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On a trip around my stomping grounds I finally got around to visiting the new Maritime & Seafood Industry Museum in Biloxi. I say new because the original, housed in the old WWII era USCG seaplane station, was swept away during Katrina leaving only the very top bell-tower of the historic facility.
If you are in Biloxi, stop by and see the new museum as it is very interesting.
While they had a large collection from the old light cruiser USS Biloxi (which will be covered in a future WW!) the highlight for me was Nydia.
Note the SYC pennant fourth down
Nydia is 30-foot gaff-rigged shoal draft centerboard sloop built in the late 1890s for the Commodore of New Orleans’s Southern Yacht Club, John A. Rawlins.
(Note: SYC is historic, putting on the oldest point to point regatta in the Western Hemisphere, initially raced on July 4, 1850, and has several Olympic sailing medalists listed on their rolls.)
Nydia was constructed in Biloxi of cypress and steam-bent oak at the Johnson Shipyard owned by William N. Johnson, a native of the city with a reputation for crafting lightning fast boats. Nydia was raced as a open pit “sand-bagger,” which meant there would be the skipper on the tiller and a “bailing boy” forward who spent his time shuffling sand bags from side to side to adjust the roll while racing.
Between 1898 and 1910, Nydia competed in no less than 39 regattas and races between Mobile and New Orleans, winning a cabinet full of trophies and a fair bit of cash and prizes. Her first win was the Bay-Waveland Yacht Club regatta on July 29,1899 (116 years ago this week!) and her last was the same event in 1908.
After 1904, she was owned by A. Baldwin Wood, a well-known New Orleans engineer who developed the pumping stations that keep the Crescent City dryish.
Baldwin added a cabin and continued her sailing career after 1910 as a seasonal pleasure craft, carting her back and forth from the Mississippi Sound to land-based storage during the fall and winter months.
During WWII, he had to obtain a special permit from the Coast Guard to continue sailing her, but nonetheless did so.
Wood, literally crossing the bar with his hand on the tiller, died aboard Nydia on a morning sail in 1956 and, at his request, she was given to his alma mater– Tulane University– along with some $380,000 and a stipulation that she be maintained and displayed for 99 years.
Well, Tulane eventually ran out of space over the decades and by 2003 Wood’s estate discovered she was in a sad shape, then launched a legal campaign to win custody of the sloop.
Risking destruction, she was saved just before Hurricane Katrina, lovingly restored in Biloxi by shipbuilder and sailor John Dane and put on exhibit at the Maritime & Seafood Industry Museum, with her mast rigged with correct English cotton sails and pennants to include one from the SYC.
She sits about 100 yards from Back Bay Biloxi, with a view of the Horn Island Pass and the open sea beyond.
It was said of Nydia that, “A tree has a body, but when it is fashioned into a beautiful boat, its timber then takes on a soul.”
Today she is the only hull remaining from Johnson’s yard which was located just blocks from where she currently rests.
At night she sits, bathed in a spotlight for the world to see, standing watch over a 45 foot long 1:5 scale model of a German U-boat used in the film U-571— which has a less romantic home in the dark parking lot.
See the U-boat lurking? Hint: Bottom left. Das Boot!
