Conn Brown Harbor Webcam

Fishing guides launching before dawn, weekend anglers backing bay boats down the ramp and the last few shrimp trawlers along the bulkhead all share Conn Brown Harbor in Aransas Pass, Texas. The Conn Brown Harbor webcam watches the harbor and its public boat ramp at HarborPoint Park, on Redfish Bay across the water from Port Aransas, so you can check how busy the launch is before you hitch up the trailer. It is one of our Texas live cams on the Gulf Coast.

How busy is the Conn Brown Harbor boat ramp?

Weekends are the crunch. When the city went after a federal grant of nearly $5 million to rebuild the roads around the 127-acre harbor area, it reported hundreds of visitors on a typical weekend and sometimes more than 1,000, most of them towing fishing boats. On the Aransas Pass live cam, a line of trucks waiting at the ramp and a full trailer lot are the signs to wait an hour.

HarborPoint Park is open 24 hours and charges no admission, with boat ramps, a fishing pier, fish-cleaning tables, picnic shelters and restrooms. The City of Aransas Pass harbor page adds the rules on the water: the whole harbor is a no-wake zone, so boats hold idle speed from the red day beacon at the entrance, and visiting boats can use low-cost transient docks and a pump-out.

Most boats head straight for the flats. Redfish Bay holds about 32,000 acres of fish habitat and the northernmost large seagrass beds in Texas, protected as a State Scientific Area since 2000, with boating rules in force since 2006 to keep propellers off the grass. Anglers come for redfish, speckled trout, flounder, black drum and sheepshead, and the city notes that redfish over eight pounds are not unusual here. Down the coast, the South Padre surf cam shows the open Gulf side of the same shoreline.

For a quieter look at the same water, check the webcam on a weekday morning, when the ramp lanes tend to be clear and the harbor belongs to working boats. Among our live webcams from around the world, it is one of the few where the rush hour is made of boat trailers.

The harbor’s working past still shows in the picture. Aransas Pass has billed itself the Shrimp Capital of Texas since at least 1961, the local chamber says Conn Brown once held more than 300 shrimp boats, and the Shrimporee, held every year since 1948, included blessings of the shrimp fleet in this harbor in its early years.