Our first week in South Texas, 2017

Arriving in Texas we set up on our rv park. Friends came over and after the usual and welcome hugs we settled in and waited for the cold front to pass.  A north wind blew with gusts over forty miles an hour and the temperatures plunged to a cold twenty-seven.

Two days later the winds switched and became southerly bringing above normal temperatures reaching eighty degree. Our first trip out was to the Gulf Coast Gem and Mineral Society’s shop. It was the first time we had seen our friend Mark, who is the shop foreman and of course we had to show and tell of each of our past years finds.

Mark had been busy acquiring quite a lot of Turkish agate, buying from a dealer he found on Facebook. Our biggest find has been the Indonesian blue amber gifted to us from a former student Rick. He works on a deep sea drilling platform in Indonesia), collects rocks and also does lapidary.

As to the shop, we don’t have a lot to do this winter as we got so much done last year in our summer studio. Still we needed to cut a block of black jade down to size and try to figure out how to work the blue amber.

The following day we went to Lamar looking for whopping cranes. There weren’t any in the usual fields but we did get glimpses of one feeding on a grassy berm. A flock of rosette spoonbills landed in a small pond but the images was from a long way away and their beautiful pink plumage didn’t image properly.

We spent a third day at the Mission River, where we tried our luck fishing and cast netting for mullet. The fishing was just that fishing, as the blue crabs stole our bait as fast as we threw out. We tried to stop several others places but the winds were too strong.

We did find a new kayak launch spot near a giant shrimp farm. It’s one of several enclosures where they raise colossal shrimp. The only place where we thought we had a chance to catch fish was at the Sailboat Channel. Again, the blue crabs stole our bait and so it was another dinner of cornbread. Clear skies