Red Tide, Whispering Pines and Texas-Sized Noise

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

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Doug Pike (0:52)

All right, here we go with yet another episode of Fifty Plus. Thank you all for joining me on this Tuesday afternoon. I'm really glad to be back, but certainly not because where I've been wasn't awesome. I got the chance once again to play Whispering Pines, perennially one of the top golf courses in the country, and more than once ranked number one in Texas, which it is right now, by the way.

It was warm up there, downright hot really. It was high nineties, but I've been acclimating to the heat all summer long, so no big deal. I'll tell you a little bit more about that in a minute. Lots to unpack in this edition of Fifty Plus, though, so let's get down to it. I'll tee up this morning with the algae bloom that's occurring now along parts of Galveston Island and Crystal Beach and on the Bolivar Peninsula there. The common name for this one is red tide because of the particular algae's color in the water, which you might or might not see depending on the severity of the bloom. Red tide kills fish by attract, attracting, attacking their central nervous systems. That was another one of those guaranteed human error things I do.

The human, the red, let me just start that paragraph over. Red tide kills fish by attacking their central nervous systems that paralyzes them, which eliminates their ability to breathe. In a nutshell, it suffocates them, it asphyxiates them. With people, when those toxic blooms, and that's why, by the way, that's why all the pictures recently of all the dead fish on the beach, that's what happens when red tide gets to them. It just, it freezes them, it paralyzes them and they can't breathe, so they die. With people, when those toxic blooms break apart, they're carried on the wind and across the surface of the water, and breathing these toxins can cause coughing, sneezing, a runny nose, scratchy throat, sneezing, that kind of thing. Just kind of like an allergic reaction to anything would be relatively mildly. In people whose respiratory systems are not 100% though, such as maybe folks who have COPD, asthma, something like that, the symptoms can be more severe, up to and including maybe shortness of breath and even wheezing. I don't know, I haven't read or at least don't remember reading about anyone who has died from ingesting this red tide stuff. And I've been exposed to it several times, as many times as I've been to the beach and seen this stuff happen. I reported on it for the paper many times when I was there. And mostly it's just going to be an annoyance. The best way to avoid that annoyance is of course to just stay away when that red tide is, and that bloom is active. And there are websites, I can't recall the name of them right now, but there's a couple of them here where you can check on the presence of red tide or not. And one more source of the irritation you might get, although it's not really probable around here, is it's not a good idea to eat shellfish that are caught from water where there's an active bloom. Now the good news is, two good news is number one, the people who are commercially harvesting shellfish probably are not gonna be anywhere near water where there's a red tide bloom. That just wouldn't work out for them well. Also, this is a very temporary thing. Sometimes a week, sometimes a couple of weeks, occasionally a little bit longer, but eventually it will go away. So briefly, by the way, I was out yesterday, as I mentioned earlier, for a media event at Whispering Pines, Texas' number one golf course, as rated by the Golf Digest and the Dallas Morning News, which publishes its own list annually. I think that would be an interesting thing for our own paper here to publish. If they would put together teams and go out and rate these courses, my hand would go in the air for that. We were there in advance of this year's Spirit International, which is a bi-annual event that gathers some of the best amateur players in the entire world. Jordan Spieth played in the Spirit, Scottie Scheffler played in the Spirit, back when they were much younger and much more amateur, and lots of other names, too. And Spirit participants actually have won dozens of majors around the world and hundreds, literally, of tournaments around the world. These are the best of the best, very young, up-and-coming players, and this year's event, be it Whispering Pines, as it always has been, and is set for November 10 through the 15