DELUGE DOWN SOUTH
An unprecedented series of storms primes the pumpinthe hyper-saline Laguna Madre.
By Scott Null Photos by Capt.Mike McBride M
Y LIBRARY of favorite fishing memories contains an entire section dedicated to the Lower Laguna
Madre of south Texas. The wide open expanse of shallow grass flats dotted with sandy potholes has provided many days of fantastic sight-casting to schools of redfish and magnum-sized trout. It is where I saw my first tailing redfish. It is also the birthplace of my lifelong addiction to fly fishing.
The Laguna Madre is the only hyper- saline bay system in the United States and one of only six in the world.
The virtually uninhabited shore-
lines surrounding the Mother Lagoon give one a sense of isolation not often found along our coast. A few days on this stretch of water can do wonders for the soul.
So it was with much angst that I watched the events of this past sum-
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mer unfold. Hurricane Alex came ashore just south of Brownsville and then lingered along the Texas border with Mexico dumping copious amounts of rain. Some areas received as much as 20 inches of rain in a few days, nearly a year’s worth of precipitation, resulting in the worst flooding since Hurricane Beulah in 1967. Falcon Lake on the Rio Grande
reached flood stage in short order as did Lake Amistad further upstream. Both lakes began releasing large amounts of water, which flooded into the already swollen river. Additional water flowed in from tributaries on the Mexican side of the border. The International Boundary Water Commission instituted their floodwater diversion plan redirect- ing the flow into several levied flood- ways in order to lessen catastrophic flooding of the cities along the river. Two of these, the Arroyo Colorado
and the North International Floodway, flow directly into the Lower Laguna Madre south of Port Mansfield. The fol- lowing week a tropical depression trekked up through the Bay of Cam- peche coming ashore near Brownsville dumping even more rain leading to an unprecedented amount of freshwater entering the system.
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