Andy Dear | Monday, 2 October 2023
“A pier is a disappointed bridge; you stare at it for long enough and you can dream it to the other side of the Channel.”
― Julian Barnes
Maybe a half mile up the road from The Balboa Courts sat another pier that during the 1990s played a significant part of my angling life. The Church St. pier, as it was known to the locals, for a little while was one of the hottest places to catch a quick limit of Redfish when the weather wouldn't allow a long boat run to more exotic locales. The irony is that the Church St. Pier wasn't actually a pier...well it used to be, but it hadn't been a working, functional pier in quite some time. All that was left were the pilings that the original pier had been built on. Most of the stringers, railing, and decking had disappeared long ago....probably a remnant of the after effects of hurricane Celia who paid Rockport a violent visit way back in the 1970.
In it's heyday, it was a long pier too...at least a 1000 feet or more. And, due to damage from the wind and tide over the years, there was a short stretch where there was a break in the pilings about 750 feet out to the end, right where the sand ended and the seagrass started...that was from day 1, THE MAGIC SPOT.
We first started hearing about the Church St. pier from the local guides, and for a while, the knowledge of what was going on over at Church St. stayed relatively quiet, and mostly local. But, like all good fishing spots, once the word gets out, it's hard to keep the out-of-town contingent of potlickers from invading the area and absolutely vacuming everything that swims out of the area for the skillet. Honestly, the fishing at the Church St. Pier stayed pretty good for much longer than any of us expected. We started going over there somewhere around 1994 or so, and the fishing quality stayed predictable until 1997 or thereabouts. Then one day it just stopped, the Redfish disappeared, and all the potlickers had to find someplace else to go ravage.
Last month, my mom and I took a day trip down to Rockport to do a little sightseeing to see how the town had changed since we sold our vacation house down there. As you are aware from my last Front Page, some damn doctor or lawyer built an obnoxious mansion right over the top of where my seedy, but beloved motel the Balboa Courts used to sit. And, as for the Church St. Pier? Well, it's a goner as well, nowhere to be seen. I suspect that like so many other historic landmarks in Rockport, it was permanently relieved of its duties by Hurricane Harvey in 2016. The sad part for me is that if you weren't around for the "Church St. blitz" of the mid-1990s, you wouldn't even know that a pier ever existed on that now barren stretch Aransas Bay.
Hope you all are having a great week.
Andy