The National Hurricane Center said its adviosry at 4 a.m. Saturday on Don would be its last as the remnants passed into northern Mexico.

"There's really not much left of it," Barry Goldsmith, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Brownsville, told The Associated Press. "It's a done deal."

The storm dampened but failed to stop a sport fishing tournament here, threatened the Rio Grande Valley's cotton crop, brought surfers out on South Padre Island — but its biggest potential effect, large-scale drought relief, had already evaporated, along with the outlook for substantial San Antonio area rainfall.

San Antonio was looking at a 20 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms Friday night through today, National Weather Service forecaster Joseph Tomaselli said, a "radical decrease" from earlier forecasts.

Remnants of the disintegrating storm brought showers to the Houston area Friday, but the moist atmosphere could release more rain today.

The system's far outer bands watered Harris County, sprinkling some areas and dumping 2 inches north of downtown Houston. Most places got a half-inch or less.

"Most everybody got some rain except portions of extreme northern Harris County," said Patrick Blood, a National Weather Service meteorologist based in League City. "There is a small area just north of downtown, inside the Loop, that picked up a couple of inches."

'Hit land and … fell apart'

Tomaselli said the storm's landfall — which hours earlier had been predicted for midnight — occurred around 7:30 p.m. just south of Baffin Bay, and the underpowered storm appeared to be winding down.

Willacy County had prepared for a direct hit, opening an emergency operations center in Raymondville, distributing sandbags, and warning of possible power outages, 50 mph winds and 5 to 7 inches of rain.

Cameron and Hidalgo counties also opened sandbag distribution points and readied pumps in case of flooding.

But Willacy County's emergency management coordinator, Frank Torres, scaled everything back and closed the center before sunset. Hidalgo and Cameron county officials also began standing down.

"This thing hit land and it dissipated, it fell apart," Torres said. "We're standing down. … I don't think we had a half an inch of rain."

The warm water-fueled storm's steering mechanism — upper level winds — sucked energy from it and shifted most rain chances toward deep South Texas, which was experiencing a drought, but greener than most areas of the state thanks to Tropical Storm Arlene in June.

Organizers at Port Mansfield were forced to cancel the offshore portion of the fishing competition and limit the event to the shallow and still-calm waters of Laguna Madre as skies darkened and squalls lashed coastal areas to the south.

"Most of them are experienced fishermen," tournament director Bob Lany said. "They know to come in if it gets bad."

Scare for cotton farmers

Fishermen vie for bragging rights every July to fund scholarships and support the local chamber of commerce in the sleepy town, which has a lot of boats, some mom-and-pop restaurants and no traffic light.

Fishing boat captain Ruben Garza Jr. called it the calm before the storm.

"The bay's going to get rough as heck, there's going to be good swells in there," Garza said. "It's going to look like chocolate milk, basically."

The rain prediction was welcome news to most farmers and ranchers, but it threw a scare into cotton farmers, who worked frantically to finish harvesting what has been a bountiful crop.

Jeff Nunley, executive director of the South Texas Cotton and Grain Association, said a little rain would be fine, but a drenching with heavy winds could be devastating to the Valley's 196,000-acre cotton crop.

"I'm driving through the country right now and I see a lot of pickers running as hard and fast as they can to try to get some of that cotton out of the field before we get those rain bands," he said Friday morning. "It's not good when Mother Nature harvests your cotton crop. We like to harvest ourselves."

Still, Travis Miller, an extension service agronomist who sits on the Governor's Drought Preparedness Council, said the storm does not appear to be big enough to make much of a dent in the state's ongoing drought.

He did not expect to get half an inch of rain from the storm in College Station, where he works.

"We need something to recharge the soil profile and the streams and aquifers and a lot of our wells," Miller said. "It's pretty critical."

Staff writers William Pack and Guillermo X. Garcia contributed to this report from San Antonio. Cindy George contributed from Houston.

lbrezosky@express-news.net