Port Aransas

By Lynx, on May 18th, 2011

While we were killing time waiting to see if we could go out on a fishing boat we had a lot of time to explore the town of Port Aransas. Not much has changed since I was a kid, they still had many of the same old shops and restaurants and all the charter boat companies were all still there with most the same boats. Some of the small stores and restaurants were now abandoned or bulldozed and some massive new beach wear and gift shops had gone in.

Somewhere there are pictures of me and my knee high cousin standing in this sharks mouth taken probably close to 20 years ago, still looks the same as I remember.

Well some people got to go fishing… This is one of the old charter boats coming in from an overnighter.

One of the deck hands was telling us how to tell some of the beach birds apart. He said the, “laughing gulls are the ones that look like someone grabbed them by their back legs and dunked their head in a bucket of black paint.” Hahaha, they do look like that.

I’ve eaten here many times before and Castaways Seafood and Grill was just as good as I remembered. Many of the restaurants around here also have a neat policy where you bring in your cleaned catch from going out deep sea fishing and they will professionally cook it for you, pretty cool. I was really looking forward to bringing in some snapper or mackerel fresh off the boat and having them cook it but sadly our deep sea fishing did not pan out.

: great po’boys at Castaways

The last night we went all out and went to Pelican’s landing. I knew we may be a bit out of my budget as soon as we saw the parking lot was full of Mercedes and Cadillacs. The food here was pretty good but remember to bring an extra wallet to pay for it. Really it was not much better than Pier 99 and other places we’ve tried and in my opinion not worth the extra cost.

We also tried Fins Grill & Icehouse and were not impressed. I got two recommendations from locals about Fins but if they were good at one time they really phoned it in when we were there, looking at the numerous mediocre to bad reviews online many agree with me. The food was slightly expensive and just wasn’t that great. The bread was stale, the fries were cold and the seafood nachos appetizer that we got was almost inedible. Maybe its the humidity but the chips were so stale they tasted like they’d been left out for a few weeks, the cheese was bad too, by the time they brought it it was already a cold hard lump and didn’t taste good. Not the worst nachos I’ve ever had but pretty close. The sea food bits in the nachos were great but the nachos part of the nachos was not. Strangely I’ve never had good nachos in Texas its not that hard to make and with the close proximity to Mexico you’d think they’d have some killer plates here. Maybe its the humidity and chips go stale very quickly, back home in the desert I can leave a bag open 3 or 4 days and they still taste fresh. I think I’ve finally learned my lesson and no more nachos from Texas! I may have gotten spoiled working next to BumbleBee’s Baja Grill with the best I’ve had anywhere in the US just a 3 minute walk away.

Well they did look good at least

This shark is at the front of a big beachwear store and is a pretty good lure to get people to stop and go inside. We did, and also ended up buying a few things like this dress for Cece!