South Padre Island seems to be strictly for tourists. I counted 19 businesses that rent fancy golf carts. If I had brought some regular fishing gear I would have used it. I’m surrounded by salt water. Saw many people pulled over on the side of the road and fishing, no, not from inside the car. I’m going to leave tomorrow, a day early.

Drove over to Boca Chica Texas to see the SpaceX Starbase and the SpaceX Launch Facility. Starbase is what you drive by first. It’s where the bays in which the Starships and boosters are assembled are located. A mile or two down the road is the Launch Facility. The Launch Facility is a couple of hundred yards from the beach. You almost drive through the Launch Facility. I didn’t notice a gate or a guard. If I could have stopped my truck, got out, and walked over to touch the arms they are going to mount onto the Launch Tower it would have been a walk of about a hundred feet. It would have been great if someone had been in my passenger seat taking photos. There is too much activity at that spot to stop your vehicle. I think there were three liquified gas trucks delivering to the tank farm.

There is a $10,000 fine for flying a drone here. They call it “Essential Infrastructure”.

Starbase

Turn around and…

Made it to South Padre Island. My campground is on the southern tip of the island. I’m between 3 and 4 miles from SpaceX. I can see it from my campground.

Another long day of driving. Left Roswell around 7:30 mountain time and arrived at Guadalupe River State Park at 6:30 central time.

Repaired two windshield cracks today.

Today and tomorrow I’ll be camped at Bottomless Lakes State Park just east of Roswell New Mexico. It was New Mexico’s first state park having been established in 1933. There are nine of the little lakes. They are not bottomless. The lakes are sinkholes that filled with water, cenotes, from the Pecos River. They range in depth from 17 to 90 feet.

My connection here is good enough to upload videos but not good enough for good resolution. When I get home I will try uploading and replacing these videos. I assume that is the cause of the poor quality.

Went shopping in Roswell. UFO and Alien stuff is everywhere. I pictured Roswell as a dusty intersection with a couple of UFO souvenir shops. It’s a city.

A little north and east of Roswell is Bitter Lake National Wildlife Refuge

Left Cottonwood Campground in Navajo Lake State Park in northwest New Mexico at 7:30 and finished setting up at Bottomless Lakes State Park in southeast New Mexico at 5:30. The first half of the drive from Navajo Dam through SantaFe was beautiful. The drive from Santa Fe to Roswell is pretty much short grass on not quite flat land. I have cell phone coverage, free WiFi, some television from Roswell, a pull-through site, and a full hook-up for $14 a night. New Mexico State Park Campgrounds are the best. I’ll be here three nights. Once the hot water heater did its thing I took a “Hollywood” which is a regular shower, not a navy shower.

Tomorrow I’ll drive to Bottomless Lakes State Park just outside of Roswell, New Mexico. I’ll drive right by Georgia O’keeffe’s home in Abiquiú, New Mexico. It’s a museum. Even before COVID a reservation was necessary to take a tour. When planning this trip on short notice I tried to make a reservation but it is booked about 2 months out. Today I’m just going to straighten things out and clean up for the rest of the trip. This is a dusty area.

A frustrating day of fishing. The first hour and a half of fishing was pretty dead. The trout were inactive but then they started feeding from the surface, something I had not seen in the past. They have always been feeding just below the surface on emergers. It might look like they are rising but what you are typically looking at are their tails or the tops of their backs. I watched many open mouths taking something from the surface. I learned my lesson today. I have been trying to only carry items in my vest I know I will use. Stupid, the stuff doesn’t weigh much at all. I didn’t have dry flies or terrestrials. I was using a piece of white wool for a strike indicator. Two times I watched a large trout come up and grab my indicator and hold it long enough for me to feel his weight. Today while walking to the river I saw more grasshoppers than I had ever seen here. Damn! It was only 2:30 so I hiked back to my truck, drove back to my trailer, rigged for hoppers and dries, drove back to the river, and hiked back to my spot. The trout were back to feeding subsurface! Almost funny. I tried hoppers, ants, beetles, and super small black dry flies for a while without any action. I had no chance of seeing the super small black dry flies. I went back to the typical San Juan rig again with no luck. Oh well. It was a beautiful day.

When fishing in the “Quality Waters” you only see serious fly fisher people, no kids, no families. My campground is just below the “Quality Waters” so there aren’t any special regulations. Families walk by heading to the river, dad and maybe mom carrying open face spinning outfits and the kids carrying the good old Zebco closed faced spinning reel outfits. They look like they are on a mission, anxious to get a bite on a worm. Looks like fun to me.

There were two older guys across and upstream from me maybe 50 yards . I heard a little commotion, looked, and one guy had gone swimming. He was all the way in and then was sitting on the river bottom with the water over his waders. That water is cold! He went to shore, came back, and toughed it out for a while but soon started walking towards the road.

Super windy all day. A good day to read. Tuesday and Wednesday look to be perfect, mid 70s during the day with very little wind. They will be my last two days of fishing this year.

Sunday I caught fish. Today the guy behind the counter of one of the two fly shops in Navajo Dam told me they increased the water flow into the river yesterday which improved the fishing. I guess it wasn’t me.

Last night I learned that my furnace isn’t sophisticated enough to know when it runs out of propane. It thought it was an air conditioner.

Since I’ve been here the daytime temperatures have been a constant 88 to 92 with the nighttime temperature getting down to 50. Yesterday not long before dark a front came through and it actually rained a little bit. Today it’s in the mid 70s. Tonight it’s supposed to get down to 39. The elevation here is around 5700 feet. Usually there are very few clouds. It gets damn hot fast in that sun. Spoke too soon on the temperature. It’s back in the mid 80s.

Fished for a few hours today. On my hike into the river I overheard a couple of guys saying how terrible the fishing has been. One said “it gets worse everyday”.

Finding fish here isn’t the problem. Properly presenting the correct fly is the challenge. For an hour I tried the usual suspects, size 24 and 26 midges with no luck. I switched to a bigger fly, probably a size 18, green annelid.

Got lucky and found something they wanted to eat. Over roughly an hour and a half I hooked up with four very nice fish. The first hookup looked like one of the monsters. I’m not bragging cause I didn’t land it. Perhaps I had him on for a half minute. I netted the next two fish, both the biggest trout I have ever caught, and I lost the fourth one. I took a photo of the first one I landed and got it back into the water. It swam away.