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Monday, October 17, Galveston, Gulf of Mexico, Full moon,
In 22 years of swimming here, I have never seen the water so clear. I could throw a chartreuse tennis ball 15 yards, swim underwater, the underfish, and snatch it just before the maw of my greedy golden, Cheri, clamps on. A gorgeous sight, an orange retriever doggie paddling in a blue green sea, against the setting sun, seen from 6 feet under water.
The Texas Gulf was never meant to be transparent though. The littoral currents from the Mississippi River deposited silts and clays for eons, building up the Louisiana delta, and the barrier island formations, including Galveston Island. The catastrophic erosion experienced in recent decades in part results from the capture and redirection of the Mississippi River current, plus the erection of breakwaters, groin works and dams that have reduced the sediment deposits along the Louisiana-Texas Coast. Jettees leading into the Port of Houston have starved Galveston Island and the southeast coast of Texas of enormous volumes of sand, resulting in historic erosion rates along the public beaches. Some beaches here erode 30 feet in a single year.
Of course if unscrupulous real estate developers, underwritten by state and federal insurance programs, did not slap million-dollar beach condos on the dunes, the erosion problem would remain moot.
Nonetheless, it was a great swim tonight. I saw the sandy bottom, which exhibited a wonderfully textural pattern, resembling the skin of a golf ball. There must be a great physics lesson there, but enough for now.
Paz
Mark
Aphorism maybe, but the sea is protean, changing, never the same one day to the next.
Two days after Hurricane Rita the rapacious salt marsh mosquitos emerged, blood thirsty, making the beach trek a penance.
Two days later the dragonflies hatched, big blue and green ones with wing spans six inches across.
One day later, no mosquitos!
The Gulf was calm, so the dogs and I swam out past the third sand bar, over a quarter-mile form shore and still not over our heads. I was racing the male dog for a stick thrown into the waves, spitting in his eye--a guy thing--when I caught a mouth of jelly fish! Not the lethal species, but still with enough sting to make my tongue numb. Some would say a good thing. We swam deeper until we were surrounded by a school of cabbage head jelly fish (stomolophus meleagris). They will disappear by tomorrow. But for today, time to get out of the water.
Paz
Mark
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