Lived in Texas for 20 years, went there once. I usually went east to Alabama or Florida for the beach scene, much better beaches.
During my short stay in Corpus we spent a lot of time hunting small critters and fishing - found mastodons literally dripping out of river banks.
There's a lot of old stuff out there and 35 or so years ago there was darn little being done about it.
Probably same to be said about the immediate off-coast regions but they are so sandy that only sonar would work.