Published: May 27, 2008 02:14 pm      

Pass Christian yacht club reopens 3 summers after Katrina

Pass Christian — Boating enthusiasts are celebrating the reopening of the first of several Mississippi yacht clubs destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

The Pass Christian Yacht Club has moved out of a trailer and into its new $3 million home. In August 2005, Katrina destroyed every yacht club between Bay St. Louis and Ocean Springs. Pass Christian’s is the first facility to reopen.

Will Seemann, a member of the Pass Christian Yacht Club, spent part of the Memorial Day weekend with his fishing buddies out in the open gulf, 90 miles due south of the new club.

“It’s definitely going to be a nice little stimulation to this downtown area in Pass Christian,” Seemann told WLOX-TV.

The new one-story building that sits on top of concrete pilings.

The yacht club is on the same footprint where the old building had stood until Katrina took it out.

Katrina is the third hurricane that forced Pass Christian members to build a new yacht club. The other damaging storms were the hurricane of 1915, and Hurricane Camille.

Architects designed the new Pass Christian Yacht Club to be 26 feet above the water.

“We want to be the center point of the community,” said Chuck Wood, who serves on the yacht club building committee.

He called said the rebuilding is a commitment to the community.

“It’s another part of going back home,” Wood said. “They wanted to get back to something that’s normal. I think it’s very important to have some things that are normal that we had before storm. So many things are not like they used to be as you well know. We want things to be, help the mental state of the people as much as anything.”

Construction of the Gulfport and the Bay Waveland yacht clubs should be finished within two months.