“The Friedrich Crossing, North Fork Guadalupe River ”
The spring-fed North Fork Guadalupe River generally has a solid flat rock or gravel bottom and a very shallow water depth. Adjacent land owners on the river, over time, have been building small rock dams in order to have deeper water for swimming and fishing holes. This painting has in it one of those small rock dams.
In the last issue, I told the story of our (my wife, Corinne, and I) weekend trip to Port Aransas, in June of 1966, to celebrate my recent passing of the architectural examination and becoming a registered architect. There were four big events that happened to us on that trip. In the last issue, I told only about the first big event, which happened the first morning when things didn’t go quite as planned. Now, I will tell you about the other three big events on that trip.
After the disaster of the first morning and our encounter with the ferry, I reread the instruction booklet a little closer on how to sail our new Styrofoam sailboard. So, after lunch at Mrs. Pete’s café, we took the sailboard down to the ship channel for another attempt to sail it. This time I got well away from the ferry. We launched the sailboard where the ship channel intersects the Inter Coastal Canal.
This time, I kept the sailboard upright and we headed north up The Inter Coastal Canal. The wind was brisk and since we were going with the incoming tide, we were really moving. It didn’t take long to pass the Port Aransas Lighthouse Tower. Along the way, we encountered a guy in a small boat who had caught something that was big enough to pull him and his boat down the canal.
We were moving fast and it was so much fun that I didn’t realize how far we had gone until I looked back toward Port Aransas and could not see the water tower. We got the sailboard turned around and headed back. Now we were going much slower because we were going against the incoming tide. Along the way back, we saw the guy with the big something again and they were still battling it out. We didn’t get back until almost dark. We were so sunburned that it was very painful to wear any clothing.
The next day we went for a day trip on our first off shore deep sea fishing experience on Woody Woods fishing boat captained by his son Butch. That day was spent mostly stepping over the bodies on the deck of people trying to throw up everything they had eaten for the last week. Since nearly everybody on board was busy providing chum, Corinne and I were the only two to catch a fish. Corinne caught a 25 pound Jack Fish that wore her out trying to get it in. I caught a 20 pound Ling fish. We were so proud of our fishing success.
During the night, while we were asleep exhausted in our borrowed tent on the beach, a violent thunderstorm suddenly appeared about three o’clock in the morning. When I got up and looked out, lightning was striking the beach all around us. Since we were the highest objects on the beach, we had to get out of there. We could see fairly well because of the continuous lightning strikes; however, we couldn’t talk because the thunder was just simply deafening.
In the torrential downpour, we dumped everything in the car and somehow got the tent on top of the car. We left Port Aransas just before daylight, drenched, sunburned, exhausted and with sand in our mouths, ears, hair and in every crevice and private place.
Cheers,
Acree
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