun. Today as we left storms were rolling in again. We met some locals stetting up for a 12 day fishing extravaganza. One was an old co worker and we had friends in common with the others. We will see them again.
Many sites at Hanks Creek are closed. They were wrecked last summer during Hurricane Beryl and the flooding also left many dead and leaning trees. Sites that had been fixed with nice new pads since the last flood several years ago had the RV hook ups set in concrete housings that were toppled off their foundations. Due to limited sites and the popularity with locals plan ahead for reservations.
We love our camper but naturally the Zamora family wins coolest camper award.
Water temps were 75 degrees and I asked Mary if she would let the boys swim. She said, "How to I keep them out of it?"
It was a good trip and I think a good start to Cathy Week.
"...I know I've seen that face before," Big Jim was thinking to himself
"Maybe down in Mexico or a picture up on somebody's shelf..."Bob Dylan from "Lilly Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts
