Christmas Books

Here are a few favorite fishing and sea adventure books, most of them from the Texas coast, that might well fit under the Christmas tree. These days, I’m all in favor of casting aside that addictive cell phone for a few hours, and getting immersed in a good book.

The Stubborn Fisherman, by Elda May Roberts

We met Elda May back in 1988 or so, and still have her signed book that details the trials and tribulations of their living in Port Aransas, beginning in 1929. Her husband was nicknamed Florida Roberts, because both of them lived near Boca Grande, Florida and were married near there. What possessed them to spend six days driving to Port Aransas and settling there, living in a shack made of driftwood, is a mystery, but then her husband did a lot of things that were a mystery. Hurricanes flattened their home a few times, but they persevered, she making breakfast for their guests before he took them fishing.

Florida Roberts did whatever it took to survive a life on the water. Commercial fisherman and guide, he would row out to the end of the Aransas jetties and load the boat with gamefish. Sometimes he caught a stringer of goliath grouper, which were towed back to town, presumably with a favorable tide. He also snapper fished offshore with sketchy equipment, and was lucky to survive, once blown south by a bad norther, before making landfall at Port Isabel. It was notable that while offshore, the Warsaw grouper were sometimes so bad, stealing his hooked snapper, that he had to pull anchor and move. They had no GPS, navigating only by compass.

His adventures and reputation were such that Robert’s Park at Port Aransas harbor is named after him.

Fishing Yesterday’s Gulf Coast, by Barney Farley.

Book summary: Renowned fishing guide Barney Farley worked the Texas coastal waters out of Port Aransas for more than half a century. In these stories and reflections, Farley imparts a lifetime of knowledge about speckled trout, redfish, ling, jack, and kingfish, and gives advice about how, where and when to fish.

Perhaps no one could chronicle the changes in sport and commercial fishing along the Central Texas Coast more ably and more passionately than Farley. When he came to Texas in 1910, he reported that he could get in a rowboat and using only a push pole, make his way "to the fishing grounds and catch a hundred pounds or more of trout and redfish" in a few hours. A couple of years later, the shrimp trawlers arrived. As they plied the Gulf in increasing numbers, they depleted the shrimp populations in the bays, and Farley watched the fish move farther and farther offshore, following their ever more elusive food source.

From his perspective in the mid1960s, Farley was not satisfied simply to lament the disappearance of once abundant species. He also strongly voiced his views on the need for conservation. Many of the problems he identified are still with us, and some of the solutions he prescribed have since been adopted.

Published by Gulf Coast Books, sponsored by Texas A&M/Corpus Christi.

Outdoor Chronicles, by Joe Doggett. This 370-page hardback edition, with a cover painting by Sam Caldwell, contains top picks of fishing and hunting stories from Joe’s 35-year career with the Houston Chronicle. Classic stories, some of which I still recall reading over a cup of coffee more than 40 years ago, after retrieving the paper from my doorstep. Those stories were often the highlight of my week.

For readers of Texas coastal life, there are five fiction book titles by Miles Arceneaux. Written by my friend Brent Douglass, we go back to grade school days in Lubbock, a few years after his dad played football for Texas Tech. Our families then moved away to the coast, me to Port Arthur and he to Rockport. Many years later, Brent and two buddies in Austin co-wrote Thin Slice of Life, creating Charlie Sweetwater, a fictional character who lives near the Copano Bay bridge. Charlie undergoes many coastal adventures, often dealing with bad hombres, in this 5-book series published by Texas A&M. Brent went on to write the remaining four books.

Here’s a partial summary from their first book, set in 1979: Meanwhile, Fulton Harbor, where Charlie’s family has docked their shrimpboats for generations, has changed—and not for the better. Hard-working newly-arrived Vietnamese immigrant fishermen are under the thumb of Colonel Nguyen Ngoc Bao, a ruthless exiled gangster who aims to recreate his Asian criminal enterprise in a New World setting.

Brent’s remaining four titles with the same hero are: North Beach, LaSalle’s Ghost (raising LaSalle’s ship in Matagorda Bay), Ransom Island, and lastly, Hidden Sea.

I have dabbled in fishing books myself over the years, though none are still available in print. However, I hope to place my latest, The Kingfish Bible, New Revelations on Amazon Kindle by Christmas. I’ve also finished a novel about a fishing guide on Matagorda Bay, and hope to upload that one next.

If you’re looking for a good high-seas read in fiction literature, a long-time favorite would be Far Tortuga by Peter Matthiessen. It’s about native turtle fishermen in Grand Cayman, who sail for weeks along the coast of Honduras, netting sea turtles for the market in Key West. The year is 1962 or so. They drag handlines behind the boat to catch fish, to supplement their meager diet of rice and beans. Lots of colorful dialog between the white captain and black crew; the author apparently made a similar voyage.

Another favorite book (part of a true trilogy) from that same period is Shark for Sale by William Travis. He’s a very descriptive British guy in the Seychelle Islands, who gathers a crew of natives to fish for sharks commercially in the Indian Ocean. And the sharks they dealt with are off the charts. Travis also wrote two more excellent books from his offshore adventures, Beyond the Reefs (Diving for valuable shell at many deserted islands) and Voice of the Turtle, about harvesting sea turtles on the coast of Somalia.