Monday, March 9, 2015

Who wants to go fishing?

I spent half the day on Sunday (despite the rain and gloom) in San Leon, a small fishing town located on Galveston Bay wedged in between Kemah and Texas City.   The day started innocuously enough with Julian (our photographer) picking me up for a Mexican Breakfast at Taqueria Arandas (yummy)!

It turns out that Julian had been looking on HAR.com for fishing camp getaways in the Bay Area, having graduated from Dickinson High School many (many) years ago!  He found a little house on a private lake just a few blocks from the Bay.  So, we took a drive to look at it.

Driving around San Leon made me realize just how many "fishing holes" there are down there!  Not to mention the restaurants, bars, clubs, taverns, saloons, and the Boardwalk nearby for lots of entertainment.

As a child, I had some cousins who had houses right on the bay with private piers and boats, but lost their piers in Hurricane Carla.  Some were rebuilt, only to be lost again in Hurricane Ike.  Ugh, some rebuilt again, some haven't.

What's really interesting is that the bay used to be lined with little fishermen bait camps, but now, mega bucks has moved in and build huge expensive homes on the water, pushing out the poor little fishermen!  What is up with that?  Is it that people with money have been watching too much "Wicked Tuna" on the National Geographic Channel?  (Some of those tunas they catch yield $10-15,000 dollars each!  Yes, for one fish!)  That kind of return would make you want to be a professional fisherman.

Croaker Anyone?
But that's Wicked "Tuna," not Wicked "Croaker!"  (I seem to remember catching lots of croakers in that bay . . . but oh well, catching a croaker is better than catching nothing at all.)  And I doubt that croaker fishing has pushed people to build mansions on the bay.

Oh well, could I just find a little fishing camp where I could enjoy the weekends?  It's only about a 45 minute drive from my home in Pearland.  Driving around the "cheaper" areas revealed a collection of characters riding around on bicycles, golf carts, and the like.  Most seemed to be dirty old men with long white hair.  Crusty.old.fishermen.  I wonder how many had been Realtors in their former lives?

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