The Age: Lessons learned from a life on Galveston Bay

By Marie Hughes, director of Chambers County Museum at Wallisville

Darrell Skillern of Cove was born in Baytown, Texas, on June 16, 1950, to Ellis Skillern and Bernice Holland Skillern. One might imagine his birth wasn’t ordinary—perhaps he came into the world clutching a fishing rod and spitting salt water. From an early age, Darrell was drawn to the water. Over the years, that love for the outdoors turned into a career, and he became one of the most respected fishing guides in the Galveston Bay area.

Learning from the Best

His early memories are anchored in long days on the water, learning from mentors who shared both their time and hard-won wisdom.

“We had a family friend who had retired from Exxon when he was 55 or 56 because he had a heart attack,” said Darrell. “We burned the country up with him camping, fishing, and roaming the rivers, almost every day in the summertime. In the beginning the boats and the motors were terrible. We had a seven and a half horse Scott Atwater motor and a twelve and a half horse C.B. motor that took two big guys to get it on the back of a boat, it was heavy. We would go to Crawley’s and you could rent a skiff, a cypress skiff, put your motor on it and putt out to the reef. A big trip was from Crawley’s old bait camp to Fisher’s Reef, about 400 yards out, maybe a little further. That was a big trip, because the boats leaked, and the outboard motors would do everything but get you home.

“Most of the boats had oar locks on them, including the cypress skiffs, so you could paddle back in if you needed to. If it was really calm . . . a really perfect day, a really long trip would be from Fisher’s Reef to Beasley’s, or to Cedar Gully. I was six or seven years old at the time. Most of the time I went with Mr. Mac, his name was McNolte but he preferred to be called Mac, and even at the age of six we could call him that. He had quite a bit of knowledge about the Bay, and we would go there and camp out on the beach. What a horrible experience that was, but we did it and we were just crazy enough to want to go back.

“We fished off the beach in the surf, and if Mr. Mac wasn’t available his neighbor, Henry would take us. Henry was a postmaster and ex-fighter in the Marine Corp, so he was pretty tough on us. When you got a backlash, you got it out and it didn’t take many times untangling it before you learned how to cast pretty good. The reels were terrible, the rods were even worse, and the boat motors were horrible. So, we didn’t venture too far, but over the years, the motors improved, the boats got better, so we started taking off for unknown parts, and most of it was unknown when I first got started,” said Darrell, smiling at the memory.

Fueled by Competition

As the equipment improved and their knowledge of the water deepened, a new force began to shape Darrell’s fishing journey—competition.

“I remember at a very early age, Bob Brister showed up there and he had a boat with twin 25-horse motors on it. Now you see them with twin three-, four-, five-hundred-horse motors. But the old-timers saw him and said, ‘That so-and-so is going to kill somebody in that thing.’ Two twenty-fives—and he probably didn’t run but a few miles faster than someone with a one twenty-five.

“There weren’t a lot of people on the water and you didn’t have a lot of sophisticated stuff like they have now, so you had to figure out when was the best time to go. Wind was a big factor—we had to figure winds. If you had a certain wind, you went to a certain place. Current has a lot to do with it, and the tide schedules—you don’t want a lot of slack. Sometimes they do bite on a slack tide, but you like a little tide movement of some sort,” he said.

“So, when we were first starting, we had to learn these things, and we learned from a lot of other people—guys like Felix Stagnow, Bill Carpenter, and different ones. A guy named Marshall Diehl was considerably older than me and I learned by watching him catch fish and how he was doing it. So, we all learn from somebody, you know, and when I learned something, I tried to perfect it a little bit.

“There was kind of a nucleus of us guys—Micky Eastman, James Plague, Dana Bailey, Jimmy West, to name a few. We were competitive. You wanted to throw a no-hitter, you wanted to beat those guys, so there was constant pressure to out-perform them. Blaine Farmode was another one. So there was competition every day . . . every day was a competition, and if you didn’t catch ‘em and they had ‘em, it was, ‘Oh, my gosh,’ you’d go home thinking, ‘Oh, Lord, how stupid I was to pick that spot. I knew better than to go over there.’ So, that’s what drove us—we had a lot of ‘want to.’ Kind of like a rodeo cowboy—it’s all about getting to the next show. Rope when you have to, but it’s always about the next show.

“When the equipment improved, a super day was when you came in with 200–300 fish. It happened; people caught that many. We calculated our fish by the number of boxes we caught, and the standard measurement was an 86-quart igloo—that was one box. We primarily fished for speckled trout—that was what most folks wanted—but we fished for redfish, too. We’d fish for reds after we got our quota of trout—it was kind of a bonus fish for us,” Darrell continued.

Balancing Work and Water

While Darrell’s dad worked long hours building cabinets, Darrell found time to sneak in fishing trips when he could.

“My dad was a cabinetmaker, and I worked for him. He worked until seven every evening, seven days a week, so that afforded me the privilege of getting out a little bit earlier and getting a morning in, I’d meet somebody, and we’d go out for a little while.

“I usually got off on the weekends or I’d take a day off during the week to go fishing. We were doing a lot of houses in Whispering Pines at the time, and the bay was right there. We would have everything ready to go and run down there and BAM, come right back,” he said, remembering.

A Change in Course

It wasn’t long before Darrell’s fishing hobby turned into a full-blown career—one that allowed him to leave the cabinet shop behind and pursue the water full time.

“A friend of mine was guiding a group from Schlumberger Oil Company,” continued Darrell. “He told me they hunted three days a week, but he was going to take a different job through a different outfitter. They were hunting through Forest West, who was an outfitter at that time. My friend said I want them to get somebody good, would you come take ‘em?

“This was hunting, not fishing,” clarified Darrell. “So, I agreed to do it, I could take them in the morning and still get to work. I then began to take them fishing on the weekends and started taking others as well.

“At some point I said, this is what I really want to do. So, I quit being a cabinetmaker and started taking people hunting and fishing and had a heck of a time at it, a lot of fun. I met a lot of super, super, neat people.

“If I wasn’t running duck hunts in the winter, we were on the water because the bay was pretty much empty during hunting season. There wasn’t anybody in your way, you could go wherever you wanted to, we loved it!” he said with a smile.

A Labor of Love

Though the gear improved over time, the guide life was never easy. Still, Darrell remembers those years with great affection.

“During the beginning years of guiding, we had much smaller boats. I had a 19 Mako,” he added. “Mickey’s was even smaller than that—it was a 17 Sport Craft. How we got four people in those boats, I don’t know, but we would get ‘em in there and they were packed in like sardines.

“That 19 Mako was the wettest thing you’ve ever been in in your life. It’d be dead calm, and you’d be running along and a teacup full of water would splash in your face. I carried slicker suits to put on ‘em so they wouldn’t get just soaked.

“We didn’t have the kind of equipment available today. We’d break down, have to get pulled in from all kinds of stuff going on, including storms and everything that goes with them.

“In the guide business, you do pretty good, then the motor blows up and you have to have a new motor. The wheel comes off and ruins the axle; you have to take it apart and rebuild it, sometimes it’s on the side of the road. I remember one evening coming out of the Wildlife Refuge, the sun had already gone down, and the hub froze up on the trailer axle and gaulded the bearing.

“So, I’m in the ditch, jacked up in the mosquitoes, and you know what they’re like down there, beating the race and bearing off so I could get another one on and get home, and still have to wash the boat and get ready for the next day.

“It’s definitely a labor of love. If you’re doing it every day, it’s tough physically, but we loved it, so we didn’t know any different. We thought that’s just the way you feel when you wake up. I remember waking up and have to literally drag myself to the bathroom, I hurt that bad. But, after a little bit, it stopped hurting and you just go on.

“When we first started, most guys were using shrimp to catch ‘em. Your paying customers wouldn’t get on the boat without shrimp, but we weaned them off of that as time went on. There were so many fish, you could catch them on almost anything you wanted to throw—and faster, ‘cause instead of digging in the bait bucket looking for a shrimp, you’ve already got your lure tied on there and you can just throw back out and catch another one.

“Fantastic times, the fishing was phenomenal. So many fish . . . oh, my gosh, there were so many fish. Don’t get me wrong, there were days when we didn’t catch ‘em, but there was a ton of days that we did, and when we got into them we worked them over,” Darrell proclaimed with obvious glee.

“That’s the way it was then—there were no limits. You kept as many as you wanted to keep. Then we got limits, but that was fine, they were pretty liberal . . . 20 fish. Now they’re limited to three.

“It was not uncommon to come in with 80–100 trout to clean—and red fish, too.”

We Had an Impact

As Darrell looks back on those glory days of fishing, he’s come to understand how deeply sport fishermen contributed to the changes in the bay.

“We have a much bigger impact as sport fishermen than we thought we did. As humans, we like to blame everybody else for depleting the stock. We blamed the commercial fishermen, the trot liners, the gill netters, and they did take their toll, but we were taking the toll too.

“When these things came along,” said Darrell, pointing to his cell phone, “the guys would be on your boat and if they were really hitting, they’d get on their cell phones to their buddies at the plant. Then after shift change, here they would come.

“Then instead of three or four boats on ‘em, there might be 60 or 70 boats on ‘em, with three or four guys in each boat taking 10 or 15 fish—each one of ‘em. So, it adds up to a lot of fish.

“You set a bunch of fishermen around and they would say, ‘Sport fishermen don’t make that much of an impact. There’s no way you could catch all these fish with a rod and reel.’ Well, they do and they have.

“So, we had a much bigger impact on the industry than we thought we would, just by the sheer numbers of us. You don’t think about it at the time ‘cause you just see what you have. So, it really did hurt the commercial fishermen,” he confessed.

Backlash Blues

Fishing was fun. Sometimes frustrating. And always full of characters.

“It was so much fun, a wonderful time of life for all of us. We were young and energetic, and we had a lot of fun with it. We’d get mad at each other and then we’d get over it.

“I guided full time for well over 10 years, either hunting or fishing. For the last few years, I was doing it full time, it was only fishing. As you age, your clientele is also aging. Then somebody dies and then another one and you start to slowly lose them. Half the people in my album are gone now,” Darrell noted sadly.

“So, you get new ones coming in and it’s constantly changing. Jeff Bradshaw guided with me for 10 or 12 years. He was a great guy, everybody loved him.”

He laughed as he recalled one of his favorite stories—one that any guide (or patient friend) could appreciate.

“One of my favorite stories was during the wintertime when we had gotten slow due to storms and cold weather. Some of the guys didn’t want to go out, but James Plague took this guy out to a place we call ‘The Hole.’ There are some oyster reefs there and some little bayous that come into it.

“He got out there and the front was coming, and he had this older gentleman with him. Sure enough, the big fish were there—six, seven pounders. James gets one on the line and oh, man, it’s great.

“The ole man says, ‘I’ve got a backlash.’ James tells him okay, and throws his line back out, then picks his backlash out and hands him the rod back, takes the fish off for him—and the ole man casts out and blows the reel up again.

“He tells James, ‘I’ve backlashed my reel again,’ and James tells him to go to the boat, there’s another rod and reel in the boat. The ole man says, ‘Well, let me use yours.’

“James said, ‘Look, you don’t owe me anything, just get out of the way.’ Even being broke, all he wanted to do was catch ‘em,” said Darrell, breaking into a laugh.

There was camaraderie, yes—but it was also business.

“James and I were actually partners in a little thing we started in 1989, called Silver King Adventures. It was very successful, a lot of people came and fished with us, and occasionally I’ll still see one of those hats that we made,” he noted.

When Hope Sinks

In 1989—the same year Darrell and James launched Silver King Adventures—a devastating freeze swept through the Texas coast.

“In 1989 we had a horrible freeze, and the fish never floated. I saw one dead fish on the bank, and figured we dodged the bullet. But we got in front of Jamaica Beach in five to six feet of water, and we could read a newspaper on the bottom, it was that clear, the water was just so cold.

“Everywhere on the bottom were dead speckled trout, like patchwork on a quilt, they were everywhere,” Darrell proclaimed with emphasis.

The numbers were staggering—reportedly six million fish died in Texas bays.

“They did the same thing in ’83. The shrimpers would pull them out, they would pull their nets up and they would be full of dead trout. They just don’t float for some particular reason.

“We put in the bay in ’83, the day after it stopped, and ran down the shoreline. It was bitter cold, bitter-bitter cold,” Darrell recalled. “But the wind had laid enough that we could get out. We were running down the shore on East Bay and there were waves there four feet high, frozen on the bank. And the biggest alligator gar you’ve ever seen in your life floating there. They came to the top for some particular reason. I’ll never forget how those waves looked, frozen all up and down the shoreline.”

The section of coast known as Frozen Point got its name for a reason.

“The bay froze over right there, you can see how it got the name, ‘Frozen Point.’ It was named long before our time, but you can see why.

“We were talking to one of the bait camp operators, Bill Reams, about the freeze and he said they had a really bad freeze in 1950 and for a year afterwards he never saw a mullet jump out of the water. Yeah, he said you couldn’t catch any fish, shrimp, or anything, so it must have really been bad.

“One thing that’s inevitable, with everything we do to improve and preserve the fishing industry—setting limits and what have you—Mother Nature can take it away in a heartbeat, and it takes time to rebuild.”

Even so, conservation efforts were beginning to take root.

“There was a guy named James Dailey who worked for Texas Parks and Wildlife. He had the idea if we could allow these fish one year of spawning, it would increase the number of fish that we had.

“It was a pretty good idea, except we were originally keeping 13-inch fish. Now we’re cut back to 15-inch, and according to Texas Parks and Wildlife, male trout typically don’t get very big.

“The last three years that I guided, I would gut the fish to see if they had eggs in them, and I had a very high percent—90 to 95 percent—that had row in them. I don’t know what the other 5 percent were, they may have been females too, I don’t know. But what we catch and keep is typically female—we were catching the breeding stock.

“Dailey, who was a great guy, he and a couple guys—John Key and Bill Baker—came up with the idea of tagging fish. I went with them on occasion and helped tag.

“They stopped that program for one reason: they weren’t getting returns on the tags and also the fact that the fish didn’t move. They were caught in and near the same place and often the exact same place they were tagged.”

Fishing at Its Prime

There was a time when the bays teemed with life. The kind of abundance that’s hard to imagine now.

“During that period of time, when fishing was at its prime, you would see rafts of mullet as big as this museum [Chambers County Museum at Wallisville], you could almost walk on top of them. There would be acres of them on the shoreline and for some reason we don’t see that anymore, I don’t know why.

“There was a point when they actually netted mullet for the row (fish eggs) in them. I don’t know whether they do that anymore, but I don’t think they do.

“You could pull up and get out of the boat, wade fishing, and throw floating lures and in a little bit start catching trout from underneath ‘em. You would see them all up and down East Bay, West Bay, even Trinity Bay, then the jackfish would come in through those schools, busting those mullet and they would come flying out of the water.

“Now they’re busted up by sharks—we don’t see the jackfish coming in here like we used to. I often wonder if those jackfish didn’t follow them in, ‘cause they typically catch jackfish in the surf,” said Darrell quizzically.

They Just Don’t Know What to Do

Today’s fishing scene looks very different—not just because of nature, but because of how redfish are raised and released.

“The spawn of red fish should occur in or near the mouth of the passes. Sometimes right in the mouth between the jetties at a place we call Fleenor Flats, or down on Bolivar Row, or right at the edge of East Beach, or out in front of the boat cut, or the mouth of San Louis Pass. Anywhere out in that area, and those red fish are big. They’re 32 . . . 42 . . . 45 inchers, big ones, and they’re surf runners.

“We never, ever in all my years of fishing, ever caught them that big in the bay, and if we caught a rare one that was a 45 incher it would be down closer to the passes.

“Once the red fish spawn, their eggs are carried into the bay by the tide, where they hatch and stay until they get up to about 30 inches long. Then they go back to the mouth of the Gulf to spawn—then out into the Gulf, never to return. They become surf runners, and the cycle repeats itself.

“When I was fishing in the beginning, all the red fish we caught in the back of these bays—like in the mouth of the Trinity River, mouth of Reds, up in front of Double Bayou, in front of Rollover Pass—all the different places, they were in what we call ‘The Slot.’ They were 26, 28, 30, maybe 31 or 32 inches occasionally.

“But now, the red fish in the back of the bay, they’re there all the time. They never leave and some are 44, 46, 48 inchers—they are hatchery reds that don’t know to go to the Gulf. They just don’t know what to do,” he explained.

“So now what’s happening—those big reds, we call them bull reds—they’re in the mouth of the bay in a marauding school. We’d pull up and hit a school and they’d be all over-sized red fish, 40-inchers. And they never used to ever be in the bay. Not ever. Not in the back of this bay,” Darrell stressed emphatically.

“They should be in the mouth of the passes, so they’re not going there to spawn. Just like any other fish that you hatch—like salmon—they put them in hatchery tanks beside the river. They get them up to fingerling size and they open a little two-inch opening, and the fingerlings go out into the river and away they go.

“Well, when they came back to spawn, what did they do? They swam back to that same opening and tried to get back in there, because that is where they were spawned. Often times they died right there without ever spawning.

“So, the natural programming of the reds is off. Instead of spawning them and dumping their eggs in the surf, they’re raising them to fingerling size and turning them out. Now, they don’t know where to go—they want to get back to where they were spawned—so they never go to the surf.

“That’s why we are catching the bigger reds in the Bay now,” clarified Darrell.

The Silt and Seagrass Saga

Along with changes in the fish, Darrell has watched the shoreline itself erode—quietly, steadily—over decades of fishing the bay.

“When I first started fishing there was a little bit of bulkheading around Crawley’s Bait Camp, but not too much. Most of the shoreline was natural. The back of the bay had long-stemmed core grass against the bank, that’s what cushions the bank and that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

“I’m not an expert on all the sea grasses. Dave Wilcox is, and a lot of other people around this area, but I’m not. But there should be sea grass out in front and the waves should break on it. Then the waves roll in and hit the long-stemmed core grass, and the long-stemmed core grass just lays down and then springs back up.

“That cushions the shoreline—it’s your breakwater, so to speak. When it’s not there, the waves break on the shoreline . . . and break on it . . . and create silt, which kills the sea grasses.

“There’s a lot of things that create silt. One thing is the dredging of the Intracoastal Canal. For many years while dredging it, they dumped the silt into the most convenient spot, which is right back into the bay. They have since built places all down through there where they can dump and skim it off, but through the years up and down the shoreline, they got it on top of reefs in West Bay, which killed them.

“The Refuge has got some stuff going on down there that’s worth a trip down there to look at it. They’ve done a really good job, and it works. They built a half-moon shape retainer wall with rocks that is just the right height—so when the tide comes in, it breaks over and the silt gets deposited behind it, then the grass begins to grow. The long-stemmed core grass is there, it just needs to be protected long enough to get it up.

“They could stagger these and reclaim a lot of shoreline that’s been lost. Texas loses twelve to fifteen hundred acres of coastline a year due to subsidence—due to the fact they’ve jettied every river and outlet we have, and the outlets are where the shoreline replenishes itself.

“A prime example of this is the mouth of the Mississippi River. What has happened is the silt has built up further and further out, so you have a channeled river straight out, but the insides have deteriorated due to the levees and rock jetties down its banks.

“Twenty miles out from the mouth of the Mississippi, you have a lump in 650 feet of water where the silt has been deposited—they call it the Midnight Lump. It’s a phenomenal place to catch tuna and all kinds of stuff.

“But that’s why the shoreline doesn’t replenish itself. The silt should come out of the river and go down the beach front instead of going out. If you go to the north jetty and go through the boat cut and immediately turn left, you will run aground. It’s just a flat out there where all the silt has been deposited. That’s what would have happened if they had left openings in the jetties they’ve built. It would still have given you protection for ships coming in and out, but also allow the silt to go down the beach,” he explained.

Phenomenal Fishing, Fine Friends

In between the big changes and the hard work were the simple joys—days on the water with good friends, catching fish and swapping stories.

“I fished with a lot of great guys. I remember one time we were in the back of East Bay and I had Chris Cloch and Bill Miller with me. We’re catching them, and man, it was good.

“Chris was looking at his watch and saying, ‘I told my wife I’d be home. It’s gettin’ late, Darrell.’ I asked Bill, ‘William, what do you want to do?’ He said, ‘Ha, we’re staying.’

“I said, ‘Chris,’ and he answered, ‘Ah, maybe one more school.’ So we get on another school and pretty soon it’s when he’s supposed to be home and we’ve got a box full of fish.

“This was before cell phones, so we had to come all the way from East Bay to Fort Anahuac Park where we put in, and it’s dark now, so I’m flying by the seat of my pants to get back.

“We pulled in and Chris was frantic, saying, ‘What am I going to do, what am I going to do?’ I told him, ‘Go up there to the pay phone at the grocery store and call your wife and say only this—just say, I’m fine, I’m okay, I’ll explain everything when I get home. Then hang the phone up.’

“He came running back to where I was cleaning fish and said, ‘I said exactly what you told me. Now, what am I going to do when I get home?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, but you’ve got about an hour and a half to figure out something—you’ve got to make up a lie is all I can tell you.’

“We had a pretty good laugh out of that one,” laughed Darrell, relishing the memory. “Man, there were many more. Many more of those. That’s the kind of stuff that I miss,” he added with a hint of melancholy.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Guiding wasn’t always about limits and laughter. Sometimes, it was about working every angle until the very last cast.

“I remember one particular day I took a group down towards Smith Point where I’d been catching quite a few, but the wind switched on me and I couldn’t quite get to the fish . . . we were wade fishing.

“We hit on one or two—they were there—but we couldn’t get them to bite. So I left and went to East Bay. The water was air clear in East Bay.

“I moved around and moved around, and I was kind of wearing my old customers out, I moved them so much. And we really didn’t have much in the cooler.

“So I decided I was going to get out and walk the shallow water to see if I could find some redfish. I walked down the shoreline, but I had kind of older guys with me, so they sat in the boat.

“I was walking down the bank in knee-deep water and saw something in the shallow water, and it looked like a red. So I cast out—I had a spoon on—and BAM . . . I’m on!

“Well, it wasn’t a redfish—it was a trout. So I started catching them. I took my hat off and started waving at the old guys—they were way down the shoreline.

“Finally, they saw me and came down to where I was, and we caught 42 trout! We had 30 fish over five pounds, and of the 30, more than 15 were over seven pounds.”

I Miss the Camaraderie

Time has changed the water, the fish, and the people. But for Darrell, it’s the relationships built on the bay that he misses the most.

“I fished the bay area at the absolute best time. Guys now are kind of on the back side of the good fishing.

“Oh, I miss it—when we could get out there on a school of fish, wade fishing or even in the boat, put the troll motor down and everybody hooked up on big trout. Thirty, forty fish out of one school.

“I miss the camaraderie of those times. We had a great run. I had a lot of fun trips with a lot of interesting characters who had a real love for what I enjoyed doing. I wouldn’t trade those days for anything,” concluded Darrell with a look of longing for the water and a rod.

But the water always had one more adventure in store.

“One time we were on Number Five—Number Five was in the Bolivar Field—and it had a piling on it at that time. The guy that was over that oil company left that piling there ‘cause it was the only way he could find that reef.

“So, we’re on Number Five and there’s a storm cell back towards Bolivar coming toward us. I looked back to the north and there’s another cell that stretched all the way across the horizon. I thought, ‘What in the world is going on?’

“Back then we didn’t have this,” said Darrell, picking up his cell phone. “There was no way to know what was going on. Just a marine radio, and a lot of the time it was ‘beep, beep, beep—small boats, small craft, you need to get in right now.’

“So anyway, we’re on Number Five and we’re just flipping them in—as fast as we can catch ‘em. I had a man and a woman in the boat, and the man flipped a fish in, and just as he did, the hook stuck in his forearm.

“Jimmy West was there beside me—he saw what happened and said, ‘I’ll get it out.’ So he hopped over into my boat and tied a string on it to snatch it out.

“Just as he went to snatch it out, a lightning bolt went Phew-BAM, real close—and he jerked at the same time. The guy never knew it came out.

“About that time, I said, ‘We’ve gotta go!’ So Jimmy headed back to Port Bolivar and I’m in the sandwich between both cells. I took off running for my life to the base of the Texas City Dike—there were some bait camps there.

“I had a built-in cooler on this nineteen-foot Mako, and it was just big enough for two people to sit, and the couple were both sitting on it. I let the hammer down and it was getting rougher . . . and rougher . . . and rougher!

“I get to the dock and run up and tie off to the cleat—and lightning’s already getting on us pretty good. The lid had fallen in on the cooler and both of them were wedged in that cooler. I had to pull them out so we could get inside to safety.

“The wind had broken the wind gauge at 110 miles per hour and blown all the windows off Crawley’s Bait Camp. There were about thirteen boats sunk in the bay by the jetties during that storm,” stressed Darrell.

The Tide Never Stops

Though the fish are fewer, the shoreline worn, and the storms stronger, the stories live on—carried in the rhythm of the tide, the pull of memory, and the voice of a man who lived it all.

Darrell Skillern didn’t just fish Galveston Bay.

He lived it.