Hootin' Anni's Day Trippin'

Saturday, February 14th, 2009
3:50 A.M.


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PHOTO HUNT 2009 THEMES

NAUTICAL







There is a museum about 35 miles from Corpus Christi, along the coastal highway 181. It's located in the Texas town of Rockport-Fulton. It's called the Maritime Museum. Most of the articles in exhibit have to do with ships' legacies, history of the area, and naval and nautical items. One section has local artists' renditions of the Texas Lighthouses...in art form. The first photo above is the Sabine Bank Lighthouse.

In the Gulf of Mexico, roughly sixteen miles south of the entrance to the Sabine River, Sabine Bank lies hidden a mere twenty feet below the surface of the water. In 1888, Congressman William H. Crain proposed a lightship for Sabine Bank, which measures about thirty miles long and five miles wide, but the district lighthouse engineer in New Orleans didn’t see the need for such a measure. A decade later, the Lighthouse Board finally did recommend the construction of a lighthouse to warn the numerous deep-drafted vessels now calling at Port Arthur of the potential offshore danger, and Congress appropriated $40,000 in 1900 and 1901 for the project.

The 2nd photo from the top is an encased replica of a shrimp boat. Here, it's a hands on exhibit. You can push buttons and pull levers to see the operation of the nets, lights and such while viewing the shrimp boat. The third photo down is a scaled model of the famous LaSalle Odyssey that is part of the Texas Coastal History. The scale is 1/12th the size of the actual Robert La Salle’s flagship La Belle. With navigation of the past, the LaBelle and its crew landed in the area...some 400 miles WEST of its original destination, with the intention of starting anew...a post on the mouth of the Mississippi River in Louisiana, instead came too far and ended the journey, sinking, in the bay near Rockport. Rediscovered in the water in 1995, the archeological finds produced millions of artifacts for the museums along the Gulf Coast to share it's fateful demise. Which brings me to the fourth photo; a brass plate off the LaBelle's hull. All some 300 years later, after the fact. And according to official maritime records, the ship's owner is indeed, King Louis XIV.