Port Aransas

Most people arrive by water. The Port Aransas ferry, run free by the Texas Department of Transportation for cars and people on foot, crosses the Corpus Christi Ship Channel from Aransas Pass in under ten minutes, 24 hours a day, with two to six boats running depending on traffic. Before a road and toll causeway opened in 1931, cars rode a flatcar on the railroad to the island; the state built the modern road to Harbor Island and the landing in 1960. Expect waits of an hour or more on summer and holiday weekends.

The town began as a grazing station of Robert Mercer, an Englishman who moved to the island in 1855. It was Ropesville from 1888, after a scheme by Elihu Ropes to cut a deep-water channel across the island, then Tarpon from 1896 for the fish, and Port Aransas from 1911. Jetties made the pass permanent, and the Tarpon Inn began in 1886 as housing for the jetty crews. Local boatbuilder Barney Farley's boats became the town's emblem; Franklin Roosevelt fished from one.

In 1935 a University of Texas zoologist, E. J. Lund, came to investigate a huge fish kill and built a rough one-room lab on an old Corps of Engineers dock. It became the Marine Science Institute in 1941. Hurricane Harvey's landfall in August 2017 brought winds recorded at 132 mph and cost the institute alone $45 million. The town counted 2,904 residents in 2020; the island's population often swells past 20,000 in peak seasons.