SaltWater Soul Shore Patrol

SaltWater Soul is a popular lifestyle apparel brand founded in Texas in 2006 by Billy Ray Wagner. If you live in Texas I’m sure you’ve seen it. As the name implies, SaltWater Soul is actually much more than a brand of fishing and beachwear, and certainly more than just a catchy name to let everybody who sees it emblazoned across a shirt know you are an ardent saltwater angler or surfer.

Billy Ray says SaltWater Soul is part of your very being. It’s primordial; like DNA, you either have it you don’t. You don’t just wear the shirt to be recognized. You wear it because it drives you and you want to influence others.

From that premise it seems a natural follow-on that Billy Ray has also created SaltWater Soul Shore Patrol. A group organized through the brand’s social media posts who care about our wonderful coastal resources and are willing to step up and walk the walk.

Billy Ray posted to Facebook recently that he was appalled at the amount of litter that had accumulated along the shoreline adjacent to the Moses Lake Flood Gate, a popular bank fishing spot near Texas City. How it got there was no mystery, it was left behind by uncaring fishermen. Plastic drink containers, food wrappers, an incredible amount of discarded fishing line, even dirty diapers and a pop-up shade.

During one of his visits to the site Billy Ray rescued a juvenile brown pelican entangled in fishing line. He worked thirty minutes to free it and remove a plastic bottle lodged in its throat pouch.

The SaltWater Soul Shore Patrol cleanup at the Moses Lake Flood Gate took place on September 22, 2019; netting more than three hundred pounds of trash that included eight five-gallon buckets of discarded fishing line.

Hats off and hearty TSFMag conservation kudos to the volunteer crew: Cody Dunn, Jacob Champion, John Quintanilla, Fallon Dunn, Tina McRae, Brian McRae, Pat Grace, and Billy Ray Wagner.

Follow SaltWater Soul on Facebook to learn of future cleanups and other activities the brand will be sponsoring.