AND LYING TO THE EAST east are two more protective levee systems; two miles away, a twelve-foot-tall inner ring of levees along an historic Colonial-era waterway known as the Forty Arpent Canal; and about eight miles away, a fourteen-foot-high levee along the western shore of a man-dug shipping channel called the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, known hereabouts as the MR. GO). Thus, Violet, while nobody’s version of a scenic harbor, is considered geographically beautiful to boat captains like Ricky Robin. In theory, the location provides not just shelter against tidal surges, and but acts as lee from the wind as well. 

That the seventy-ton Lil’ Rick, snugged in hard against Violet Canal’s north levee, is now being shoved around like a puny kid on the playground is a bad sign. Ricky needs knowledge.

He keys his VHF marine radio and broadcasts out into the pummeling blackness. He raises a fellow shrimp-boat captain on his ship-to-shore radio at Empire, a fishing and oil-patch marina across Breton Sound in Plaquemines Parish, about thirty miles south-southeast. The news isn’t good. He can barely hear the guy screaming into his radio above the din of the raging storm. “We’re catching hell. Wind and water like you wouldn’t believe. The Gulf’s pouring in over the flood gates.”

The captain is on his own ocean-going trawler wedged in a cluster of substantial fishing and oil-field work vessels at a protected harbor sitting inside the Mississippi River levee. He’s under power but almost every boat that isn’t manned has been sunk--held under like drowning rats when an astonishingly powerful and fast-moving storm surge overcame the length of the tie-down ropes and flipped them. Those that haven’t been sunk are heading for other disasters.

The captain is probing the rain-slashed darkness with his spotlight. He tells Ricky what he sees: a hulking ghost rips by--a ninety-foot-long steel menhaden deep gulf seining ship, torn from its moorings. It’s running dark (meaning, probably no one’s aboard) and propelled by no more than seething tides and tornadic winds. Ropes fat as pythons coupled with giant anchors secured this boat. But it’s been loosed, and the guy watches it being tossed up, in a froth of whitecaps, on a nearby levee—as if it were some toy boat. Others will end up on in the middle of highways and on the up-ramps to bridges.

“This wind and water—it’s coming your way,” the man tells Ricky. “Get ready.”

Then he’s gone, in a squall of static.

Ricky Robin thought he was plenty ready, but now he’s not so sure.

He leaves the Lil’ Rick’s wheel and makes his way unsteadily, the trawler leaning in the gale, back to his cluttered galley. The boat’s pitch has worsened and Ricky realizes the problem. He’d raise his two forty-foot booms, the steel mechanical arms that hold his trawls, to forty-five-degree angles above his decks and secured them with chains to hold them in place. His worry: had he left the booms down and his trawler broke loose in the storm, the steel arms would carve, like giant steel wings, through any nearby boats in the narrow canal, where maybe thirty other manned boats are hunkered down under power and perhaps another forty or fifty are tied down hard to docks.

 But in the shrieking, whipsawing east-southeast wind, the raised booms are acting as airplane wings and the trawler has swung sideways to the gale. There are tornadoes about and Ricky’s fear is a rogue gust will whisk the windward boom skyward—and flip the Lil’ Rick over.

Against the thrum of his generators and engine, and the din of the wind outside, he has a tense counsel with his co-captain and cousin, Dwight Alphonso—Tee-Tee, to his friends—who has volunteered to ride out the storm with him, along with Dwight’s eighteen-year-old son, Dwight Jr.

“Look, Tee-Tee, if the boat rolls over this way,” Ricky says, manning the trawler’s wheel and pointing toward the port side exit to the wheelhouse, “we’ll try to get out this door.”

It’s a sobering moment--contemplating having to feel their way in confused blackness through the tight exits, the boat keeled over or capsized, water pouring in. Assuming they make it out, unpleasant things could await them at the storm-tossed surface.

Soon, another gust tilts the Lil’ Rick precariously and Ricky knows he has to do something. “Too much lean,” he tells Tee-Tee. “I gotta lower the booms or we ain’t gonna make it.”

He pushes through the aft door, which is sucked shut in a thud behind him by the blasting wind. Outside, it’s unfathomable—raging gusts pummeling his head like a boxer, rain slanting horizontally in buzz-saw sheets. He feels his way to the first boom and feels his way out on the boom, since opening his eyes isn’t an option. Imagine being strapped to the hood of a car and driven, face first, through a power wash: That’s what it’s like.

Luckily, Ricky knows his booms the way a blind person knows his route to the kitchen. He feels his way out and gains the end of his starboard side boom and, in the glare of his floodlights, grapples with the chain, tied in a double half-hitches—a mistake. This isn’t a quick release knot, and as he struggles to untie it, he feels that he’s about to be scraped off the boom at any second and spit into the dark, howling maw. He yells crude curses at the storm—he calls Katrina a mother_____--and yanks harder at the chain. The knot finally gives. The boom releases.

The Lil’ Rick lurches, then rights itself.

Ricky edges his way down, then repeats the operation to the port-side boom, holding on to a long boom rope as he descends to the trawler’s aft deck. But the wind kicks his legs out from under him and sends him skidding.

For a long moment, it’s as if he’s in a bad pirate movie--he’s lifted up and suspended in air above his railing, his purchase on the rope doubtful. But a wind dervish slaps him back to the deck.

He lands with a thud. Rope in hand, he secures both booms by lashing the rope to giant steel cleats welded to the outer wall of the Lil’ Rick’s galley.

 The wind makes standing impossible, so Ricky crawls on his belly, squirming wet as an eel, toward the aft door. He wrangles it open and steps into the lighted galley. He shuts the door behind him and looks at Tee-Tee, shaking his head.

Katrina’s a damned handful.

He decides, given the violence of the wind, the trawler could still use more ballast to keep her on an even keel. He uses electrical pumps, powered by his generator, to fill three, three-hundred-gallon water tanks, normally used as live-bait wells, on the windward side, and he, Tee-Tee and Dwight Jr. take up positions on that side as well.

At fifty one, Ricky’s still in good shape, save for a mild red-beans-and-rice paunch that is a signature of middle-aged men in these parts. Still, he’s a compact guy, about five-foot-five, built like a bulldog. But Tee-Tee and his son are hefty guys—six footers weighing in at about two hundred thirty apiece. “It’s a good thing we got your fat asses aboard,” Ricky tells them.

Even Tee-Tee thinks this is pretty funny. It’s about the only thing they have to laugh about.

Ricky moves forward again to the wheelhouse, guns the three-hundred h.p. diesel engine and turns the Lil’ Rick’s wheel to shore up the trawler’s position into the wind. “Let her blow now,” says Ricky.

 He almost regrets saying it—eye-wall winds will gust up to one hundred forty mph here, and hit-and-run tornadoes will wreak incredible havoc on boats, buildings, houses, trees and vehicles.

 At some point, with a glimmer of light in the sky, Ricky sees a chilling sight: out of the east, a small shrimping skiff, maybe twenty-feet-long, maybe longer, is tumbling in the air on the howling wind toward the Lil’ Rick. At fifty yards away, it touches down and skips on the bayou’s surface like a skittering stone.

 Ricky guns his engine again, hoping to goose the Lil’ Rick harder up against the levee and out of the boat’s way. The small trawler skitters by—just grazing the Lil’ Rick’s stern. There’s a scraping sound, and the boat whirs off into the ether--never to be seen again.

Ricky has been in enough hurricanes to believe in the theory of microbursts—in his interpretation, mini-tornadoes that dip out of the clouds like jet-propelled Ferris wheels, scooping up everything in their path and tossing them skyward.

That would explain the flying boat.

This is Ricky’s one of two moments of near panic. If you’re in a boat hammered by a microburst—even a seventy-ton trawler like his—Ricky has a pessimistic theory of your prospects. “That’s your ass,” he says. “You’re gone, even if you’ve done everything right.”

He looks grimly at Tee-Tee and his son and decides they all need to be lashed together on a rope with a life ring that Ricky will control. If they get blown over or washed out of the boat, they at least have a chance to stay together.

He orders Dwight Jr. into the shelter of the Lil’ Rick’s lower bunk off the galley (below the window line and thus out of the path of any penetrating flying objects) and he and Tee-Tee take up a watch in the wheelhouse.

With daylight edging into sky and the wind, though still formidable, appears slacken some, Ricky is thinking, well, damn, we made it through.

       Indeed, around 8:30 a.m., he twists through the dials of a portable radio to find a New Orleans radio news report that says New Orleans seems to have been spared a direct blow; the storm has made a slight but propitious jog to the east and is grinding its way to what will be its terrifying last act on the Mississippi Gulf coast about fifty miles northeast.

       But for Ricky Robin, and the knot of a few hundred others hunkered down on boats and in dwellings in and around the historical safe haven of Violet Canal, the slackening wind is Katrina’s cruelest feint. The center of the eye of the most destructive storm in U.S. history—an eye thirty-two miles wide—is passing a mere twelve miles to the east of here.

       On the backside of that eye, the wind will return with a vengeance, and far worse things are about to happen.