A Hero on the beach and in Life-Billy Sandifer

I thought I'd share a story that deeply touched me.This man is a REAL HERO in my book ,and a great example of how we can be involved in protecting what we love.

written by David Sikes :Corpus Cristi Texas Feb 20,2010
CORPUS CHRISTI — Billy Sandifer’s grandfather’s eyes watered when a young Billy and his little brother performed a modified version of the Davy Crockett television show theme song. The boys had replaced Crockett’s name with that of their grandfather, a World War I veteran who was raising the boys as his own.

His mixed reaction was unexpected.

“Papa cried, and then he whipped us,” Sandifer, 62, recalled.

The lesson, as Sandifer remembers, was that the men who died in the war were the real heroes. Sandifer’s grandfather didn’t want his grandsons to mistake mere discharge of duty for heroism.

Billy was 8.

Sandifer, an outspoken local conservationist, surf-fishing guru, birding icon and founder of the annual Big Shell Beach Cleanup on Padre Island National Seashore, shares his grandfather’s reluctance to accept the hero label.

But this hasn’t stopped others from thrusting it upon him. Field & Stream magazine, after a nationwide nomination process, in the fall named Sandifer as one of six finalists for the magazine’s prestigious 2009 Heroes of Conservation award. Magazine officials said Sandifer received more letters of recommendation than any other finalist.

He didn’t win the award, but people who know him and his work believe he has earned the title.

The nomination letters came mostly from the Coastal Bend. Beeville birder and sportsman Jimmy Jackson describes Sandifer as part preacher, part cult leader, part curmudgeon, part naturalist, part predator and all hero. Jackson considers Sandifer a secular monk of sorts, with steadfast principles, beholden to no one.

Longtime friend David McKee, a biology professor at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, said Sandifer is one of the most genuine and straightforward men he has ever known. Sandifer, whose labels include “Padre of Padre” and “Padre Protector,” has earned a reputation as the authority on the island’s wildlife and fisheries.

He lived or rather survived by his wits on the beaches of Padre Island for nearly two years from the summer of 1977 to February 1979.

“I didn’t want to go to jail and that’s where I would have ended up if I’d stayed in town,” Sandifer said. “That or dead.”

Life on the beach

He ate Rice Krispies with water most mornings and corned beef hash twice a week. But Sandifer said his main source of protein was whiting and the occasional small speckled trout. He lost count of the sharks he caught. He wears 27 teeth on a necklace. The teeth were taken from sharks that measured six feet or more, caught during that time.

Most days, Sandifer would plant four or five long rods into the sand, then board an inflatable raft. He would use a handmade oar to paddle large shark baits between 1,000 yards and 2,000 yards into the surf. He would tie a red bandana near the rod tip so he could explore the beach and still see from a distance whether a fish had taken a bait.

He didn’t eat lunch.

On some weekends, friends would deliver groceries, water, ice, cigarettes, fuel and M&M candies.

These were the only times he spoke to another human.

Some nights he would catch as many as three big sharks. Each could take more than an hour to land. If conditions were right, some days Sandifer would use lighter tackle for trout, many in the 7- to 9-pound class. He released all big trout because the fillets were too big for a single meal. And because refrigeration was unreliable and scarce.

He kept a fire burning constantly and would burn as much beach debris as he could. This was his first attempt at a beach cleanup.

Every three days Sandifer would break camp, pack up his red Toyota Land Cruiser Wagon with white shark jaws painted on each side and move five miles north or south. Each morning he would test his perception skills by studying his surroundings. He learned to recognize his exact location by the nuances of the dunes. Each section of the Padre Island shore and dunes is distinct and dynamic, he said. If he were blindfolded and air-dropped anywhere on the beach, within seconds of removing the blindfold he could tell you how many miles south of the entrance road he is standing.

Sandifer said he can tell the seasons by the behavior and plumage of birds or by the presence or absence of certain species.

“I tried to learn as much as I could about how everything on the beach reacts to each other,” Sandifer said. “I read some, walked a lot, thought a lot, observed a lot and learned a lot.”

This tour on that remote beach was Sandifer’s Walden.

McKee said Sandifer is an excellent observer of nature and an impeccable record keeper with an exceptional scientific mind. The professor said Sandifer is by far the most popular and engaging guest lecturer he invites annually into his classroom.

Despite his self-proclaimed lack of social skills, Sandifer’s broad appeal is evident from the impressive turnout at his annual Big Shell Beach Cleanups. He chose Big Shell because no other cleanup would touch it. It’s an unforgiving span of deep sand that stretches for miles southward from a point about 15 miles into the park’s four-wheel-drive section.

Debris from far reaches of the Gulf of Mexico collects here because of a convergence of currents. The aftermath of Hurricane Ike left hundreds of tons of flotsam on the barrier island. As a result, the 14th annual cleanup in 2009 was the most challenging.

800K pounds of trash

More than 500 volunteers answered the call, removing about 800,000 pounds of stuff that didn’t belong on the seashore.

The group included Sandifer’s longtime and loyal generals, a ragtag and dedicated army of colorful surf fishermen, along with Winter Texans, young families, retired couples, Boy Scouts, students, folks from a variety of political and religious persuasions, executives, teachers, small business owners, professionals, conservation group members, refinery workers, park employees, bikers, soccer moms and other anglers. The morning brought temperatures into the 40s, misty rain and a 24-mph wind.

The debris removed by volunteers that day approached the 1.03 million total pounds collected during the previous 13 cleanups combined. Sandifer refers to event volunteers as his heroes and affectionately calls them his brothers in the sand. Year after year, volunteers say they come mostly because of their admiration for Sandifer. Their love of the beach is secondary, followers say.

“If it wasn’t for Billy and his leadership, this event wouldn’t be nearly what it is,” McKee said.

Knowing this, Sandifer founded the nonprofit Friends of Padre in 2007 with seed money from the Ruth Parr Sparks Foundation. The Friends of Padre was set up to manage the Big Shell Cleanup long after the ashes of its founder are scattered over the dunes of Padre Island. So far the foundation has donated more than $38,500 to the National Seashore and its Kemp’s ridley sea turtle program.

Locals reciprocated recently by showing their affection for Sandifer in a dramatic way as plans were made for his visit to Washington, D.C., for the Field & Stream awards ceremony. The magazine had provided airfare for Sandifer, but not for his wife, Joy.

Within two or three days of learning this, Michelle Horine, vice president of Nature Tourism & Communications for the Corpus Christi Convention & Visitors Bureau, had collected cash or commitments totaling $2,600 simply by e-mailing a secret plea to Sandifer’s friends and acquaintances. Field & Stream kicked in another $250 to make sure the couple would be on the same flight.

When Sandifer accepted the money and acknowledged the generous gesture, surrounded by a few friends on the front porch of his Flour Bluff home, he said that nothing in his background had prepared him for this. It wasn’t clear whether he was referring to accepting the cash or his upcoming trip to D.C., which would include a tour of the White House.

Sandifer was raised on a farm in Agua Dulce. He refers to his father as a World War II gunner on a PT Boat turned skid-row wino. One of his father’s final mailing addresses was a pool hall called the Pla-Mor on Staples Street.

Family pride and shame

Sandifer’s mother was overwhelmed raising two boys on her own. So Sandifer’s paternal grandparents inherited the job and she left. His grandfather was 54 when he accepted this responsibility. Billy was not yet 3 years old at the time. He began helping on the farm at 5.

Sandifer boasts an American Indian heritage with family roots in Walthall County in Southern Mississippi. He was the first Sandifer to graduate from high school. He wasn’t a good student, but excelled in elocution and drama.

Early on, Sandifer was filled with a complex message of family pride and family shame. He recalls stories about two of his great-grandfathers, who were part American Indian. Sandifer was told they had joined the Confederate Army to compensate for their Indian heritage and to prove they were good U.S. citizens. They both lost arms in the Civil War. Sandifer also heard as a boy that one of his paternal grandmother’s uncles had died in the Alamo or at least had fought in the Mexican-American War.

With this family history, he grew up believing military service was both a privilege and an obligation, to be revered.

This contrasted starkly with some of what he saw in the man he called Daddy. When Sandifer returned home on leave in 1969 during one of his tours in Vietnam, he went looking for his father near the bars he frequented.

“I knew he was a drunk but he was my daddy,” Sandifer said. “I wanted to see him and I wanted him to see me.”

Sandifer, clean shaven and lean from battle near the Demilitarized Zone, found his father drunk, cold and asleep with six other winos in a car they had broken into off Staples Street. The men were huddled together for warmth and covered in a blanket of newspapers.

The young Sandifer stood outside the car wearing a crisp U.S. Navy uniform with a chest full of service ribbons.

“Lawrence Sandifer,” he shouted. “You in there? It’s your son, Billy.”

The elder Sandifer crawled out of the vehicle, greeted his oldest boy and commented on his slim frame. Then he asked if he wanted to go get a drink.

That was the beginning of a three-day binge. When the young soldier awoke, his father was gone and $75 was missing from his pocket.

Lawrence “Sandy” Sandifer died in a halfway house called Charlie’s House, which Sandifer praises for its merciful service. One of the last memories Sandifer holds of his father is of him smoking a cigarette with oxygen tubes up his nose. Sandifer began smoking at 11 and only recently quit. He learned of his father’s death from a Cameron County constable while fishing near South Padre. The service was in Mississippi. Sandifer attended.

When not working on the farm in Agua Dulce, Sandifer and his grandfather enjoyed fishing. He recalls the exact distance from the farm to Bob Hall Pier. Fifty-six miles.

Papa didn’t think his grandson would graduate high school, but he never skipped school to go fishing and poor grades meant no fishing. They alternated between the pier and the bay, sometimes fishing on school nights.

Sandifer recalls catching nighttime stringers of golden croaker too heavy to carry at the swing bridge across Humble Channel. In 1962, Sandifer said, he noticed that fishing in the Laguna Madre had begun to decline. Too many boats, he said.

Catch-and-release advocate

Today Sandifer, through magazine and newspaper articles, preaches against the use of croaker as trout bait. He believes the controversial bait is too effective to be sporting and is damaging trout stocks. He refuses to use croaker during fishing charters. This conviction has negative repercussions in his charter business and represents a dramatic attitude change from Sandifer’s earlier life as an apex predator and premier shark killer.

During the past decade, Sandifer has become a vocal champion for catch-and-release fishing. And along with his cleanups and longtime promotion of sea turtle and bird preservation, followers agree that Sandifer has helped change the face of a hardened subculture that once defined surf anglers.

McKee credits Sandifer for making conservation popular on the beach. The praise makes Sandifer uncomfortable.

“I could give a damn about being a legend,” Sandifer said. “But if that’s what it takes to leave a conservation legacy with folks who wouldn’t otherwise be receptive to it, then OK.”

Sandifer’s conservation ethic has limited his income. Killing sharks, using croaker to catch trout and filling ice chests with limits of fish are still popular among charter clients.

“Meat-haulers don’t hire Billy Sandifer,” he said. “But I won’t do it even though it’s crippling me financially. Conservation ain’t always convenient. It comes at a price.”

It’s hard to track Sandifer’s evolution from indiscriminate killer to conservationist. He recalls an early indication of his calling while working as a deckhand on a shrimp trawler in the 1970s. This is when the waste started to become unacceptable.

Education was the first step. The amateur scientist in Sandifer came out. He bought a field book and began identifying the dead organisms in the mountains of bycatch he culled. Later he was fired from a shrimp boat for trying to release a 48-inch redfish caught in a net. Somewhere along the way he relinquished a dream to operate his own shrimp boat.

He said he didn’t care much for long-term goals anyway. And he had a long history of surviving hardship.

Sandifer had served two tours in Vietnam — nearly two years total — and then rejoined for a double stint with the Harbor Police in Cuba. His military career was cut short when he angered his superiors in Cuba.

Sandifer had filed complaints against military authorities for mistreatment of black Marines during shore leave. Injustice is injustice, he said, whether it involves a redfish inadvertently caught in a shrimp net or a black soldier wrongly accused and harassed.

Between military enlistments, Sandifer worked as a sky marshal in 1973-74. These were highly trained armed security officers on commercial airliners.

Throughout his military and sky marshaling days, Sandifer said, the common thread was that he woke up each day with a mission. This daily purpose was painfully absent when he returned to civilian life. This led to years of reckless and aimless behavior. And this is when he became obsessed with shark hunting.

‘I needed a war’

“For a while I hated everyone and everything,” he said. “I was just a misfit Indian without a mission.

“Shark fishing became my war. And at the time I needed a war. I needed an enemy.”

During this time the reckless behavior didn’t necessarily stop. But now Sandifer had a reason to go to the beach each day. His addictions included adrenaline, which was satisfied by tiger sharks, bull sharks, blacktips, sandbars and others.

His biggest was a 746-pound tiger caught in 1976. A charter client named Charlie Krause later bested that in 1990 with a 12-foot tiger shark that weighed 820 pounds. A photo of this shark hanging by a rope beside Roy’s Bait & Tackle on South Padre Island Drive was made into a postcard. Thousands have been sold. As the only sanctioned surf-fishing guide working the National Seashore, this helped Sandifer’s charter business.

But while Sandifer’s guide bookings were rising, his taste for death was waning.

“That tiger was murdered for a set of jaws,” Sandifer said. “I looked at that 75-year-old shark in awe. But at the same time I wished it was bigger. I realized then that they’re never going to be big enough.”

At the time, Sandifer would not eat shark meat because of a dangerous 1979 encounter with a big sandbar shark that brushed up against him during a mishap while he was paddling out a large shark bait.

“We made a pact,” Sandifer said. “I was scared. I told him that if you don’t eat me I won’t eat you. And I haven’t ever since.”

Soon afterward, Sandifer began removing a single keepsake tooth from sharks he caught rather than the traditional killing of them for their trophy jaws. And he began aiding researchers by tagging and releasing each catch. He still does this and encourages others to do the same.

“There comes a time when you just don’t care about killing stuff anymore,” Sandifer said. “I don’t want to be that guy who goes around bragging about killing the most whatever. I just want to be part of the outdoors.”

Sandifer said he fears being confronted in the afterlife by all the death he has caused. In his sleep, he’s haunted by their staring eyes. He awakes in a panic.

Sandifer said his decision to exist in harmony with nature has made him a better student of his environment. He knows the names and has studied the habits of birds and other creatures on the island. He has witnessed with reverence thousands of sunrises and thousands of sunset ceremonies on his beloved beach. Sandifer believes that every creature on the island performs its own sunset ritual. And so does he.

During one of his own sunset reflections many years ago, Sandifer said, he spoke to his creator.

“I asked him what he wanted me to do, why he put me here,” he recalled. “There’s nothing for me in town. You created me. Why?”

A clear voice replied.

“He told me I didn’t have to go to town,” Sandifer said. “I should have known. I’ve always lived on the fringes of society. That’s where I belong.”

Dances with coyotes

Eventually, pneumonia forced him from his shanty existence on the beach. But not before he forged many lasting bonds, including a special one with coyotes.

He recalls a fishing day many years ago when three coyote pups howled at him from the dunes. He howled back and after a while the curious pups began to approach. They sat nearby to watch as he fished.

Sandifer offered them pieces of shark bait. They accepted them and retreated into the dunes.

When he caught a shark, Sandifer noticed five silhouettes against the sky. A mature male and female had joined the skinny pups.

Sandifer dragged a 7-foot tiger shark into the dunes and cut it open.

The relationship continued for some time with similar encounters. They would howl at Sandifer while he was paddling out shark baits. Something in their tone made Sandifer imagined these were calls of concern. Eventually the female and her pups would approach Sandifer with less and less caution. The male never did.

Then one night while Sandifer was sleeping on a cot on the beach, covered in a mylar blanket to keep away mosquitoes, he sensed a foul odor. Reaching for his loaded pistol, Sandifer opened one eye. And there in the soft light of an autumn moon was the wet nose of a young coyote. He knew how another coyote would have reacted. He’d seen it many times.

“I couldn’t resist,” Sandifer said with an uncharacteristic grin. “So I licked him.”

The young coyote ran off yelping, occasionally stopping to rub its muzzle in the sand, apparently trying to rid itself of human scent.

But the relationship strengthened into what Sandifer believes is mutual concern and respect. One of the coyotes Sandifer named Mooch is particularly friendly. It sometimes lies on the beach near Sandifer’s rusty Suburban and waits for handouts. Some of those morsels may contain heartworm medicine.

Sandifer’s sometimes gruff demeanor softens when he reflects on his coyote family. He doesn’t care if folks believe his stories or whether they trust that he cares deeply for the island and its residents.

He knows his purpose is worthwhile and true.

“They told us when I was a sky marshal that each morning when we stood in front of the mirror to ask ourselves if we were prepared to die that day for the people on that airplane,” Sandifer said. “You never lose that kind of honor and commitment. It’s in my nature to protect things.”