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Car Bodies Reefs
Figure 3. Pipe being lowered to bottom on Galveston Reef (September 1962).
I have sometimes commented on fishing offshore this time of year at the old "car body" reef off Galveston, the scene of many short but fun offshore trips. While anchored, fishermen there can easily see Galveston. We always caught a variety of bottom fish there, including snapper, along with slot and oversized bull redfish, big sand trout, hefty whiting and bull croaker. All are tasty items, except we don't eat bull redfish. We always found consistent action out there from October through December, and I'm fairly sure that action continues through spring. A lot of bottomfish winter in the Gulf in 50 feet of water or so, protected from cold fronts. You can bet flounder are spawning out there this winter, too.
The car body reef was built in 1962, examined by divers a year later (for fish and subsidence), and then another big chunk was added onfortunately after Hurricane Carla. Galveston's ill-fated sister car body reef in Freeport, built a year too early with lighter material, vanished when Carla pounded the coast in 1961. Freeport's reef really was built of car bodies, about 500 of them, but became scattered or buried. The Galveston reef is built of sturdy concrete pipe and should be fishable today, though I haven't been out there in a good while. But we fished it heavily when it was 25 to 30 years old. Those many concrete pipes had a long time to snuggle down into the silt before the next real hurricane, if you discount smaller Alicia in 1983.
According to the old diagram, each concrete reef was built in an area of about 100 by 100 feet, which is just about what we experienced when circling a spot. However, we were never told there are four reefs, mostly running north and south, and stretching for 1,000 feet. So, it would appear we only fished 25 percent of this reef. I suspect the Galveston site was nicknamed "car body" by mistake, and it's just a catchy name, though built of concrete. Otherwise, why was this reef still producing fish in the 1990s?
The two reefs were built in the infancy years of Texas artificial reefs, and it was later determined by the state they were underutilized, thus too expensive to build. A lit buoy was maintained at the center of each reef, but how anyone was supposed to accurately fish various parts of the reef is a mystery, given technology available back then. The reef however was built in a straight line north and south, with the newest addition due east of the center. The two reefs were built for small craft that couldn't safely fish further offshore at traditional snapper reefs. It was built on "natural bottom," whatever that means.
How could boats from the early 1960s ever have fished these two reefs? The lighted buoy could be torn away by any storm. Did anyone have inaccurate Loran A in those days? And one can imagine what a depth finder looked like back then, probably a flasher. So, it's a mystery how fishermen were expected to fish these reefs. Today, you can just cruise around with a depth finder marking only the bottom five feet of the water column, searching for pipe, and on the GPS hit the MOB button every time structure and fish are marked. Years ago we were more old-fashioned and still liked to throw a Styrofoam buoy, weighted with a sash weight. Circle our buoy and get the lay of the land, where each structure was in relation to the buoy. We'd anchor over a favorite piece, but often another pipe or two were within casting distance. Those bottom fish seemed to roam from one piece to the next. Our bait on bottom seemed to chum them, too. We always brought a cutting board and would fillet smaller sand trout for fresh cut bait. Drop an entire fillet down there, and something big would latch on. Once I dropped down half a bull croaker on a circle hook, and a huge tarpon spooled the big reel. In late November, late in the season for tarpon.
We used two techniques: the first was the old and reliable multiple circle hook rig, with eight ounce weight. Mark a pipe and fire that baited rig down, and it hit bottom in seconds. That many squid baits, sometime four on the rig, drew action pretty quick and the circle hooks could handle all species described earlier. Heck, just set a couple of those stiff rods in gunnel mounts, and attend to other business in the boat. The fish hook themselves. For more sport, with trout tackle we'd cast ounce bucktail jigs sweetened with a piece of squid. Cast it out there at other structures, or just fish straight down. With a little luck, sometimes a late-autumn big Spanish mackerel would intercept it. If we'd used live shrimp, we'd have had shots at sheepshead and flounder too, but we never tried it.
It gets really foggy out there in autumn and we sometimes drove right to the Galveston reef with GPS, after cruising along just fast enough to stay on plane. Peering hard dead ahead, for boat traffic. We were counting on the fog burning off at 10 a.m., which it always did, though there are no guarantees out there. Fishermen offshore back in the 60's had to sprint for the jetties when they saw an afternoon fog bank sneaking back in from further offshore, often at 4 p.m. or so, if my adventures out there way back in high school years were typical from the 1960s. Get socked in with fog without GPS, and there's no telling where you might wind up while searching for the jetty's granite rocks in pea-soup fog. That's a bad combination.
Mostly we fished soon after a cold front, when seas were flat on the beachfront. We'd just round Galveston's south jetty and head south. From where we soon anchored, we could still see the lighthouse back at the jetty. If the south wind came up in the afternoon, we'd fish until we had seas of two feet or so, then ride them home. We were often in a 17-foot McKee Craft, but we also fished the spot on New Year's Eve in a 56 Bertram, and everyone caught fish that day, too. Also aboard Buddy Shultz's 42-foot Hatteras. We made quite a few November trips there with the McKee, catching and hauling live bull redfish back to Galveston Yacht Basin, where a hatchery truck waited. (Hatchery trips aboard the Hatteras were noticeably easier). For a McKee Craft, that was a load for such a boat. We had a 320-quart SSI cooler full of water, with five bull redfish inside, parked forward of the center console. It was wet but honest work, sometimes on gray afternoons, slinging buckets of seawater, pulling a stringer aboard of flopping 42-inch female redfish, and then the ride back.
There must be lots of other spots to fish just off Galveston, where shrimp boats have been working, sunk either in storm or by mishap for almost a century. It would be great to get a shrimp boat captain's book of hangs and obstructions from this area off Galveston, in state waters. The big shrimp boats out there plowing bottom all the time, by now, have learned to avoid many spots where nets get snagged, including the car body reef.
While anchored there we could see lots of shrimp boats trawling during autumn, a mile or two to the northwest, which must have been clean bottom. But caution is advised here for passing shrimp boat traffic, they often cruise along with nobody at the helm. This actually happened right on top of the car body reef. One moment a friend of mine was anchored there, unhooking snapper, the next he was fighting to get both outboards running. Too late, a big shrimp boat ran down his anchored 26 Mako, flipping it upside down on the last day of October. Everything loose in the boat–including dive gear from the previous summer–sank and contributed to the reef below. It happened fast, and there was no time for life jackets. The Mako eventually floated away upside-down, the crew clinging to it for a while, finally rescued by the shrimp boat, whose crew seemed a little sheepish... The Mako was found drifting a mile away that night, and towed upside down by friends, including myself. Next morning it reached Galveston yacht basin for repairs. That Mako was a tough boat and it won future tournaments.
That area definitely shows promise, even today. Those old pipes need to be found, while each captain stays alert for adverse weather and passing boat traffic. The car bodies were Texas' first concrete artificial reefs, as far as I know, and many hundreds more need to be built ASAP, as management of snapper in federal waters continues to deteriorate. We need lots of "car body" reefs. In state waters of course, and built of the same sturdy pipe.
The car body reef was built in 1962, examined by divers a year later (for fish and subsidence), and then another big chunk was added onfortunately after Hurricane Carla. Galveston's ill-fated sister car body reef in Freeport, built a year too early with lighter material, vanished when Carla pounded the coast in 1961. Freeport's reef really was built of car bodies, about 500 of them, but became scattered or buried. The Galveston reef is built of sturdy concrete pipe and should be fishable today, though I haven't been out there in a good while. But we fished it heavily when it was 25 to 30 years old. Those many concrete pipes had a long time to snuggle down into the silt before the next real hurricane, if you discount smaller Alicia in 1983.
According to the old diagram, each concrete reef was built in an area of about 100 by 100 feet, which is just about what we experienced when circling a spot. However, we were never told there are four reefs, mostly running north and south, and stretching for 1,000 feet. So, it would appear we only fished 25 percent of this reef. I suspect the Galveston site was nicknamed "car body" by mistake, and it's just a catchy name, though built of concrete. Otherwise, why was this reef still producing fish in the 1990s?
The two reefs were built in the infancy years of Texas artificial reefs, and it was later determined by the state they were underutilized, thus too expensive to build. A lit buoy was maintained at the center of each reef, but how anyone was supposed to accurately fish various parts of the reef is a mystery, given technology available back then. The reef however was built in a straight line north and south, with the newest addition due east of the center. The two reefs were built for small craft that couldn't safely fish further offshore at traditional snapper reefs. It was built on "natural bottom," whatever that means.
How could boats from the early 1960s ever have fished these two reefs? The lighted buoy could be torn away by any storm. Did anyone have inaccurate Loran A in those days? And one can imagine what a depth finder looked like back then, probably a flasher. So, it's a mystery how fishermen were expected to fish these reefs. Today, you can just cruise around with a depth finder marking only the bottom five feet of the water column, searching for pipe, and on the GPS hit the MOB button every time structure and fish are marked. Years ago we were more old-fashioned and still liked to throw a Styrofoam buoy, weighted with a sash weight. Circle our buoy and get the lay of the land, where each structure was in relation to the buoy. We'd anchor over a favorite piece, but often another pipe or two were within casting distance. Those bottom fish seemed to roam from one piece to the next. Our bait on bottom seemed to chum them, too. We always brought a cutting board and would fillet smaller sand trout for fresh cut bait. Drop an entire fillet down there, and something big would latch on. Once I dropped down half a bull croaker on a circle hook, and a huge tarpon spooled the big reel. In late November, late in the season for tarpon.
We used two techniques: the first was the old and reliable multiple circle hook rig, with eight ounce weight. Mark a pipe and fire that baited rig down, and it hit bottom in seconds. That many squid baits, sometime four on the rig, drew action pretty quick and the circle hooks could handle all species described earlier. Heck, just set a couple of those stiff rods in gunnel mounts, and attend to other business in the boat. The fish hook themselves. For more sport, with trout tackle we'd cast ounce bucktail jigs sweetened with a piece of squid. Cast it out there at other structures, or just fish straight down. With a little luck, sometimes a late-autumn big Spanish mackerel would intercept it. If we'd used live shrimp, we'd have had shots at sheepshead and flounder too, but we never tried it.
It gets really foggy out there in autumn and we sometimes drove right to the Galveston reef with GPS, after cruising along just fast enough to stay on plane. Peering hard dead ahead, for boat traffic. We were counting on the fog burning off at 10 a.m., which it always did, though there are no guarantees out there. Fishermen offshore back in the 60's had to sprint for the jetties when they saw an afternoon fog bank sneaking back in from further offshore, often at 4 p.m. or so, if my adventures out there way back in high school years were typical from the 1960s. Get socked in with fog without GPS, and there's no telling where you might wind up while searching for the jetty's granite rocks in pea-soup fog. That's a bad combination.
Mostly we fished soon after a cold front, when seas were flat on the beachfront. We'd just round Galveston's south jetty and head south. From where we soon anchored, we could still see the lighthouse back at the jetty. If the south wind came up in the afternoon, we'd fish until we had seas of two feet or so, then ride them home. We were often in a 17-foot McKee Craft, but we also fished the spot on New Year's Eve in a 56 Bertram, and everyone caught fish that day, too. Also aboard Buddy Shultz's 42-foot Hatteras. We made quite a few November trips there with the McKee, catching and hauling live bull redfish back to Galveston Yacht Basin, where a hatchery truck waited. (Hatchery trips aboard the Hatteras were noticeably easier). For a McKee Craft, that was a load for such a boat. We had a 320-quart SSI cooler full of water, with five bull redfish inside, parked forward of the center console. It was wet but honest work, sometimes on gray afternoons, slinging buckets of seawater, pulling a stringer aboard of flopping 42-inch female redfish, and then the ride back.
There must be lots of other spots to fish just off Galveston, where shrimp boats have been working, sunk either in storm or by mishap for almost a century. It would be great to get a shrimp boat captain's book of hangs and obstructions from this area off Galveston, in state waters. The big shrimp boats out there plowing bottom all the time, by now, have learned to avoid many spots where nets get snagged, including the car body reef.
While anchored there we could see lots of shrimp boats trawling during autumn, a mile or two to the northwest, which must have been clean bottom. But caution is advised here for passing shrimp boat traffic, they often cruise along with nobody at the helm. This actually happened right on top of the car body reef. One moment a friend of mine was anchored there, unhooking snapper, the next he was fighting to get both outboards running. Too late, a big shrimp boat ran down his anchored 26 Mako, flipping it upside down on the last day of October. Everything loose in the boat–including dive gear from the previous summer–sank and contributed to the reef below. It happened fast, and there was no time for life jackets. The Mako eventually floated away upside-down, the crew clinging to it for a while, finally rescued by the shrimp boat, whose crew seemed a little sheepish... The Mako was found drifting a mile away that night, and towed upside down by friends, including myself. Next morning it reached Galveston yacht basin for repairs. That Mako was a tough boat and it won future tournaments.
That area definitely shows promise, even today. Those old pipes need to be found, while each captain stays alert for adverse weather and passing boat traffic. The car bodies were Texas' first concrete artificial reefs, as far as I know, and many hundreds more need to be built ASAP, as management of snapper in federal waters continues to deteriorate. We need lots of "car body" reefs. In state waters of course, and built of the same sturdy pipe.