Seaman describes fight against storm.

Byline: Bill Bishop The Register-Guard

Piercing even the raging wind of Hurricane Katrina at her peak, a 10-second blast from the emergency whistle on the dredge Stuyvesant on Monday told deckhand Adam Bacon that things were taking a turn for the worse.

Bacon, the 26-year-old son of Florence residents Larry and Kay Bacon, had been on watch since midnight Sunday after spending the day helping to lash down everything that couldn't be moved below deck.

At midnight, Katrina had only begun her assault on the Gulf Coast. Through the night, Bacon loosened mooring lines on the 398-foot dredge as the Mississippi River rose, threatening to snap the 4-inch lines that held the ship to Napoleon Avenue Wharf C in the Port of New Orleans.

A seaman for 14 months, Bacon had worked on container barges tossed by 30-foot waves on the Bering Sea. Since signing on with the Stuyvesant in January, the work had been mostly in the flat waters of the Gulf of Mexico. The crew could never have dreamed what would happen on this 28-day assignment.

The Stuyvesant - the largest hopper dredge in the country, capable of moving 11,000 cubic yards of silt and sand in one load - had hired out to dredge a stretch of the Mississippi River to accommodate the huge oceangoing container ships that made New Orleans one of the busiest ports in the world.

The 22-member crew worked mostly a few hundred yards from where the vessel tied up as Katrina bore down. But they felt they'd sailed a world away by Monday morning, Bacon said.

"The rain was sideways. The wind was just screaming," he said.

The dredge's wind gauge had broken early Monday, jammed at 92 mph.

Bacon later learned that a Navy ship anchored across the river lost its gauge, too - at 152 mph.

"It was pretty intense. The wind was just such an awesome sound. You are just amazed by it," he said in a telephone interview on Thursday. "There were points where they said, `Nobody goes out on deck. There's debris flying around everywhere.' '

At 9 a.m. the Stuyvesant's whistle summoned the crew to emergency muster on port side, facing the river.

From there, the threat took form in the rain-shrouded outline of a freighter, the Vim Houston. The freighter is small compared to the container vessels in the port, but slightly larger than the Stuyvesant.

Like the Stuyvesant, the freighter had put about a dozen thick lines off its stern and bow, in addition to the usual lines to the heavy bollards on the wharf, to help secure its position in the approaching storm.

But the bow lines had snapped. Over the screaming rain, Bacon heard the stern lines separate like rapid rifle shots.

"When their lines separated, they went spinning off into the river," Bacon said.

The Stuyvesant's crew watched with the almost calming knowledge that there was absolutely not one thing they could do to prevent the freighter from colliding with the dredge and possibly sending both vessels to the river bottom at the height of the hurricane.

"She swung two 360s before she got her engines up and got her bow pointed upstream," Bacon said. "She was trying to hold her position. I really don't know what we could have done if there was a collision. If they had ruptured our hull, we would have started sinking. I was pretty nervous."

Getting off the ship was not an easy option for the Stuyvesant's crew. First there was the hurricane. Then there were all the containers stacked four high, like a fortress wall, all along their starboard at the wharf.

The scene unfolded through the blur of rain on a banshee wind.

"All you could see is the foremast of their crane on deck," Bacon said. "Once they got their engines up and running, they were maybe 100 feet in front of us. Maybe 200 feet to port side."

It seemed closer, but the crew of the Stuyvesant could start breathing again.

The freighter moved away and continued fighting the storm, dropping both anchors and getting them so fouled that it took more than a day for tugs to bring the ship back to dock after the storm, Bacon said.

As Katrina moved away, with looters running through the streets, the Stuyvesant's crew manned fire hoses on the starboard, preparing to fend off boarders who might be looking for the ship's food and other stores.

"We were extremely lucky. We had running water, satellite TV, food to eat, electricity. Everybody out there (in New Orleans) had nothing," Bacon said.

Churning up the Mississippi to Baton Rouge on Thursday, Bacon was looking forward to 28 days off and a return to his home in Vancouver, Wash.

"I'm anxious," he said. "The word is I might get to go home tomorrow."