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Hard
to believe, but Texans haven’t always fished just for fun.
Along the coast,
from the time of the fierce Karankawas until the latter days of the 19th century,
fishing was about eating, not a recreational pursuit.
When a skilled laborer
named Tim Vought got hired in 1875 to do some repair work at the 1857-vintage
Port Aransas light
house, he soon realized that he was staying in one of the best fishing spots on
the Gulf of Mexico. Accordingly, Vought spent much of his free time fishing. Well,
acquiring fish.
The Port Aransas Museum has on display an excerpt of an
interesting letter Vought wrote home about fishing at Port A:
“We took
two cast nets with us and throwed into the bayou that runs alongside [the] light
house. In less than half an hour we caught 65 large mullet and redfish. I never
saw fish so thick before in my life.”
Of course, netting game fish long
since has been a conservation law no-no. (It’s OK to net bait, but using a net
to catch redfish would be a costly proposition these days if a game warden happened
to see it.)
Describing another venture in search of free protein, Vought
wrote that he went out with someone named Hart. This time, they “went up a little
bayou.” Again, they carried a cast net, not fishing poles.
“I rowed the
boat and Hart throwed the net,” the light house worker continued. “In about half
hour we caught large basket full of mullet and plenty redfish and drum. Some of
them were 18 inches and two feet long. We had a nice dinner.”
Despite
that, Vought concluded his letter with: “Getting sick of the sight of fish.”
Whether
Vought managed to retain his taste for seafood is not recorded. And tastes change.
Though redfish (technically red drum) is still considered a delicacy, mullet have
long since been relegated to baitfish status. And no one has ever been interested
in eating the boney fish that for a time reigned as king along the coast, the
tarpon.
That species, arguably, is the fish that spawned recreational
fishing as a Port Aransas
pastime. It happened in the mid-1880s, when work began on a set of rock jetties
intended to deepen the ship channel to Corpus
Christi. When mainlanders connected with the construction project started
seeing big schools of tarpon, it occurred to some of them that catching one of
those big fish would be good sport.
Not having boats of their own, these
“jetty people” (as the locals called them) began paying island residents $1.50
to row them out for some tarpon fishing. That, according to the Port A museum
exhibit, marked the beginning of sport fishing on the Texas
coast. In addition, it was the genesis of the fishing guide business, a pop-and-sometimes-mom
industry that still brings money to this part of Texas. |
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Port
Aransas'
Tarpon Inn in the 1920s
Postcard courtesy rootsweb.com/ %7Etxpstcrd/ |
By 1886, tarpon fishing
drew enough visitors to make opening a hotel viable. That brought the Tarpon
Inn, a two-story wooden hotel still in business. Ten years later, the small
town on the tip of Mustang Island was named Tarpon.
As word of
Texas’ mid-coastal tarpon fishery spread across the nation, a monied New York
sportsman named Ned Green came to Tarpon to fish for the town’s namesake. He had
a good time and became a frequent island visitor, in 1899 building a fishing-duck
hunting resort on Saint Joseph Island he called the Tarpon Club.
In
the early 1900s, just as automobiles had begun to replace horses as a mode of
transportation, rowboats began to give way to powerboats. Green purchased the
first motorboat ever seen on the middle coast, also paying for a guide named Ed
Cotter to travel to Chicago to get schooled in how to run and maintain an international
combustion engine.
The advent of gasoline-powered motors further enhanced
sport fishing, though the museum has a photograph documenting that the change
didn’t happen all at once. In the photo, Cotter in his powerboat is towing a string
of rowboats to a tarpon hotspot. |
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| "Papa
loved to go fishing at Port Aransas" - Sarah
Reveley 1950s photo |
| "Here's
Mamma. We always drove down in her jeep. Papa didn't want to get his Buick Special
dirty." - Sarah
Reveley, 1950s photo |
Port
Aransas got more national attention as a prime tarpon fishing distination
in 1932 with the beginning of the Tarpon Rodeo, an annual tournament that
continued until 1958. By that time, overfishing had severely depleted the tarpon
population and the rodeo got deep-sixed. But the Deep Sea Roundup, an off-shore
fishing tournament that started in 1941, is still going strong.
Few anglers
visiting Port A today
are likely to share or even comprehend old Tim Vought’s sentiment about getting
sick of the sight of fish.
© Mike
Cox - "Texas Tales"
March 11, 2011
column
See: Port
Aransas | Port
Aransas Hotels |
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