Thread: Desperate for Beach Camping!!!

PINS has a good website!

Padre Island National Seashore - Campgrounds (U.S. National Park Service)

Welcome Me vs Wild, a newcomer with some good info to boot! I want to try some beach camping myself but I still long for that travel trailer that has not (YET) come my way. And congrats to Mama Luna and company with the new addition. Fun is on the way.

Sandy

We are heading there Friday to Sunday

Have fun. We'll be out there Saturday, Sunday and Monday.

Hopefully you didn't get hurt too bad by the storm on Sunday afternoon. We had our shade canopy totally thrashed and thrown a half mile down the beach into the gulf, and our tent got turned half inside out by the wind and everything inside was soaked. I would guess the winds were blowing 60+mph and we had pea to dime sized hail falling. We were camped around 14 miles down and ended up bailing out that evening instead of staying until Monday. As we drove out, it looked like very few people stayed south of about 7 mile down to 15 mile, while the area north of 7 mile was still pretty crowded.

Wow... Glad to see you guys made it out okay. The same thing almost happened to our canopy. All I remember is standing way out in the water, and when I turned around to look towards the shoreline, I saw my girlfriend waving bbut it did not click. I stared at her for at least 10 second before I realized she was trying to yell at me and when everything came into focus, all I saw was her clinging onto one leg of the canopy as it started to tumble.

I was not planning on giving into the weather and let it ruin my weekend so I packed up, got a room at Motel 6 ( nice.. they just remodeled and now even has wall mounted flat screens). I was back out there Monday, and went down to the 20-25 marker.

I did enjoy watching the rain come down on the ocean. It felt so peaceful.
The only thing that did ruin my weekend were people dong something that I like to call "ghetto fishing". fishing should be something fun, peaceful. But it seemed everywhere I went, you have people fishing with no licenses and bagging fish that are way undersize.

The worst part of my day was when I went to my fishing spot. There was a guy about 30 yards to my right. As I was putting a live shrimp on my hook, whenthe guy walked over to me and said that I could not cast or fish here because this was "his" area. I asked him what he meant and then realized this one guy had 8 fishing poles casted out at every angle. Not a single one was being paid attention to. He didn't know how to fish... just greedy. What made me more mad, was that the line that he was refferring to near me, no longer had any bait, but he made a big deal that I could not fish there. And everytime I did cast out to where I did not tangle his line, he purposely threw it accross my line to get tangled and I kept getting snagged. If my girlfriend was not there with me, there would have been a good chance that I would have told him my Rick James joke.... "What did the hand say to the face?" SMACK!!!

So... i did the next best thing. I rigged a 4 ounce spider weight, threw it accross all his lines and reeled them in. I gave my pole a good jerk, and his far pole dipped hard. He grabbed his rods thinking fish on. I started reeling in his lines and when all 8 of his lines came up, I cut them....yeah... I did it! You get what you deserved. I would not have gone that far, but when I threw my line out earlier and set my pole and went to my car... this guy had the nerves to look through my stuff ( tackle and live shrimp bucket ). He was getting ready to using my bait. So yea, I cut his line.

Fishing is sport, fish, catch and release.. keep only won't you need to or want. People keep keeping everything and we won't have anymore good fishing left in a few years.

Wow...sounds like a real jerk. We were lucky enough to end up with about 1/4 mile between us and anybody else in either direction. We had an ovenbird and a Canada Warbler hunting insects under our truck and inside our shade canopy, watched stingrays feeding in the shallows, had coyotes walking around at dusk and just generally had a really nice time right up until the storm hit. We contemplated staying in a hotel sunday night, but had an entire truckbed full of sandy muddy camping gear that we would not have wanted to leave in the truck overnight. Plus, we knew we were going to have a full day's work cleaning and drying out gear when we got home so we dragged the busted shade canopy out of the water and threw it in the dumpster on the way out.

That storm was a mean one. If your girlfriend was able to hold the canopy in place, you must not have caught as bad of a part of it as we did. We had lightning hitting within a mile, blinding rain, 60+mph winds from two different directions during the storm, and pea to dime sized hail falling. With steel poles on the canopy, the last thing I was going to do was stand on the sand trying to hold one upright in a lightning storm.

All we could do was sit in the truck and watch it get taken down. We had it guy roped out pretty well on 4 of the 5 corners to cover the wind directions we had been getting wind from all weekend. The worst winds of the storm turned and came from the direction we only had it staked down on and that was all it took. The tent managed to stay upright, but at one point it was bent over about double, and the wind was blowing a wall of water across the top of the sand and it blew right up the side of the tent under the rain fly and in through the tent windows.

I did very little fishing this trip...just wanted to relax and rest. On sunday afternoon, it looked like jacks and mackerel were working hard outside the third bar straight out from us. Anybody with a kayak would have had some awesome fishing just before the storm got there.