It was a beautiful weather day with temperatures in the low 80s and calm wind. We love these shorts and sandal days in the winter!
Fishermen were lining the ferry park sidewalk, and we watched as this guy was struggling to reel in a big one. His heavy-weight rod and reel where bending, and it took all his energy to bring in this fish. Some fellow fishermen showed up to help as it got closer to the surface of the water.
It took all three of them to land this big guy. We found out it was a male black drum. We also found that this fish gets its name because it makes a deep resonating drum beat that we could hear now that he was out of the water.
The appropriate pictures were taken, and the fishermen estimated it weighed around 40 pounds. Then we watched as surgery was done to deflate the fish, so he could be thrown back into the salt water. We were glad to see that he hit the water and went under instead of floating.
Our next stop was the beach at the end of the ferry park. We started the very long walk on the very uneven footing of the granite jetty. We were surprised to see that this is a mile-long jetty, and of course we had to go all the way.
We stopped about half-way, to sit and watch the pelican show taking place in the bay.
It was a great fishing location, as we watched the pelicans dive head first into the water right in front of us.
Most of their dives seemed to be successful as we watched their pouches expand as they gulped down their catch.
After getting a full belly, a pelican would be content to just float on the waves. That's when one of the resident gulls would try to hitch a ride.
In between watching the pelicans, we almost always had one or more dolphins playing in the waves in our view. We feel like we are being blessed with a day of God's wonders wandering right in front of us!
We counted as many as nine dolphins at one time, and many times we could see them quite clearly.
We never remember seeing so many dolphin sightings in our lives. It looked like they were enjoying the beautiful weather as much as we were!
Sorry for all the pictures, but we took close to 100, so this is just a tip of the dolphin iceberg.
We looked up to see that this was also a great day for para-sailing.
Because we had walked so far into the Gulf on the jetty, we had a front row seat to their landing back into the boat.
We were one of the few walkers that made it all the way to the tip of the jetty. We had to take the picture on the last big chunk of granite. We're now almost a mile from the beach.
On our long walk back to the car, we saw fishermen that had a successful day on the jetty. The red drum were biting today! They estimated the three fish on his back weighed around thirty pounds. They got really heavy by the end of that mile-long walk to their car.
This fisherman was catching sheep's head, a smaller (and lighter) fish to carry back to the car.
We had already gotten lots of exercise by the time we actually made it to the Port Aransas beach. We found more sea shells here than we did at Mustang Island or North Padre beaches in the last two days.
Denisa took all the shells from her three-beach-trifecta in the last three days to spell out "Mustang" on the beach near our motor home at Mustang Island State Park.
The sun was low in the sky as the wind was picking up and the temperatures were dropping on the last of our beautiful three days of living at the beach. We were blessed with great weather for our time of wandering God's wonders living right on the Gulf!
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