Texas Gulf Coast SEAL
Galveston Bay, Galveston & Gulf of Mexico
(Abridged from http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online)
GALVESTON BAY, centered at 29°34' north latitude and 94°56' west longitude, is the largest estuary on the Texas coast and the seventh largest in the United States. Three-quarters of the Texas coastal population live in the counties bordering Galveston Bay, and 29 percent of all marinas on the Texas coast are on the bay. The bay extends thirty miles south to north and seventeen miles east to west. The bay is seven to nine feet deep. It has a mud bottom and about 600 square miles of surface. Fresh water from numerous bayous, the Trinity river, and the San Jacinto river mixes with the tidal salt water from the Gulf of Mexico through the channel between Galveston Island and the Bolivar Peninsula (Bolivar Roads). The bay provides nursery and spawning grounds for 30 percent of the state's total fishing products.
The Houston Ship Channel passes through Bolivar Roads, Galveston Bay, the San Jacinto River, and Buffalo Bayou to the Port of Houston, which in terms of tonnage was the third largest United States port during the 1980s. At that time around 4,700 ships traversed Galveston Bay each year to and from its principal ports: Galveston, Texas City, and Houston.
CLEAR LAKE, TEXAS is the home port of the Texas Gulf Coast SEAL course at Lakewood Yacht club, our sponsor and the host of numerous regattas, including NOOD Regattas, the Bay Cup, Shoe Regatta, Heald Bank Regatta, and the Harvest Moon Regatta in October. In 1961 the National Aeronautics and Space Administration selected the Clear Lake area as the site for its Manned Spacecraft Center (renamed the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in 1973). Major aerospace contractors with local offices include Boeing, Ford Aerospace Corporation, McDonnell Douglas, and Martin Marietta. Tourists frequent numerous activities in the area, including the Kemah Boardwalk, Yachty Gras, the Lunar Rendezvous Festival in July, the Blessing of the Fleet in August, and the Christmas Boat Lane Parade.
GALVESTON, TEXAS The island and harbor that came to be named Galveston has long been recognized for its potential as a natural port. Between 1817 and 1820 Galveston Bay provided the water connection for the illicit smuggling and privateering activities of the Lafitte brothers. Used by pirate Jean Lafitte from 1818 to 1821, Galveston was soon thereafter used as a common port, principally for the growing Austin colony. In a petitioning letter to the Mexican Congress, Stephen F. Austin called Galveston the "best natural harbor the colony of Texas has to offer." As part of his father's colonization efforts, Stephen F. Austin promoted Galveston's port potential and succeeded in gaining official designation as a port of entry from the Mexican government in 1825. A customhouse was later built, and a small group of soldiers were garrisoned there to collect customs duties by 1830.
After the Texas Revolution (1836), Anglo-American settlers poured into the new republic. They came by land through East Texas and by sea through various ports, some of which had been established long before Galveston as supply points for the Spanish missions of early Texas. Matagorda, Velasco, Aransas, Corpus Christi, and Indianola all competed fiercely with Galveston in the race to become the "Gateway port to the west." Hindering port development and shipping on the Texas coast were the unpredictably shallow sandbars and shifting openings into its bays. The deep-keeled sailing ships of the day often had trouble getting across sandbars where as little as five to ten feet of water could be counted on. A process known as lightering required ships to unload their cargos onto smaller boats (lighters) to get into the harbor. This added greatly to the expense and difficulty of shipping into Texas. In 1837 the first steamship was put into service between Galveston and New Orleans. By May of 1837, forty sailing vessels were regularly carrying cargo and passengers to and from Texas, with daily arrivals at Galveston by 1838. In March 1839 the first cargo from England had been conveyed on the English bark Ambassador. By 1839 Galveston was handling over a million dollars a year in trade.
The Civil War left Galveston with her one railroad to Houston and her wharves in poor shape, but otherwise intact. By 1869 Galveston was again emerging from Reconstruction to resume its effort to become the busiest port in Texas. In 1888, Congress passed the Galveston Harbor Bill and appropriated $6,200,000 for the deepening of the harbor to twenty-two feet and construction of five miles of protective jetties to keep it open.
The devastating hurricane of 1900 brought national interest and called attention to the city's precarious position close to the sea. The wharves were repaired at a cost of $382,673 and reopened within two weeks, but the massive rebuilding effort and need for borrowed capital focused local attention on the poor state of the city's finances. In 1904, while Galveston was busy with its project to elevate the level of the east end of the island and build a seventeen-foot-high protective seawall, nearby Texas City opened its own deepwater wharves.
During the 1920s Houston, Texas City, Beaumont, Port Arthur, Orange, Freeport, Corpus Christi, and Brownsville were all benefiting greatly from the burgeoning oil and gas industry after the huge Spindletop oilfield was opened. Large cotton companies were also moving to Houston to get closer to better rail connections and farther away from the threat of hurricanes.
At the beginning of the Great Depression immediate problems faced Galveston from cut-rate competition from the port of Houston and her cotton merchants. The 1930s brought prolonged hard times for Galveston because of a long and severe drought in the main cotton and grain farming areas of the Southwest. Economic conditions were further depressed by the lingering world depression and Roosevelt's "New Deal" policies, which expressly discouraged the growing of cotton in favor of other crops. Cotton exports fell dramatically from seven million bales annually in the United States to 262,567 bales by 1942. In 1930 the largest grain elevator on the coast in the nation, Elevator B, with six million bushels of storage capacity, was opened on the wharves.
During World War II the Galveston wharves were kept busy handling the large volume of supplies to troops and afterwards the huge volume of food relief to former United States allies and enemies alike. In 1946 the wharves consisted of six miles of concrete dockage, a six-million-bushel grain elevator, forty-seven miles of railroad track, assets of $12 million, corporate surplus of $5 million, and bonded indebtedness of $2.5 million. By 1967 the port was capable of docking thirty-eight modern steamships simultaneously. In 1975 the Galveston ship channel was deepened to forty feet by the United States Army Corps of Engineers. The wharves were still the largest cotton-storage center in the world. Major exports of the time were cotton, flour, sulfur, fertilizer, chemicals, and grain. Imports were crude oil, raw sugar, fruit, frozen meat, dairy products, tea, plywood, and manufactured iron and steel products. In 1981 the wharves handled 8.5 million tons of cargo.
In addition to exporting and importing, the Galveston wharves are the site of the Texas Seaport Museum and the home of the Elissa a restored historic sailing vessel, as well as of shops, restaurants, cruise ships, and party boats and the nearby Strand.
THE GULF OF MEXICO washes the Texas shore for 624 miles from the Rio Grande delta to Sabine Pass. This partially landlocked body of water, an indentation in the southeastern coast of North America, served as an avenue for discovery, exploration, and settlement of the southern and western sectors of what is now the United States as well as Mexico: the initial approach to the mainland continent. It brought the Spanish conquerors to Mexico and Texas, French colonists to Louisiana, and, somewhat later, settlers of numerous other nationalities to the republic and state of Texas. Today, the Gulf serves a vital commerce. It links the ports of five southern states and Mexico with the larger ocean and forms the basis of the various Marine Resources of Texas, which include navigation, recreation, oil and gas, commercial fisheries, oysters, and shell. The Gulf is open to the Atlantic Ocean through the Straits of Florida and to the Caribbean Sea through the Yucatán Channel. These passages, approximately 100 and 125 miles wide respectively, lie on either side of the island of Cuba, which extends into the Gulf's mouth "like a loose-fitting bottle cork." The United States and Mexico form the Gulf's mainland shore, which extends more than 4,000 miles from the Florida Keys to Cabo Catoche, the northwestern promontory of the Yucatán Peninsula. Sharing the Gulf coast are Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, as well as the Mexican states of Tamaulipas, Vera Cruz, Tabasco, Campeche, Yucatán, and Quintana Roo.
The Gulf's waters cover 500,000 square miles and plunge to a depth of 2,080 fathoms (more than 12,000 feet). This deepest part is Sigsbee Deep, an irregular trough more than 300 miles long, sometimes called the "Grand Canyon under the sea." Its closest point to the Texas coast is some 200 miles southeast of Brownsville. The cooler water from the deep stimulates plankton growth, which attracts small fish, shrimp, and squid. These and other sealife that feed on plankton attract larger fish to make this a prime fishing ground. Biologists have counted more than 300 fish species off the Texas shore. The Gulf of Mexico, under ordinary conditions, has tides of two feet or less, but on the wide and shallow shelf such a variation is quite noticeable.
The Texas shoreline is characterized by seven barrier islands: Galveston, Follets, Matagorda, St. Joseph's (San José) , Mustang, Padre, and Brazos. Padre Island is the longest barrier island in the world. These islands, formed 5,000 to 8,000 years ago, are the survivors of several sets of barriers that have existed along the northwestern Gulf Coast during the last million years, formed and destroyed by fluctuating sea level (usually related to glaciation) and the resultant shoreline alteration. During the four major glacial periods that covered North America with ice, the sea level was lowered by some 100 meters, exposing the continental shelf. Consequently, rivers emptying into the Gulf deepened their channels and carried sediment seaward. In the warmer interglacial periods, when the sea level rose, estuarine sediments and fossils were left on the shelf. Coral reefs, known to fishermen as "snapper banks," were formed from hard shale forced up by salt domes. These banks are found in the northwestern Gulf west of 91° west longitude. The Flower Garden Banks, the northernmost coral reefs on the North American continental shelf, lie about 110 miles southeast of Galveston. More than fifty feet under the surface, "flowers", actually, brightly colored corals and other marine animals and plants, blossom in brilliant hues. The two banks, resting atop salt domes and encompassing areas of about 100 and 250 acres, were designated a marine sanctuary in 1992 (under the Marine Sanctuary Program established by the United States Congress in 1972) by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The Gulf itself is one of the world's most concentrated ocean shipping areas. Cargo received and shipped through Texas ports in 1990 totaled more than 335 million tons, of which 321 million tons was handled by thirteen major ports. Eighty percent of this tonnage in 1986 was made up of oil and petrochemical products. Because of its location on the Gulf of Mexico, Texas is economically linked to Latin America, especially to Mexico, with which it maintains an important trade relationship. Texas port facilities have generally been closely linked to offshore drilling for oil.