By Dale Rankin
My first spring break in Port Aransas was the year I got my driver’s license. I drove my friends over from Portland and as locals who were accustomed to going to that beach, what we saw was different in that groups of kids a bit older than us gathered around flags from various universities across the state and signs with Greek letters identifying their fraternity or sorority. There was no such thing as spring break for high schools in those days and flying to Cancun for college students was too expensive. It reminded me of a drink-or-drown night on fraternity row; edgy but controlled.
Heading to The Coast
Once I arrived at college in San Marcos, my upland friends couldn’t wait to go to The Coast for spring break and we got rooms at Beach Lodge and did the stupid stuff college kids do (no one was arrested) but after my freshman year I preferred to head to Leaky or Garner State Park. I had seen enough of the beach and the flatlands and I didn’t attend another spring break on The Coast until the late mid-eighties when I flew down to cover things for our annual Chop-per Five Goes to Spring Break week and I immediately noticed a change in the beach crowd. The drinking age had gone back up to 21 which excluded about half of college students who instead made a pilgrimage to the Corona Bar in Acuna where the drinking age was the price of beer.
Instead of college students I saw lots of tattoos and pet snakes and the mood was always edgy and just in need of one dirty look, cutoff in traffic, or pass at a stranger’s girlfriend from a flashpoint. As we were doing a live shot near the south jetty in Port A, word came of a “riot” down the beach and I took off in the helicopter in search of the melee which as it turned out wasn’t hard to find. A man from San Antonio had run over a teenager girl on the beach and instead of stopping hit the gas with her under the car dragging her down the beach. By the time we landed and got to the scene the police had the bloodied driver in the back seat of a patrol car after the crowd had dragged him out through the driver’s-side window and commenced to apply a straightforward brand of street justice. These weren’t frat boys.
Padre Island 2000
Then in 2000 I moved to Padre Island and the crowd in Port A and on the Padre end were pretty much the same. Keep in mind that on Padre the Packery Channel did not yet exist and the beach drive was from Newport Pass south down the beach to Access Road 6 south of Bob Hall Pier. It was one long continuous line of cars and there were as many revelers in the cars as on the sand. That changed in 2006 when Packery Channel bifurcated the spring break conga line and split the crowd into two distinct demographics. South of Packery was where a more family-oriented crowd migrated and north of the channel was ripe with snakes and fireworks and like Port Aransas was not a college crowd. A drive along the beach after the parties went home found abandoned couches, beer cans, parts of wooden lifeguard stands that had been turned into firewood, and a landfill full of broken chairs and ice chests. Military recruiters began setting up displays to connect with high school kids looking for direction.
Action in Port A
A little over a decade ago the Port Aransas City Council addressed the growing volatility of the spring break crowds by banning the consumption of alcohol after sundown which had the effect of pushing the late-afternoon already-lubricated crowd south to Newport Pass to join the late-afternoon already-lubricated crowd there and after a few years they both skipped Port A and gathered on the beach north of Packery Channel. The result was huge crowds that required three traffic lanes carved out of the sand and a huge police presence. Scores that began in San Antonio and points north migrated to the North Packery Beach where they were often settled with gunfire and knife fights. As things spiraled toward controlled anarchy Corpus Christi looked for a way to address the problem and the answer was a breed ban on pit bulls north of Packery with the goal of keeping out gang gatherings but it was soon discovered that breed bans were not constitutional so all dogs were banned—a version of which still exists today. For several years I attended pre-spring break briefings at Port Royal where law enforcement outlined plans for crowd control and police began setting up command centers on the Padre end. The new rules and a heavy, heavy police presence on the beach north of Packery had an effect over the years and as I drove that stretch of beach this year I saw a crowd very different from those of a decade ago. There were still plenty of police cruisers showing the flag but fights were few and I heard no gunfire.
This weekend in Port A
Not so in Port Aransas. I drove north up the beach from Access Road 2 just north of Fire Station #16 on Saturday. The beach there was almost vacant in some points, but somewhere around Marker 35 things changed drastically and it wasn’t the mom-and-pop-and-kids crowd found on the Padre end. It was a volatile crowd of kids between the driver’s license age and the legal drinking age of 21, which didn’t seem to matter. Golf carts zigged and zagged in and out of traffic and jacked up trucks zipped through crowds of pedestrians. We stopped at an impromptu rave up where trucks had been backed into a circle and a helicopter hovered overhead while uniformed officers hovered around and stopped cars leaving the scene, often putting underage drinkers in cuffs. As officers swooped, partiers jumped in trucks to find another, less supervised spot. Like in past years chaos was just one word or one cut-off in heavy traffic away. Jan was hit by a golf cart while taking photos. The line of cars into Port Aransas by mid-afternoon—by beach or by highway—was backed up to the point that we never made it within five miles of Port Aransas. The volatility of the crowd was confirmed when gunfire broke out later that evening and five people were hit. A twerker on the roof of a Jeep that rear-ended a car sent him to the ER. Reports came from downtown Corpus Christi that bikini-clad women were wandering the streets there after being released from jail with no way back to Port Aransas.
How other cities have coped
Spring Break as we know it started in Ft. Lauderdale in the 1960s and by the 1980s that city found itself in much the same predicament as Port Aransas now faces. Their solution was to ban alcohol, prohibit overnight parking—a more severe step beyond the current after-dark alcohol ban—and reroute traffic to prevent crowds from congregating. The spring break crowd migrated south to Miami and in 2024 that city went to $100 daily beach passes, bag checks, and alcohol bans which lead to a 25% decrease in arrests in 2026.
Based on what I saw last weekend I think Port Aransas has become the Ft. Lauderdale/Miami of The Coast and things are only going to get worse. The scene last weekend took me back to the 1980s when the teenage woman was run over by a car. It was a big, mostly underage crowd with no adult supervision, peace officers were working but in a reactive mode and no one was really in control. I don’t know how you prevent problems in a crowd like that and it only looks to get worse as the population in our feeder markets continues to explode. What I saw last weekend was a wildfire just waiting for a match and over time that can’t be good for business.
The current plan isn’t working.
