Hooked Up: October 2025

Alas! A touch of fall is finally in the air and I am so glad to see the worst of the heat behind us. Probably my age, definitely the diabetes meds, maybe a million summer dink trout, but damn if it doesn’t seem to get under my skin a little more every year. Remarkably, 20 gauge shotguns and arrows knocked on the Matthews seem to drop the air temperature 25° every time I get one in hand this time of year.

If you love to fish anywhere from Aransas Bay to Baffin Bay, we got some big news in early September. The city of Corpus Christi has been jockeying to build an Inner Harbor desalination plant within the port for quite some time. The whole coastal bend is in need of fresh water. Industry consumes 70% of everything that we capture and have piped in currently. Combine that with a long-term drought over our catch basin and we have been in a pickle for some time.

Desalination is a great long-term solution and has been implemented successfully all over the world. However, the Corpus Christi brain trust made some critical errors and the Inner Harbor desal project just got voted down by a majority of city councilmen.

The city’s plan was to build the plant in a very old area of town that has been taken over by industry (another tragic subject), intake the water from a dead-end port where all of the tankers load and unload (pollutants), and discharge the brine and chemicals from desal treatment right back into the bay. Keeping in mind that for every gallon of fresh water produced, you will have two gallons of salt brine and treatment chemicals to get rid of.

The only environmental impact studies that were provided (very limited and not fully disclosed) were completed by the contractor. Numerous consultations by independent scientists warned that this disposal into the bay would not work and would be very detrimental to all life forms in our bays. Regardless of those unbiased opinions, the city stood their ground with the plan that was cheaper, faster, and guaranteed to damage our whole ecosystem and tourism industry.

Three years ago the cost of this project was just under $300 million. In the short time since then it has blown up to $1.2 billion, and will likely end up pushing a full $2 billion by the time it is completed. Even crazier is that this project would, in reality, be capable of producing only 20-25 million gallons a day, which is way short of our actual needs and polluting the bays in the process. What a debacle!

On the day of the vote to take this project to 60% design completion or scrap the whole project, I and about 85 others gathered to speak publicly against this project. The crowd was unwavering in their demand for proper offshore disposal of brine into the gulf and not our bays. It was an exciting evening, running to 1:00 am before it concluded. There was a lot of passion on display, finger-pointing, and three arrests. When it was finally all said and done, the vote was 6-3 to scrap the project. That is a huge win for anyone who loves a healthy fishery and the water in our bays in general.

Personally, I am for desal, and I do not know many who are truly against it. Saying that, using our bays as a dumping ground will always bring the highest form of opposition and something I’ll bet the city doesn’t take for granted in the future. We have won this battle, but the war for clean is not over.

Finally, moving on to fishing – October will bring cooler temps and trout will begin becoming more active. For the adventurous anglers unwilling to simply be “spot” fishermen, there will be many new opportunities as significant cold fronts begin to arrive. Areas of the King Ranch shoreline will come into play with cooler temps, along with many miles of shallow shorelines that have held excessively high water temperatures and low oxygen levels. Between that, schools back in session and the opening of hunting seasons, there will be ample opportunity for everyone to find their own piece of real estate, spread out, and not be piled upon each other.

October is, now and always has been, a transition month for our fishery. Patterns are going to be a little different than the summer months, but you can expect to begin catching some quality fish. So, get out there; be adventurous, read all the signs, and make smart decisions.