Vamanos

....El Estomago

Snook Sandwich

I went fishing with the New Sheriff the other day.

He wanted to go early, up the Brownsville Ship Channel looking for snook, wanted to leave around six AM, to which I reluctantly agreed. D and Jen (Ms. Sheriff) were having a yard sale, so it seemed like the perfect time to duck out. But then I decided, ahhhh, fuck it, six AM is way to early, so I laid around like a big bed pig until around ten or so, when I was awaken from a soporific sleep by the whistling wind outside rattling the windows.

Spring time is normally a windy season here on the coast when the late season northers march their way south, only to meet equally powerful high pressure ridges advancing from the distant tropics, colliding in a leviathan shoving match which usually creates severe weather along its boundaries somewhere up there, but leaves us with only a violent howling south wind that pushes great quantities of dust and dirt derived from the vast loma expanses to the south, and the dredge spoils heaped up along the ship channel fouling everything in a thirty mile radius. I spent over two hours cleaning Menagerie washing fine silt, leaves and garbage that had blown onto the foredeck and under the cockpit seats, only to have the winds return the next day and start the process all over. I felt like Atlas rolling the stone up a hill only to have it roll back down, over and over again….

So the New Sheriff called and said that he was going fishing anyhow, and did I want to go? Ah, what the hell. I grabbed a few things and decided to go flog the water for a bit anyway. We stopped and got ice, braving the spring break crowds. About ten thirty or so I cracked open a breakfast Tecate.

The New Sheriffs’ skiff is an ancient Jon Boat, resurrected from its final resting place at his dads house in Florida. The Rusty Duck has a center console, with a steering wheel that’s broken off, and is nothing more now than a stub, but it still turns, still works. It has an vintage Johnson Seahorse Sixty Horse engine that makes it go like a bat out of hell. Most importantly, mounted on the bow is a trolling motor. Now this particular trolling motor did not come straight out of the pages of Bass Pro catalog…no, this trolling motor has seen far better days, but it still works, and that’s the important thing. The corroded cover has been wrenched off, and the New Sheriff now has to use a cut off ax handle, jammed into the pinion gear to change it from forward to reverse, but he’s got the whole cantankerous thing under control.

Hell, I used to have a skiff like this one. Named “the pickle”, it was a modicum of idiosyncratic behavior. Like Steinbecks Sea Cow, it generally ran, but it generally never ran right. It did however lead us to catch a lot of fish.

And so it is with the New Sheriffs boat.

Like myself, he has fallen thoroughly in love with catching the mysterious snook that live up in the reaches of the Brownsville Ship Channel. We’re fortunate to live in the only place along the Gulf (outside Florida) where there is a population of them. I discovered fishing for them about ten years ago or so, when during a particularly strong cold front that had us shut out of the Laguna Madre, we decided to explore the Ship Channel and the adjacent shrimp basin. I was bored with drowning shrimp for mangrove snapper, so I tied on a topwater bait and mindlessly plopped it close to the shore along the rocks. After the ripple dissipated, I twitched the lure, made it do a big GLUG when instantly; WHAM!, the water swirled, and my rod doubled in a “U” shape. It was like tying into a largemouth black bass with a supercharger up its ass….

The fight lasted no more than about thirty seconds before the fish cut the line with its razor sharp gill plate.

I fell instantly in love.

Now launching the New Sheriffs’ boat in this gale, years later, I remembered each snooking trip, each savored experience, each one as much about the adventure as about the catching. However, I couldn’t help hoping that I might again tie into one of these rockets. ….

Heading out south towards the open channel from the Highway 48 ramp, past the Saturday crowds who were braving the sandblasting wind, throwing great hunks of mullet into the water in hopes of catching a big red or maybe black drum, or maybe even, a snook, the New Sheriff deftly steered the little skiff with the stub steering wheel through the chocolate whitecapped water. Other gente lined the shoreline crabbing with string and turkey necks. Once out into the open Ship Channel, the New Sheriff carefully put the Rusty Duck on plane as we bounce along the south shoreline.

Cutting back across the channel, we stop along the north shore, where we toss soft plastic baits up against the rocky slope. Almost instantly, something smashes my bait, doubling the road. After about ten minutes, I land a Jack Crevelle about ten pounds.

One of the strongest fish around, Jack Crevelle can make a wreck out of even the best fishing gear. I return this one to the water, and the New Sheriff and I have a laugh, and a fresh Tecate.

Working our way up the channel, we ease down a side cut lined with mangroves, one I used to fish in years ago. We watch a belted kingfisher flying along the shoreline, working the oyster lined banks. In here the persistent wind is almost calm, shielded on both sides by high banks and vegetation, mesquite and retama trees lining the banks, creating a cool and shady hideaway. We work the spot hard, but don't find any fish. That’s OK though, because the New Sheriff is a great guy, full of interesting stories, and so the intense silence is punctuated only occasionally by observations and commentary. The way any good fishing trip should be. Anyway, I’m always in a reflective mood on any good fishing trip, remembering friends and experiences from past trips, adding the current one to the collage.

We venture back into the wind, and working along a wall, just past the granary for awhile, trying to get the mangrove snapper to bite, but the wind is so violent that it is hard to get the bait down where it needs to be. Finally the New Sheriff catches a fat sixteen incher, which he immediately deposites into the fishbox where it protests by smaking its tail against the platic begging to be released. No dice fucker.. The wind here is so bad, that it was blows seagull shit and feathers off of the dock and down on top of us, and we are afraid that our open beers might get compromised, so we put away the trolling motor, and steam up to the end of the Ship Channel, near where long ago, was held the La Frontera Blessing of the Fleet (and Shrimp Festival)…that however is a story for another time.

Up here in the unprotected turning basin, the wind is blowing way too hard to fish effectively, so we flee and duck under the Montagine Fuel docks, where I used to fish with El Estomigo, Mr. Vamanos hisself. A former outdoor TV celebrity, we’d fish for huge snook there late at night, misbehaving badly in the process.

The New Sheriff and I cast up under the shady pilings to the snook we see laying there, finally enticing two small fat ones to bite, both of which we turn back. By this time it is about two in the afternoon or so, and we figure we better on meander back so we could get ready to do a full assault on Matamoros Mexico with the Ladies that evening….

Back out on the open water, and one last fishing spot. I was recounting a story about something, as I casually flipping the soft plastic bait up toward the shoreline. On the first cast a sizeable snook smacked the bait. I lead him to the net, deciding to keep this one for fish sandwiches….

The wind has now increased to a frantic speed, and the channel is eerily, obnoxiously obscured by blowing dust, which works its wretched way into every clothing opening, all of our pores, into open eyes, ears noses and mouths. We pass a bay boat, as it chugs along, deep in the hole. I guess they are afraid to get up on plane for fear of running into something. It is like a brown terribly toxic and abrasive fog. I feel like some sort of fucking aquatic Lawrence of Arabia or something, lost in a blowing sand/shit storm. I could barely make out the side channel leading to the boat ramp….

My eyes felt sandpapered for three days afterward…..

Back at the docks, I try to drive the Rusty Duck on to the trailer, but it is a losing battle. Like my own skiff of long ago, it only wants its owner and nothing else. We finally load up , and crack open the final Tecates of the trip, washing about a pound of silt and sand, down our throats.

I wasn’t hungry for over an hour after that……

Muy Pendejo

Pendejos and the PMF

It’s twenty eight miles from beach access 5 to the Port Mansfield Jetties. I used to drive that long stretch of beach once a week, more often if there was a turtle, dolphin or other chingaso reported up there. On weekends it could be hell. First, you have to make your way through the throngs of partiers between beach access 5 and 6…mostly folks from Brownsville, all parked just above high water, barbecues sending fragrant smells of fajitas, costillas and hamburgesas wafting on the breeze, making everyone inside a two hundred yard radius lust for Miller and Bud light….in great quantities. Children running amok, back and forth between the waters edge and the parked cars….vintage piece o’ shit vans (like I used to own), lowriders, troques with elaborate murals painted on the tailgates, tiny wheels dug deep into the sand, prime candidates for later towing out…the whole nine yards. And the adults, well, they’re generally unconcerned with anything more than swilling gallons of beerungas, sitting in circles getting thoroughly shitfaced.

Usually on this stretch, there’s always at least one, and often times several vehicles stuck in loose sand, throwing huge plumes of flying sand as they futilely gun the engine, spinning the wheels until ultimately, they’re stuck down to the frame, up to the doors. There’s a few “towing services”, who will unstick you, for around a hundred bucks in this area, which is still pretty close to town. The last time I ventured up the beach (and I hadn’t been there in a long time), there was a motorhome stuck in the sand. Big bastard, new, with a buncha spring breakers looking forlornly at the rear dullies stuck deep in the sand.

During the season, the “Winter Texans” line the beach from here to the Mansfield Cut, throwing bait into the surf, hoping to load up on our gamefish….mostly whiting, but sometimes reds, trout, shark and jacks. I’ve seen them take huge stingrays and toss them on the beach. I usually stop and try and explain that they shouldn’t ought to do that, the stingray is an important part of the whole system, and besides it’s a gentle fish that would much rather get out of your way than bury its stinger in your foot, in your leg. I try and explain to them that the stingrays stinger is strictly defensive, that if someone were to step in the middle of my back (my kids excluded) that I’d get pissed too, and probably try and whack ‘em right in the balls to get ‘em off….it doesn’t do much good though, cause the Winter Texans know just about every goddamn thing there is to know, and of course the only good stingray is a dead stingray, hell, everyone knows they’re dangerous as all get-out…I’ve even overheard the pinche bastards discussing the fact that they catch enough fish down here every winter to take “back home” for fish frys all year long. Bet they wouldn’t like it too much if I were to go on up to “back home” during the spring and summer, maybe Minnasooooota, and rape, pillage and plunder all of their goddamn walleye so that I could have fish fries all winter down here…

Just past all of the madness, the beach opens up as you pass a wide expanse of hurricane wash-over flats and pristine dune fields. Past the end of the paved road. Sometimes coyotes hunt along the beach, and flocks of Sanderlings, little legs running furiously, chase the water as it laps at the shoreline. I always watch for groups of gull and terns diving in the water, giving away the telltale location of feeding big fish.

About sixteen miles north of the end of the road, a shrimp boat is slowly sinking into the sand between the second and third sandbars. About all you can see now are the outriggers, top of the wheelhouse and the antennas, just visible above the surf. I was there the morning after the night it went aground. The Coast Guard had chased it, and once they hit shallow water, the shrimpboat crew bailed, and swam / waded ashore, where they were promptly apprehended. Just to the south was the reason why. A stretch of gillnet over a half mile long lay on the beach, jammed with hundreds of sharks, mostly sand sharks, blacktips and spinners, but there was one big blue about seven or eight feet long, and in among the sharks, a bull redfish about forty something inches in length. I untangled the red, looked at his gills and eyes, which were still bright red, and threw him in the bed of the truck, a fish destined to become blackened redfish and tasty bowls of ceviche.

Up here, the beach gets strewn with all manners of goodies. Once, D found a sonde, a buoy normally dropped from an aircraft, a regular old data gathering tube washed up on the beach. She sent it off to the address on the side, and got a 250 dollar reward. There’s gold in them thar beaches. And just north of course, is the nudie beach.

Marked by a spray painted giant log of driftwood (how apropos) is a stretch of beach that has been designated since I can’t remember when, as the naked beach. Of course, to a normal guy, a naked beach conjures up images of big breasted bronze blonde bathing beauties, lounging lugubriously on sweltering white sand beaches, bodies begging for suntan oil.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

In the winter, most often, the nudie beach is populated by knarly old viejitos, refugees from the lands of endless snows, people who popularized nudist camps back in the 60’s. Now in their sixties themselves, they are leathery skinned bastards, women with saggy wrinkled tits and veryclose veins, the men, hunch backed and ancient, with flaccid ballsacks and weenies atrophied from eons of disuse. There used to be one who would sit in a lawn chair and smile and wave as we’d pass, just as happy as a pig in shit. In the summer, the naked beach is inhabited mainly by gays who ply their wretched morality far from the disapproving stares of town.

Just north of the nudie beach is an area that we all affectionately call “the narrows”. Here, the sand dunes extend down to a narrow beach which, at high tide, and during big storms is inundated, and impossible to cross without driving through the water. It is an odd area, out of place with the rest of the beach. At low tides, the prairie terrace, the ancestral consolidated base that the island rests on, a material which resembles mudstone is exposed. I have hauled ass through this area, screaming down the beach at sixty miles an hour plus, when big storms threaten to close off this section rather than get trapped north until the norther blew herself out. I always puzzled over why the narrows were there, until one day I was looking at a map of the island trying to determine where the old Singer ranch had been. It suddenly occurred to me that the narrows lie directly east of the mouth of the Arroyo Colorado, and when sea level was much lower, during the last ice age, this was the course of the river channel. Voila!

The island is segmented in various sections after large hurricanes breach it in numerous places. These areas of wash over eventually heal, but can always be identified by their lack of dunes and dune fields. One such wash over occurs just north of the narrows. The last time it was breached, there was a salt water stream which ran between the open Gulf of Mexico and the Laguna Madre which you had to ford in order to get to the Mansfield Cut. Those of us who’ve lived here our lives know how to do it, and if in doubt, get out and wade across to determine where the best crossing is. There’s almost always some space where the sand starts to fill in first as the river grows less and less pronounced, before finally being totally strangled off, and the wash over flat begins to heal to pre hurricane topography. On one trip some pendejo just decided to ford his new Ford wherever through the stream, and it sat in cockeyed mute testament to his lack of higher intelligence.

Of course, there are lots of pendejos who think they know better. Last time I drove the beach with D there was a maroon truck who passed us going about sixty or so (yea I know I do it, but I know when to), bouncing, vaulting up into the air and almost fishtailing out of control as it disappeared up the beach. We figured we’d come up on it flipped over. Later we saw the same truck up at the PMF jetties, with the driver pouring salt water on the engine, which had apparently overheated. Dumbass. They flew past us on the way back, with a sealed Texaco Oil Co. barrel which we had seen on the way up, a barrel that had washed ashore during some big offshore storm, one filled with probably some sort of toxic shit like benzene or hexane or something worse. Anyway, they were hauling ass again, with the truck sometimes becoming airborne, barrel jumping up independently in the truck bed as the truck careened almost out of control through the shallow water along the shore, sending huge roostertails high into the blue winter sky. We figured these guys life expectancy couldn’t be too long. For sure their vehicle wouldn’t probably last the week.

This far up the beach the flotsam and jetsam become large and odd. People can’t too well salvage the huge tanks, buoys and other industrial crap that washes off the decks of ships, boats and oil rigs, and so the beach hosts a graveyard of shit. Recently I found the remains of a pedal boat, the kind you see in ponds and little lakes washed up on the beach and wondered who the fuck would ever attempt to use one of those thing around here? Another time the beach was littered with computer monitors.

Finally you reach the Port Mansfield South Jetty, the Cut, PMF. This dredged cut through the island was created about fifty years ago, and since it’s not natural, has the tendancy to silt in. That’s the way it is right now. Without intervention, the island will heal herself again, and totally close off the cut, and once again one could (theoretically) drive all the way from the Brazos Santiago Pass to Aransas Pass along the beach. When the cut was first opened up, dredged, the remains of an old sunken Spanish ship yielded artifacts, gold and silver, but the state stepped in and claimed it all for itself, screwing my friend Billy K out of a fortune. I used to camp up at the cut, sometimes floundering at night along the channel edge for big old saddle blanket fish. Other times, I’d paddle across to go surf with friends, a caravan of gypsies on surfboards, the lead board being an ancient Dewey Weber longboard, with an ice chest of beers balanced on the nose, gingerly paddling across keeping a sharp lookout for the chingos of sharks that inhabit the cut.

I had a friend from Oregon that I’d fish with up there long ago. We’d fish in the channel, catching all kinds of fish. Jacks, Kingfish and Mangrove snapper, along with the ever present scourge, hardhead catfish. One time he got so mad at a catfish that he’d caught, one that had swallowed his bait, that he kicked it in disgust. Of course the catfish had extended his filthy, poison filled pectoral fin spines in self defense, extended them straight out, and when my friend kicked the wretched thing it drove the spine through his sneaker and deep into his big toe. My friend promptly fell down on the hard granite, writhing in burning pain, screaming “I’ve been hit!”…..”this is really it!”.

I had a hard time keeping a straight face…….

Pendejo

Sorry Faith, there is no Santa Claus

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