Two Boaters Die at Dinner Key Marina
Hurricane Katrina's sudden, unexpected turn resulted in at least two deaths as it caught residents of a houseboat community by surprise. Officials fear more deaths.
BY JACK DOLAN - Miami Herald (Sat. Aug. 27/05) ~
jdolan@herald.com
Herald staff writer Mike Vasquez contributed to this report.
Boaters riding out Katrina at the free anchorage just off of Dinner Key Marina on Thursday believed they were in for a rough night on the fringes of a far-off hurricane.
But just after dark, the wind turned from strong to vicious, and
lightning exploded over the bay.
Hurricane Katrina had made its sudden, unexpected turn and was bearing straight down on the small community of ramshackle boats.
At least two people died in the desperate hours that followed, police say.
Curtis L. Howse ("Bud"), 67
John Nye (''Go John''), 61
Search teams brought one body to shore just after noon on Friday morning. They discovered the other in a submerged houseboat around 2 p.m.
The two were among three confirmed deaths related to Katrina in Miami-Dade County. The third victim was an elderly Miami woman who died after a power outage shut off her ventilator. At least four were dead in Broward.
''Quite a few house boats turned over,'' said Miami Police Chief John Timoney.
``I wouldn't be surprised if we find a few more bodies.''
Dive teams, which were hampered on Friday by violent squalls blowing in behind Katrina, will likely be searching long into today, Timoney said.
Officials have not formally identified either of the bodies, but their friends knew them well.
''Bud's dead,'' said 62-year-old former shrimp fisherman Chuck Davis, who said he saw his friend ''face down'' on the
deck of his boat Friday morning.
Like many of the
men who live rent-free on weather-beaten old boats in the anchorage, Bud had no other home, and rarely used his full name.
But Davis identified him as Curtis L. Howse, 67, a former shrimp fisherman and
Vietnam veteran who had lived on his boat for decades.
BARELY ESCAPED
Davis said he barely escaped with his own life.
Just after dark, he said, another boat tore loose and crashed into his, sheering his
cabin from the
hull and sending it
overboard with him inside.
Davis said he half-swam, half-drifted to one of the small barrier islands just off the marina, where he spent the night hunkered behind a tree.
Also missing and feared dead: John ''Go John'' Nye, 61.
He told his friend Fred Grothe that he thought the storm would be ''a piece of cake'' and that he wouldn't even need to take down the sunshade on his
deck.
But when dawn broke on Friday, Nye's two-story house boat had broken away from its
anchor, drifted to the other side of the island and flipped upside down, Grothe said.
There was no sign of Nye or the three
dogs that lived on the boat with him.
Early on Friday, Grothe said a search diver told him that he'd viewed the outside of Nye's boat from beneath the surface, and that it didn't look like there were any air pockets inside the mangled
cabin.
`LIKE FAMILY'
Later in the day, Grothe said that a Miami police officer who knew Nye confirmed for him that the second body discovered was Nye's.
''God, it hurts,'' Grothe said. ``He was like
family.''
While deadly winds assaulted the boats outside the barrier islands in Biscayne Bay, more than 20 boats moored inside broke free and were tossed onto the rocks between Dinner Key and the Coconut Grove Sailing Club.
''It tore my heart out when I saw,'' said Richard Lemire, standing in the
cockpit of the double-masted, 37-foot sailboat he restored five years ago.
The boat was impaled on sharp rocks in the northwest corner of the marina, with seven other damaged boats strewn around and on top of each other.
In that pile was a 34-foot
sloop named ``This is the Life.''
Jeff Marquis, who endured the storm on his 25-foot shrimp boat, said he was shocked at the hurricane's intensity.
''There were hundred-knot winds, easy,'' he said. ``This was life and death, man.''
Marquis, who
rode out the storm tied to Pier 9 on the southern edge of Dinner Key, said several of the wrecked sailboats bounced off the bow of his boat before crashing ashore.
''There's nothing you can do,'' Marquis said. ``The wind and waves are relentless, they don't stop.''
The highest officially recorded wind speed in the area was 97 m.p.h across the bay on Virginia Key, with sustained winds of 73 m.p.h.
CAREFREE LIFE
Stephen Bogner, Miami's
marinas manager, said the Dinner Key facility overall held up well in the storm.
But, he said, ''it's disheartening'' that Katrina piled up dozens of boats on the barrier islands, the subject of a much-trumpeted cleanup effort earlier this week.
Bogner said the idea of living carefree on a houseboat ``may be romantic from a distance, but when you're sitting on an
anchor at 90 miles per hour, it's not fun.''
***
UPDATE:
Sunday, August 28/05
@6:05 AM CDT (1105Z)
Upgraded to Cat. 5 /w near 160 mph sustained winds
@4:20 AM CDT (0920Z)
Maximum sustained winds have increased to 150 mph (130 Kts), making “Katrina” a very dangerous category 4 storm. Further strengthening is likely with Katrina during the next 12 to 24 hours, and it’s possible that Katrina could reach category 5 status before making landfall along the northern
Gulf of Mexico. Hurricane warnings have now been hoisted from
Morgan City, La., to the Florida-Alabama border. This includes the city of New Orleans and Lake Pontchartrain.
Katrina is a very large storm that will affect a large area - both at the coastal landfall - and well inland, with a trail of flooding rains and damaging winds across
Mississippi and
Alabama, and then into Tennessee.
Goto:
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/
Elsewhere: In the northwest Pacific, “Talim” has become a typhoon, and is
forecast to grow to a 120 mph typhoon before moving across
Taiwan and into mainland
China in the next 3 to 4 days.
Goto:
http://forecast.mssl.ucl.ac.uk/shado...c/200513W.html
And:
http://www.jma.go.jp/en/typh/
It's now Friday morning and all is well here ... 
could have made one for much less cost than what we had to pay for the Shadetree. If only we had the new 
!
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