Dutch & LuLu

Here’s a dramatic demonstration of why we need a continuous dune line. Next time you’re at the beach pick up some sand and stare at it.  Get a good close look.  See the tiny white grains; they look solid enough.  But make a fist, turn your hand over, and open it up a bit.  That sand’ll run through your fingers slick as a whistle.  We all know this, and yet we think our island starts at the waters edge.  It doesn’t start at the low tide line, or the high tide line, or even at the “vegitation line” as defined by the Texas Open Beaches Act.  The island starts where the plants start.  That dune covered in vegitation as much of a boundry between the surf and dry land as you can get on a sandbar, which don’t forget, is where we all live.  Our beaches look beautiful, but soak them down and let the swell give them a kick and they flow just like the shot I’ll be tossin’ back the next time I hear there’s a storm brewing out in the Gulf.

ps.  Thanks to Jerry Wilson for taking this and several other dramatic shots posted here.

Welcome Ike back to South Padre Island.  This time it’s the debris that’s drifted down from Galveston.  It may be littered with sunglasses and soda cans, but there were also lots of nice drift seeds and shells.  Until Saturday, I’d only ever found one star palm seed and one mermaids purse, and really Diane found those.  Well, we found tons of both!  We brought back about a bucket full of drift seeds, tumbled pumice, shells and even a couple small coconuts!  I spent most of the afternoon washing and sorting it all.  Now, if it would just stop raining, we’ll get it all dried out, and wait till you see what we’re going to do with it!

The swell from Ike has been washing our beaches hard for a while now. Our maintenance crew has taken up the mat that leads thru our beach access and built a sand berm across the path. Amazingly it has been washed down both sides, but didn’t get wet enough to really flow & wash away. Once the water came over the berm, it flowed downhill along the path all the way back to the shower at the restrooms!

This is really nothing, though, compared to the scene just a bit north of there, where a condo at Hibiscus Street had a reasonable dune behind it, but without proper vegitation. The swell has been cresting it, hitting their bulkhead, and flowing downhill from there through this poor place: