Coastal Conservation Association (CCA)

Casting Comments
Getting Back to CCA’s Roots

By Ted Venker
TIDE
Sept/Oct 2006

There is an independent oil company in Houston that realized long ago that not everyone who worked at corporate headquarters would have the opportunity to truly experience the business from the rumbling, sweaty floor of an oil derrick.

The CEO had grown the company from a small enterprise to a major international player and believed it was important for every employee, from the lowliest clerks to those with mahogany desks, to know exactly where and how the company’s money was made.

So every year, at no small expense, every employee was bussed out to a worksite upon which a real, working oil rig was chewing into the earth. Secretaries, HR specialists, marketing guys, mail clerks and even the CEO lined the floor of the rig and watched roughnecks trip pipe in and out of the hole, change out drill bits, and pump in drilling mud.

Invariably, what had seemed so abstract would suddenly become a reality for many of those spectators. This was real work; loud, dangerous work. It combined high-tech with brute force. It meshed science, physics and chemistry with a gambler’s sense of success and failure. It pitted spectacular risk against unimaginable payoffs.

If nothing else, the tours would succeed in instilling every employee with a sense of pride in what their own company had accomplished.

Clearly CCA and multi-national oil firms are oceans apart in size, scope and often policy, but there is value to be gained from that company’s example. It is indeed important to step back every now and then to gain some perspective.

With that in mind, a large portion of CCA’s national staff recently toured Sea Center Texas, a one-of-a-kind marine fish hatchery located on 75 acres in Lake Jackson. Texas Parks & Wildlife Department (TPWD), Dow Chemical and CCA Texas joined forces to make Sea Center a reality in the early 1990s. Dow donated 60 acres of land (later expanded to 75 acres), CCA donated seed moneys of $1.1 million, and TPWD directed the design and construction of the facility. Because the donations from Dow and CCA were specifically allocated to the recovery of red drum, these donations qualified for federal matching funds under the Sport Fish Restoration Program.

The Center now houses educational displays of the marine life of Texas bays and Gulf waters, the largest red drum hatchery in the world, 35 acres of grow-out ponds and a five-acre interpreted marsh area. It produces 15-20 million juvenile redfish and speckled trout for release into Texas coastal waters every year.

Sea Center Texas opened in 1996 and is now a multi-million dollar, state-of-the-art marine finfish hatchery and education center. However, even employees of CCA were unaware of the role that tens of thousands of conservationists had played in its creation.

It is one thing to read a magazine like this and learn about the massive volunteer effort that virtually redefined marine resource conservation in this country. It is quite another to tour an actual facility that CCA helped build and walk past tanks holding brood stock, hear how the lights are manipulated to fool the fish into spawning and see the billions of eggs and larvae that are produced. It is enlightening to hear how the secret of successful restocking was slowly unraveled and explore the technology that is employed to bring seawater miles inland and filter millions of gallons a day.

To hear someone who works for CCA whisper that they had no idea we were a part of something like Sea Center is inspiring. To realize that every one of us on the tour that day can’t wait to go fishing is rewarding.

The tour was a small event, in a small corner of CCA, but it drove home a point that applies to all 92,000 CCA members. We are all doing work that we can be proud of, in projects big and small. We are making a difference.