Every year the Mermaid Society SMTX chooses two people to honor as the Mermaid Queen and the King of SPLASH — standing for Stewardship, Preservation, Local, Arts, Sustainability and Heritage. As the name implies, the people are generally selected for service to community, whether that be preservation of history, contribution to the arts, or in the case of this year’s king and queen, Tom and Paula Goynes, protection of the river.
Tom and Paula Goynes moved to San Marcos from Houston in 1972. According to Tom, it was the San Marcos River, specifically the Texas Water Safari that takes place every year on the river, that brought them here.
“I read about the first water safari in 1963, so I would have been 12 years old, and I thought I got to do this,” Tom said. “It was on the front page of the Houston Chronicle and a couple of Houston cops won that year. So it took me a few years, it was 1967 and I was 16 when my brother and a friend of ours and I got together and bought a canoe and started training.”
