Why is this man smiling?

That's Bob Murphy, a colleague at TPWD and native of Texas' Golden Triangle. Bob and I are both in South Padre Island for the sinking of the USTS Texas Clipper -- which has now been delayed twice.

After the last flurry of phone calls letting folks know we were pushing-back the scuttling of the ship, Bob and I had just enough time to head down to Isla Blanca Park at the south end of South Padre Island to do a little rock-hopping.

We were looking for snook on a strong incoming tide. The water, pre-cold front, was in beautiful condition.

A few bumps -- missed fish, and not snook from what I could tell -- and I look up to see Bob hooked into something. He lifts his rod tip and swings a shimmering, shivering Atlantic cutlass fish (we call them ribbon fish around here) onto the rocks.

I hook into something small -- a pretty little Rock hind (the diminutive, polka-dotted member of the grouper family) -- followed quickly by my own ribbon fish.

By this time I am fishing the calm, northern side of the north jetties; Bob is working the tidal rip on the channel side just 20 feet away from me. We're chatting as the last glow of a pretty nice sunset lights the skies.

Suddenly, Bob's rod bows and I see him fumble to get a good grip as line sizzles off the reel. I'm sure it's a big snook and open my mouth to tell him to hold on tight (why do anglers offer such advice? Like he hadn't thought of that ....) when a huge, silvery shape rockets out of the water.

Tarpon!

And not just any tarpon, but a better-than-man-sized fish well into the triple digits. The fish crashed back into the water with the sound of someone dropping a 2-ton granite jetty boulder into the channel. Bob's reel sizzles again, then: slack.

The fish "came unscrewed." That's no surprise since tarpon have notoriously hard, bony mouths, and the majority of hook-ups for any angler typically result in lost fish.

"Jumping" a tarpon is the thrill, the rest is just a slugfest for the most part.

Bob whooped and yelled and jumped up and down on the rocks, then suddenly went silent.

"Sorry for all the noise," he said, a bit sheepishly.

I laughed.

"Sorry? Man, if it was me, I'd still be laughing/cussing/crying -- all at the same time. I nearly had a heart attack, and I was just watching."

It was Bob's second tarpon. The first came years ago, on the very same set of jetties.

Those are some pretty good rocks.

Final voyage

For all sorts of reasons, I don't often write here about things that go on at my day job at the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, but I feel compelled to write about a project I'm currently working on.

In two weeks time, on Thurs., Nov. 15, workers will open a series of valves and flood the USTS Texas Clipper, sending her 134 feet down to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, about 17 nautical miles from South Padre Island, Texas.

The 473-foot ship, ex-USS Queens, ex-SS Excambion, will become Texas' newest artificial reef.

Wednesday, she'll be towed to the reef site, and I expect there will be a crowd at the jetties lining Brazos Santiago Pass: former crewmembers, interested locals, some of the department's staff.

Some of those who sailed aboard the ship have told me that's the only part of the event they want to see -- the final voyage; they said seeing the grand old lady slip beneath the waves was not the final image they wished to hold in their minds.

Ships have lives.

The Texas Clipper was born at the Bethlehem Steel Works shipyard at Sparrows' Point, Md., in 1944. She got to the Pacific in time to be the first attack transport ship to resupply U.S. forces on Iwo Jima, and ferried troops to the occupation of Japan. She then brought nearly 4,000 war-weary soldiers home.

Refitted at Bethlehem's Hoboken, N.J., shipyard, she was renamed the S.S. Excambion, one of the American Export Line's grand passenger-cargo combi-liners.

As the S.S. Excambion, she was the first fully air conditioned combi-liner in the world, and plied a New York - Mediterannean route for more than a decade. Mothballed as jet airliners became the preferred mode of transatlantic travel, she was loaned to Texas A&M University-Galveston as a maritime training vessel.

Painted Aggie maroon, the USTS Texas Clipper made 30 summer cruises, a gentle teacher to generations of Merchant Marine and Naval Reserve officers.

Even with her funnel and masts cut down, the Texas Clipper today remains recognizably the same ship she was in 1984, in 1964, in 1944. Her fine bow and graceful counter transom hark back to an era of shipbuilding when beautiful lines still counted.

As an artificial reef, the ship will provide critical structure and the foundation of a diverse and complex community of corals, sponges and other organisms. They, in turn, will draw fish. The ship, and the life surrounding her, will bring people.

Such a rush of divers and anglers, in fact, that local economies can expect to see a boost of $30 million a year, each year for the next half century.

It's not a bad end for a grand old lady. In fact, it's not an end at all. Many of my colleagues refer to it as the Texas Clipper's "fourth life." I think of it as a sort of afterlife.

I wish her the best.

[To see the electronic press kit for the Texas Clipper reefing project, go to: http://www.tpwd.state.tx.us/newsmedia/releases/news_roundup/texas_clipper/. The illustration at top is by Paul Hammerschmidt, TPWD; the photo of the USS Queens on patrol is a U.S. Navy photo, courtesy of the National Archives.]