Beachfront Camping Report...

Once, in another life, I was parked beachfront in my truck just sitting on the tail gate enjoying the sun. Three girls came walking by and said hi. I was at a loss for words but quick thinking led me to ask them if they wanted to toss a frisbee. I did not have any idea what girls wanted to do but I was giving it my best shot. One of them said, "Nah man, I could never throw one of those things," and they continued on down the beach. I've never asked a girl if they wanted throw a frisbee again. I've never even asked my wife if she would throw a frisbee. She'd probably say,  "Nah man, I could never throw one of those things."

We made of first beachfront camping trip of the summer this week at our secret spot on the Brazoria County Free Beach. If you are a regular reader here you will know it's where we camp free on the beach. No hook ups but bring water, run solar on the camper and a generator as needed. It's a sweet deal. We stayed Monday till Wednesday morning, avoiding the weekend crowd and pretty much had it to ourselves. The fish left us to ourselves as well with a rough surf and wind making conditions less than ideal for the surf. By Wednesday morning the wind had subsided, the surf lay flat and the sea weed rolling ashore had diminished and green water is expected with a couple of tide changes. 

In fact browsing the fishing reports looks like they caught them off the jetty yesterday and the surf was good this morning. I had netted a few live baits and tried lures since I did not feel the percentages were going to be high for me but I'll be ready with some shrimp for bait next time. 

Water looks pretty in this photo and even though no bites I wouldn't say I had a bad time. Some one once asked Cathy if Carl had to catch fish. She said, "I don't think so. He looks at stuff, makes pictures." I like the beach and I'm glad my wife is a beach girl. 

Water looks pretty in this reflected photo off the camper glass. 

On those windy days the fire felt good sitting on the beach at night as the air cooled when the sun went down. We never used the air conditioner but on the morning we left it was warming, the wind had dropped and made it easier for the biting horse flies to torment you. If the fish are biting I have enough repellant to make that tolerable.   

If ever on Surfside beach and you see a guy that looks like he wants to throw a Frisbee by all means, stop. 

 

 

Big Red Drum and Shark Was the Catch...

Another beach camping trip is in the books. Once again the fishing was good at Pop-Pop's secret beach spot but this time instead of just enjoying our own company most of the time like we usually do we were joined by Rose and family who live locally, the Zamora's who drove down for a day and we spent a very enjoyable afternoon getting to know my cousin Caleb and his girlfriend Angelica who live and work in Houston.    

 Fishing score for this trip was this 32 inch red drum which I threw back because he was out of the slot and because I had bought my fishing license online this week and had not received the red drum tag yet, another 20 inch slot drum which I kept, four throw back trout and a small pile of those whiting which we really enjoy eating.   

If you note in the photo the tail of the drum is a bit chewed so there's something bigger out there. Also when I looked down his throat to remove my hook I spotted a shrimp tail lure with a pretty fresh dead mullet that was apparently embellishing the presentation. I removed it along with the 15 or 20 pound trailing length of braided line. I had seen a couple of guys 100 yards or so up the beach catching mullet for bait and fishing so I expect they had lost this rig and he gobbled it off the bottom.   

Come on everyone! Let us fill our pants up with sand. With some increased wind speed a little tropical weather blooming up from the Pacific water turned from Bluewater Highway blue to sandy green. That held the trout and Spanish Mac bite back a bit but that's a good signal for the fall red drum run. 

  One odd thing this trip was that seems our propane was not as efficient as usual. We typically run solar power all day and at night use the generator for air conditioning and that has been taking 3 to 4 five gallon tanks over a three night trip. This time we used five tanks. I'll have to investigate this discrepancy. 

Miguel and Milo stay close while the rest of the crew heads out. 

The red drum makes about the 14th species of screaming beast I have subdued this year but Mary caught this 26 inch black tip shark.  

Once when my son Morgan sent me photos of big red drum he had caught surf fishing I responded with the observation that he really knew how to catch them. 

He responded, "I learned from the best." That made me feel good. 

This trip I asked Mary what her childhood memories of the beach were ad she replied it was all the adults being amazed that a little girl could throw a cast net and catch mullet for bait. 

Somewhere, someplace someone might be saying, "Hey, you remember that little girl that caught all those mullet?" That just goes to show that beach memories are good memories.  

 

Surprised by a Swimmer...

I stood waist deep on a sandbar in a calm morning surf facing West fishing with the wind and current. I was casting dead shrimp under a popping cork and had scored a keeper trout and a few big bull whiting. Scanning back to the East making sure there was no fish activity I spotted a guy about 50 yards away swimming up out of no where from roughly the direction of Cedar Key, Florida. .

He staggered up on the sand bar and I asked, "where did you come from?"

Panting from the swim he said, "flipped my kayak."

I asked, "you ok?"

He said, "all good now."

I said, " how long you been swimming?"

He said, "I'll probably need a good nap."

He continued ashore where there were a couple of buddies parked on the sand near the waterline. I'm not sure he had launched from that spot since I had been out early and not noticed them but the sheriff and police soon appeared and checked the swimmer out. I'd guess the buddies reported him missing

After a bit I'm still fishing and the buddies set out in their kayak mounted up on it in a way that brought to mind riding double horseback. Like the swimmer, who was stretched out in the back of the truck for his much needed nap there was not a life jacket in sight.

The swimmer did apologize if he messed up my fishing but I told him it was ok.

Beach Camping on the Gulf of Mexico...

 I always keep an eye on fishing reports and our recent travels have kept us from good beachfront conditions but we managed to make it to Surfside beach this weekend for clear water, calm winds, cloud cover to keep it a bit cooler and biting fish. 

Here's 7 whiting and one speckled trout that I caught on dead shrimp under a popping cork. Those big ones are about as large as they get. They are like a panfish with no restriction. We ate them and then I caught another little bunch of whiting which we cleaned and froze to bring home for another day.   

All I ever really wanted to do was play tuba and camp on the beach with a girl and that's pretty much where we are at these days. The Brazoria County part of the beach is free camping. There are no hook ups but with our solar and a generator to run the AC at night we get by. There was one day when it was a bit cloudy and we had to turn on the generator earlier in the evening but that's ok. One propane tank runs the AC 12 hours. I'm up fishing long before that but the afore mentioned girl usually sleeps 12 hours. 

Here's the catch of the trip. It's a 25 inch Spanish Mackerel. Spanish macks usually like a flashy lure and because of the teeth you better have a short steel leader. This one hit a dead shrimp under a popping cork. It made several runs stripping line from my reel but I landed it, filleted it and we had it for supper. 

I think last trip the fish wanted all baits fished on the bottom but this trip the popping cork was the ticket as everything was swimming high in the water column and wanted the bait suspended. 

I think that mack makes the 13th species I have caught this year. I hung several ladyfish which is a member of the tarpon family and not good eating but with their twisting and jumping never added them to the catch list.  

Friends from church Peter and Sherry joined us for a day. Sherry grew up on south Padre and Peter is a long time surf fisherman. They are beach people like us and after talking up the beach while we stood around in the church foyer we finally made a day and piled up the whiting and they shared our mack supper. 

Late summer is clear water time. River flows are down and so far tropical activity is non existent for the middle of the Texas peak season so the water was swimming pool clear. Photos don't do it justice. 

We never had much rain but thunderstorms rolled all around us and we saw a double rainbow and clouds were like paintings. 

We have a big trip planned the end of September but hopefully we can make one more beach trip before this. Maybe the pleasant conditions and fishing will hold. 

 

Gimmie a Spoonful...

 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.   

      

Beach Front Camping Season 2025 Opens...

 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. 

 

  

  

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. 

If plans hold next camping trip is the beach. 

 

    

Mardi Gras Galveston...

It was cold, windy and wet but that did not stop us from enjoying a the 12pm parade this past Saturday on the beautiful, choppy, gray Gulf of Mexico for Galveston Mardi Gras. 

We had a good spot, floats were great, caught several specular throws and there were lots of tuba in the marching bands. 

They let you put your RV on the Seawall starting on Thursday morning before the parade at 5am. I talked to the fellow in the camper across the street behind Rose and Miguel and he said at 5am Thursday he was unable to secure a spot close to friends he was trying to camp with. Looks like fun but I don't think I can get Cathy up this early to get a good place. Maybe next year at least bring a BBQ grill.   

Waiting for the parade.

Getting drunk on Vienna Sausage. 

He's making a good Mardi Gras Man. 

Who dat in the mask? 

If I mention it enough when you google the Gulf of Mexico my blog will be one of the hits. 

These beads will be used at the church Mardi Gras, Tuesday March 4th at 5:30. I'm cooking gumbo.  

Throw me something mista! 

Tuba! 

They ended up canceling the 6pm parade because of rain but opened up the area of the Strand requiring tickets to free admission. We headed home as relocating this circus might have been a Mardi Gras too far.