Tim Lippoldt was turning the wheels over – furiously – on Padre Boulevard, working up a good sweat in his wheelchair.
Lippoldt was catching his breath when he heard a voice behind him.
"Are you OK?" asked a man wearing a visor with silvery white curls.
Lippoldt was indeed doing fine, thanking the man for his concern before pushing on down the street. He was just getting going again when the same man gave chase, catching up to make a request.
"I need your help," he said.
"I’m in a wheelchair," Lippoldt said he replied. "Who needs me?"
It was a chance meeting destined to form a lasting partnership between Shane Wilson and Tim Lippoldt. Wilson is the founder and chairman of Fishing’s Future, a nonprofit organization with chapters in the United States and Great Britain. Lippoldt is a South Padre Island native and a paraplegic searching for a purpose after a terrible accident six years ago changed his life in an instant.
"Uncle Shane" is what Lippoldt would come to call Wilson as they partnered to make bay fishing accessible to those with special needs. They worked for months with engineers to construct a bay boat that could accommodate the wheel chair-bound and others laying in medical beds so they could float out into the Laguna Madre to fish or just feel and smell the sea air again.
"I never thought I’d be out on the water again," said Lippoldt, who grew up an Island boy with a fishing rod in his hands. "Being part of this has given me a purpose. This is where I need to be, out on that boat."
