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Home Destinations U.S. Gulf

The City of New Orleans’ Municipal Yacht Harbor remains a shell of what it once was due to ongoing problems with FEMA. West End was expected to be awarded the U.S. Olympic Sailing Trials in 2005 before Hurricane Katrina struck - with marine infrastructure rotting, the City of New Orleans apparently has no interest in high profile sporting events away from the French Quarter. Photo: Troy Gilbert

Katrina 10 years later

September 3, 2015
in U.S. Gulf
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“I’ve got ¾-inch nylon lines that I use for storms, and the boat gets so much pressure on it with the ropes getting so tight that they become like piano wires,” says Dennis Raziano. “The lines were actually sawing through the boat in places and they started moaning.” Raziano rode out Hurricane Katrina on board his 34-foot liveaboard oyster trawler in the Orleans Marina in West End New Orleans. “I was taught many years ago to never leave the boat. Even if it’s floating down the highway—you never leave the boat.”
The miserable and dangerous adventure Raziano and a few other brave souls went through in New Orleans in the summer of 2005 during and after the storm was ill-advised, but a decade after its landfall on the Mississippi Coast and the levee failures in New Orleans, their stories are now legend. After this terrible chapter, the recreational boating community on the Northern Gulf Coast has made great advances toward rebuilding and now holds thousands of state-of-the-art marinas and mended yacht clubs.

NOLA Municipal Harbor Boat Launch still in disrepair. Photo: Troy Gilbert
Between 200-300 sailors race weekly on Lake Pontchartrain and support the local businesses – with a repaired marina, this would easily be the largest weekly sporting event in New Orleans. Photo: Troy Gilbert
The footprints for West End’s old restaurants – Fitzgerald’s, Bruning’s, Jaeger’s, The Dock – will never rise again due to the Army Corps’ insistence that they may interfere with water flow when the outflow canal is closed. Yet the Corps hasn’t seen fit to remove the existing pilings. Photo: Troy Gilbert
Arial of West End. Photo: Friends of West End.
The Katrina damaged fishing pier at West End. Eligible for FEMA funds, even this small infrastructure still lies in a state of disrepair. Photo: Troy Gilbert

In Mississippi alone, nearly 1,000 slips have been rebuilt in marinas from Pass Christian to Pascagoula, and an entire new marina has been constructed adjacent to the historic and quaint downtown of Bay St. Louis. Out of the 33 Gulf Yachting Association’s yacht clubs from New Orleans to Pensacola—including 3 of the 5 oldest clubs in the Western Hemisphere—18 have been rebuilt or repaired. The 166-year-old Southern Yacht Club of New Orleans has a new 30,000-square-foot facility. Many of the more than 150 years of historic trophies and Olympic medals lost in the dual calamities of fire and water are slowly being replaced, including a Lipton sailing trophy, which was generously rebuilt by the Lipton Tea Company using the original London silversmith.
On the coast, junior sailing programs have been re-invigorated. Fishing tournaments and 150-year-old regattas have quickly returned with participation now getting back to “Pre-K” numbers as boats have been replaced and boat shows have boomed, including the Gulf Coast Yacht and Boat Show that relocated in 2010 to Gulfport, Mississippi.
The one outlier has been the Municipal Yacht Harbor in New Orleans and its 600+ slips. One of three public marinas in the city, the marina’s management board has been battling with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for rebuilding funds and now stands as a flashing beacon of bureaucracy, still without utilities and half empty.
The New Orleans’ boaters and the many businesses that serve them have struggled but learned to make do. New Orleans and this heavy boating community along the Gulf Coast will have endured everything from catastrophic hurricanes to oil spills, yet the strong boating culture and its infrastructure will continue their resurgence. The love of pulling in those red snappers or racing sailboats in century-old regattas will never be quashed on this coast—we are boat people.

By Troy Gildert, Southern Boating Magazine September 2015

Tags: 10 years150-year-old regattasDennis Razianofishing tournamentsgulf yachting associationGulfportHurricane KatrinaKatrinaLipton Tea CompanyMississippiMunicipal Yacht Harbor in New OrleansNew OrleansNorthern Gulf CoastOrleans MarinaPass Christian to PascagoulaSouthern Yacht Club of New OrleansWest Endyacht clubs
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