Mack the Knife

About a month ago there was a derelict houseboat at the marina over by the buccaneer. Big old flat-bottomed nasty thing, corroded outdrive units encrusted in a six inch thick layer of barnacles and oysters, sitting forlornly against the dock. I had a brief wondering from sanity, probably driven by the heat and humidity and thought about offering a few bucks for it and starting a restoration job, maybe turning it into a bit of rental property, or better yet a poor mans getaway condo, anchored out in the bay, up by Three Islands or somewhere. Sanity soon returned though, and I decided against it. It’s hard enough maintaining any vessel, let alone another project.

Someone else bought it, but it turns out the guy was a major con artist who mostly paid his way with hot checks, including one for the houseboat. By the time the local authorities caught on to him, he had convinced a property owner to let him tie up the scow over in the shallow water area of the Port Isabel fingers. This area is notoriously shallow, and even skinny draft bay boats can hardly access it except on big high tides. It’s been a constant battle with the City, the Corps of Engineers and the owners to try and get this spot dredged deeper, but to no avail.

That’s because the local dredger is a pirate too. The problem is, no one around here ever wants to do things according to the regulations. And in my experience, almost all coastal communities are like that, so it’s not just Port Isabel. BK the local dredger was just shut down over on the Island for dumping dredge material into an area of sensitive dune vegetation where he promised he wouldn’t. Sea oats, sea purslane and beach croton, with its pretty yellow flowers all now under a blanket of sand, mud and rubble. Now BK has to obtain a five hundred dollar permit so that he can legally bury sensitive beach vegetation. BK moans the fact that the Army Corps of Engineers makes it so hard for him to obtain permits to do anything. “They’re picking on me” he says.

All coastal communities are a tidal gathering of pirates, bandits and thieves – individuals on the endangered species list. I finally got the complete story of the guy who bought the boat, told to me by my friend Mark who owns the Marina. Mark is the quintessential optimist ready to help out anybody in need. So he gave a job to someone he met in church, in Sunday school who wanted to learn to be a draftsman, but who really wanted a construction company of his own. But what he really wanted was a derelict houseboat that he could make payments on, using hot checks. When they closed down CRC marine across the harbor, the boat showed up, and Mark warned him about it, but he made an outside deal with the owner, paying in rubber checks. When his rubber check writing extended to almost all facets of the community, he fled town and the houseboat sunk at the dock over on the shallow side, creating an oil slick and alerting the Coast Guard, Texas General Land Office and others dedicated to preserving the quality of the coastal waters. They were all waiting ready to pounce, collect some revenue to line their own pockets with, but there was nobody to pay the bill.

So the owner of the condo commissions the infamous Yamaha John, better know as “Mack the knife” to handle the problem. He figures, “hey, out of sight…out of mind, at least the fucker ain’t in my backyard anymore”.

Dirty deeds…done dirt cheap. You only hire Mack the knife if you need to creatively take care of a problem without an obvious legal solution. Like right now, the City of South Padre Island is in a quandary about what to do for an upcoming event where they need the use of a boat ramp that’s currently silted in. This event involves the media, local and national, ESPN and lots of potential revenue. But first, the ramp needs to be dredged, the whole thing depends on that. The organizers have been screwing around, figuring ways to make money off of the thing, so now, there’s insufficient time to obtain the necessary legal permits. They’ll probably hire Mack the knife to do a bit of midnight dredging. Most likely, he’ll drive an old boat on a trailer with a big old powerful hulk of an outboard engine down to the ramp in the middle of the night, back the whole thing down into the water and begin work, shoving and revving the motor in and out of gear, while still attached to the trailer, progressively backing deeper and deeper as the prop wash cut gets deeper and wider, throwing a churning, boiling plume of sediment visible all the way across the bay, extending to the shores of Port Isabel, slick in the moonlight, scouring out the shallow area so that the boats can get in and out. Problem solved.

Mack the knife decides to take the old girl out into the Laguna Madre somewhere and just let nature take its course. Maybe up around Three Islands, an area that’s becoming a repository of homeless boats, in fact, I’ll bet Mack the knifes handiwork is already part of this area, which reminds me of a marine-mafia graveyard. Anyway, he has some of his cronies pump the boat out, getting it to finally float again, and starts to pull it out of the fingers, edging towards the open shallow lagoon, when to nobodies surprise, out pop the agencies like a bunch of flies on cowshit. Swarming all over Mack the knife, they demand to know where he’s taking the boat. Mack thinks fast, and tells them he’s just towing it over to Southpoint Marina.

The constabulary calls Southpoint, who of course doesn’t know anything at all about it. Out come the handcuffs, and they take old Mackie off to the graybar hotel, leaving the boat on a sandbar just outside the channel entrance where we always bring Le Menagerie in and out of the Bay to our slip in the deepwater part of the fingers. A mute testament to how things are done in coastal communities. An effigy to the individuals, pirates, thieves and scoundrels, who I would much rather see inherit the coast, rather than regulators, bureaucrats and politicians, who are the true pirates, thieves and scoundrels. I hope the houseboat gets left there as a monument to this dying breed, till it eventually falls apart, claimed by the tides, wind and salt, but I know it won’t.