Life After Katrina

I have a feature article in the current issue of Sea Kayaker magazine:
Life After Katrina: The Mississippi Gulf Coast in the Wake of a Major Hurricane.

This issue in bookstores now, for those who are interested. There are several photos in the article from the coast, some taken immediately after the storm and some taken a few months later when Travis Easley and I did some exploring in our sea kayaks.

Here's a link to the Sea Kayaker website: http://www.seakayakermag.com/

Kayaking in the Aftermath

Travis Easely paddling past grounded fishing vessels in the Industrial Seaway


Kayaks are probably the safest boats in which to navigate Mississippi's coastal waters at the moment. There's an unbelievable amount of debris hidden beneath the surface almost everywhere that would pose a serious threat to most larger vessels.

I did some exploring by kayak over the Thanksgiving holiday week, launching solo from Ocean Springs harbor one day and paddling up Davis Bayou and then over to Deer Island and back on one day trip. Then Travis Easley and I made a loop trip around Bernard Bayou to the Industrial Seaway and down to Big Lake and back to our starting point.

Deer Island appears normal when viewed over the horizon from the mainland, but once ashore it is easy to see the effects of Katrina. The beaches are littered with debris from mainland homes and many trees are down in the predominately pine forests that cover the island. A lot of beach erosion has occured as well. Overall, however, the island hasn't changed in a significant way and will certainly recover. I only explored the southeast end on this trip. Travis Easley and I went back Sunday with my Necky Tesla and his new Current Designs 14-footer and planned to launch from the beach near the former location of the Biloxi Yacht Club. We had unloaded the boats when we were informed by a Biloxi police officer that it was a $500 fine to drive around a barricade and park on the south side of highway 90. There were no signs to this effect. Thankfully, he let us off on the condition that we load up and leave immediately, so our plan to circumnavigate Deer Island was dropped and we did the Bernard Bayou loop from the park at Switzer Road instead.

Although most have been removed by now, there are still plenty of wrecked commercial and pleasure boats along the Seaway and in the bayou. We paddled past sunken boats and destroyed houses, but found the marsh and woods surprisingly intact in this area. I hope to get out to the barrier islands and to the lower Pascagoula River soon. The purpose of these day paddles is to take photographs and gather observations for an article about what was lost here to be published in an upcoming issue of Sea Kayaker magazine.

Last Visit to Intensity

Yesterday I made one more trip to Discovery Bay to salvage a few more items off of Intensity. It's been awhile since my last post, but Ernest Herndon and I went looking for my boat in his canoe and found it after paddling up the canal from the marina and then hiking/wading across the marsh to the back side of the dense woods adjacent to the marina basin. Being dark green, the boat is hard to spot in the surrounding vegetation.

When we found her that day, I discovered that looters had broken in and taken a few items, but there was still a lot of gear on board that we were able salvage; much of it will be useful on another boat at some point. A few weeks passed and I decided to go back with tools and try to remove more stuff, particularly hardware and other useful equipment that was bolted down.

I knew when I first found the boat jammed between two pine trees where it was that it would not be sensible to try to salvage and repair it. The storm surge was reported to be 30 feet high in this area, and it's obvious by the fact that the boat was carried through the tree tops before being dropped where I found it by the receding water. A section of my mast was hanging from the top of one of the trees, the rigging caught on branches at least 50-60 feet above the ground.
The rest of the mast was lying across the cabin top, the mast tabernacle torn out through the deck. Besides dismasting, the bow pulpit and several of the stanchions were torn off, as well as the port sheet winch. The rudder shaft was bent and the tiller post pushed down through the cockpit floor. The hull is still sound, a testimony to the solid construction of old Grampian boats. But as anyone who has ever built or rebuilt a sailboat knows that a hull is only a small percentage of a cruising vessel. I knew it was time to move on to the next boat and the only thing to do was salvage what I could and cut my losses.

Yesterday's trip was successful, in that I got just about everything on the list that I made in advance. The whole Discovery Bay area is a scene of utter destruction, and even now there has been no effort at clean up. A few boats have been removed, but those in the woods like mine are still just as they were after Katrina left them there. The place was deserted yesterday and eerily silent as I worked alone in the woods and rowed back across the bayou in my heavily loaded dinghy. I suspect it'll be a long time before I return to this backwater yacht basin that was home to my boat for so many years.

Discovery Bay Marina Wiped Out

This is all that remains of the bar and grill at Discovery Bay Marina.










One of my favorite little funky marinas and backwater bars on the Mississippi coast was Discovery Bay Marina. I've had a long association with this place, having kept my boat there on and off since I bought her in 1999. Hurricane Katrina's storm surge swept Bayou Portage clean, leveling the bar and carrying most of the boats in the marina into the surrounding woods and marsh.

My boat, Intensity, was here as well, as I had left Point Cadet Marina in Biloxi a month earlier to seek refuge from Hurricane Dennis. When Katrina set her sights on the northern Gulf coast, it was too late to go elsewhere, so I secured the boat as best I could where she was. Not many boats fared well on the Mississippi coast, considering the size of this storm, so it didn't make a whole lot of difference where you were, a lot of it was just luck, either good or bad. Intensity is gone, likely swept far into the inaccesible woods nearby. I went down on Labor Day, a week after the storm and rowed to the marina in the dinghy, searching the surrounding banks and winding canals nearby, but could find no sign of my faithful old Grampian 26. Many of my neighbors boats were nearby, swept up into the trees, some half sunk at the water's edge, some hard aground and others dismasted or totally destroyed. The road into the marina was blocked by 50-60 shrimp boats, piled up like toys on their sides and in heaps of rubble.

Ernest Herndon and I are going back this week with a canoe to search the area more carefully. I don't have much hope for Intensity, but if we find her I should be able to salvage some gear that I left on board.