At Home on the Road

By: rlogan1155

Feb 23 2013

Tags: birding, boat tours, Brownsville, dolphins, pelicans, RVing, shrimp, shrimp boats, south padre island, Texas, travel

Category: RV Living - Full Time Experiences

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South Padre Island, on the Gulf of Mexico at the most southerly tip of Texas is a two hour bus ride from our park. This is totally a tourist  destination with lots of beach shops and restaurants. Beach condos spring up along the shoreline blocking beach access and replacing quaint beach houses that used to cover the island.

wheel of an old boat

tourist hang out

fishing boats

Fishing boats fill the marina and plenty of tour boats wait to take passengers out bay fishing,  dolphin watching or just touring the bay.

the tour boat in the slip

dancing to the music

It was here that our group from the park arrived for a 4 hour tour of the Brownsville harbor (I couldn’t help thinking of Gilligans Island, the old TV show, as we boarded). All the free beer you could drink made for a happy crowd, but as I never developed a taste for beer it didn’t do me much good.

what’s out there?

at the bow

you never know what you might see

Brownsville is the biggest port in the US, connected to the bay and the Gulf  by a man made  ship channel, dredged in the thirties (took ten years to complete) opening up a 17 mile long deep water channel for ocean going freighters. Constant dredging keeps the channel open.  Unfortunately we were not allowed to take pictures in the channel because of Home Land Security but there were plenty of other photo ops along the way.

heron nesting

laughing gulls

pelicans roosting

Main industries of the port are building of gulf oil rigs, international shipping and salvaging of ocean going ships. We saw them dismantling old ships from top down to the water line, grinding up the steel into silver dollar size chunks and loading it onto ships to be sent to Houston to be made into massive sheet metal rolls and then sent back to Brownsville for trans- shipment around the world and returned to United States as refrigerators, stoves or cars.

take off

perching pelican

We saw lots of birds; I just love the pelicans. And we saw dolphins! Lots of them! Playing  in the wake of the boat! What a thrill!  That was the highlight of the trip for me. I’ve never seen dolphins in the wild before, they are truly amazing creatures.

two dolphins

The dolphin pictures were taken by Jerry Schroeder, a great photographer in the park who graciously allowed me to use them in my blog.

The shrimp boat basin was most interesting. A lot of boats were out in the gulf working but the ones that were in port were a well used bunch of boats. Unfortunately the shrimping industry in the gulf is suffering because of competition from imported and farm raised shrimp which is far cheaper than local shrimp. We buy only gulf shrimp. They’re fresh, not fed who knows what, and they taste better. Besides, we are supporting the local economy.

nets ready to go

in dry dock getting painted

nets & rope

tire bumper

rusty shrimp boats

Speaking of shrimp, we ended our trip with a meal at The Shrimp Haus, a local restaurant that serves mostly shrimp; fresh gulf shrimp, of course. I had the trio, three coconut shrimp, three pecan coated shrimp, and three fried shrimp. A great ending to a great day.

shrimp boat coming home