Port of Brownsville Tour

    

  The Port of Brownsville tour went out from South Padre Island. There were about 15 people on the boat. There was room for about 40.   The boat went across the Laguna Madre Bay and into the intercoastal waterway that leads to the Port of Brownsville. The trip took 4 hours. It was about 15 -20 miles one way.  The ship channel is 55 to 60 feet deep for the big ships to get through. It is only wide enough for one ship at a time. In the port is a building where the Ship Master is. He is like an air traffic controller for the ships. He communicates with each ship , then tells them where to go, instead of the ships communicating with each other.

    

 The first boats I saw were the shrimp boats.

The red one is a shrimp boat. They spend a couple months at sea. The blue boat is a supply boat. It takes food and stuff out to the shrimpers. The shrimp are frozen fresh on the boat.

In the nets is a large metal ring with like metal flaps across it. The metal rings let the sea turtles back out but not the shrimp. When the nets are dropped , they go along the bottom for a long time, catching the shrimp. The turtles can only hold their breath for 20 minutes. The nets are down longer than that. Before they had the metal rings, many sea turtles died. Now the turtles can get out and very few die.  For the rest of the tour, they did not let us take pictures, due to homeland security. What I saw was , the off shore oil rigs being worked on. They are very large. The platform is a triangle shape. It has 3 very large legs, that look like a 4 post cell phone tower. One leg was on each point of the platform.  In the Gulf of Mexico, the platform legs go down to the ocean floor, so the platform is just above the water. In the port, the legs only go about 15 feet deep, so the legs are sticking way up in the air. 

Also in the port were many ships and a navy ship that were old and being taken apart for scraps. The navy ship has the name removed first, so that people touring the port do not get emotional, if they served on it.  It takes 6 months to up to 2 or 3 years to dismantle a ship for scrap. They cut a piece off and pick it up with a giant magnet on a crane, then drop the piece in a pile on the land. The scrap pieces are then either loaded directly into a barge or else they go through a shredder, and then into a barge. The area had a strong smell  like burnt metal from the welding and the cutting.

They also had piles of crushed cars. The cars were going through the shredder.

At this time, the scrap metal goes to Japan. They sell it back to us in electronics and cars!

In the port , were piles of crushed rock. It is from Brazil and is used for building roads in Texas.

I also saw some dolphins, pelicans, sea gulls and some other water birds. Some large birds build their nests on the bouys. One bouy had 3 big nests on it.

I even saw a pelican swallow a fish!