During the summer of 1981, by accident, Dewey Stringer and I “found” a boat, probably a scuttled shrimper that had been sunk in fifteen feet of water, two hundred yards north of the old concrete ship, right off of the Galveston Ship Channel. With the right conditions, incoming tide, not too much wind or too heavy a current, we consistently caught speckled trout and red fish at this spot.
A very favorable set of circumstances led us to “finding” this sunken wreck. With our depth recorder on, because we had forgotten to turn it off, we had been drifting the flats north of the old Quarantine Station, on the west side of the Ship Channel. We noticed that we had drifted out too far into deeper water toward the Ship Channel and, all of a sudden, a “hump” appeared on our chart paper.
This got our interest so we crisscrossed the hump several times and determined that it was a sunken boat about the size of a shrimp boat. This was before the days of GPS’s, and Dewey didn’t have a Loran, so we had no way of marking the spot other than triangulating on the old concrete ship, a channel marker and an oil rig.
We anchored over the wreck, baited up and let our rigs down to the bottom. Dewey was right into a nice fish, but I was hung up on something. I had caught the wreck and in loosening up my hook brought up a small piece of wood. I netted Dewey’s fish, a nice red, got my rig baited up and proceeded to land a two-pound trout. We were on to something and for the next two years “The Wreck” was a fish producer for us and it was only a twenty, minute boat ride, straight down the Intercoastal Waterway from Dewey’s Camp!
In 1983 the tidal surge from Hurricane Alicia washed away the sunken boat and put an end to a great fishing spot!