Tag: yacht clubs

Katrina 10 years later

“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.

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

Zebra mussels invade Texas

Invasive species are a very real threat and a menace to natural ecosystems across the planet, and the lionfish is one that has garnered a lot of public and media attention as of late. However, a new foreign scourge is rampaging through the lakes of Texas and has forced strict new boating and fishing guidelines in an effort to halt its spread.

The zebra mussel was imported from its natural Eurasian habitat into the Great Lakes around 1988 and has since spread rapidly down through the Mississippi waterway. Preferring still or slow moving bodies of water, their larvae can be easily transferred via rivers, bait wells or bilges and survive in this stage for up to 30 days and allows their population to multiply aggressively.

With colonies large and concentrated enough to actually sink buoys with their weight over time, the Zebra Mussels adhere themselves to keels, boat trailers, pilings—basically any solid structure under water. Very difficult to remove from even the hull of a boat, the mussels can damage or block any water system on a vessel including heads, air conditioners and engine cooling systems. On a larger scale, the mussel colonies are specifically wreaking havoc with drainage, irrigation, cooling supplies for power plants, and pipes for local water supplies. The colonies bloom out and adhere to each other and block these larger water intake and discharge systems similar to blocked arteries. The environmental damage to local ecosystems is also radical, with entire populations of fish dying off due to the large colonies of mussels’ ability to alter the temperature of lakes via their natural filtration of the water columns.

One of the many efforts the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department are using to control the Zebra mussels. Photo credit: Texas Parks and Wildlife Dept.

Already discovered in Lake Texoma, Lewisville Lake, Lake Belton, and multiple others across Texas, the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department began enforcing new regulations that went into effect over the summer. Applying to flatboats, skiboats, personal watercraft, sailboats, kayaks/canoes or any vessel of any size—whether powered or not—owners must now flush and clean all livewells, bilges, motors or any other item or machine that comes into contact with public waters, a good boating habit to begin with.

With their larvae capable of transiting in any standing water from one lake to another, cruisers are now the first line of defense in staving off infestation between bodies of water throughout the country. Already discovered in California and even Utah with recreational boats the likely transportation, cruisers throughout the South must become vigilant or the millions of dollars already being spent throughout the Great Lakes region on removal and eradication will surely arrive on lakes across the Gulf Coast—along with higher boating fees necessary to pay for the damage.

By Harlen Leslie, Southern Boating October 2014

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