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Despite an official cancellation due to threatening weather, the boats of a south Louisiana fishing community received blessings from a local priest Sunday, absent the traditional parade of boats festooned with banners and depictions of saints.
But the Rev. Joseph Pilola said the improvised blessing ritual, resulting from the 11th hour pleadings of some parishioners at Holy Family Church, provided an opportunity for a return to basic tenets of faith in God and prayer.
Perched at the bow of the trawler Master Christopher, the priest, known as “Father Joey” to congregants, sprinkled holy water from a gold-colored aspergillum toward boats docked along Bayou Grand Caillou, from the church all the way to its junction with the Houma Navigational Canal. He offered prayers for a bountiful season, properly functioning mechanical and harvesting gear, and most of all for the safety of all those venturing on the water.
“This brought it down to the essentials, we didn’t have the big boat parade like we did before,” Pilola said during the return voyage, recalling the high attendance at the morning’s fishermen’s Mass. “We prayed for everyone’s safety as we always do. It was a community effort.”
The decision to cancel the boat parade was made late Saturday night, when meteorologists were predicting a 70 percent chance of rain, along with thunderstorms. “Some of the fishermen got scared, they heard there was going to be a lot of lightning. They asked us to cancel. The people who work on the water know there are forces a lot greater than they are,” Pilola said.
What began as a somber religious observance many decades ago has morphed into a day of sometimes ribald celebration, sometimes involving scantily-clad passengers on boats that pull into the bayou and follow the lead boat, a practice tolerated but also frowned upon by more devout participants.
On Sunday morning the blessing’s organizer, Virginia Verdin, saw that the skies were fairly clear and that the chance of rain had lessened. Showers and storms pummeled communities in Louisiana’s mid-section, but the forecast for Terrebonne Parish began to look tame.
The Bishop of the Diocese of Houma-Thibodaux, Shelton Fabre, was to have attended but was already notified of the cancellation. Verdin’s own out-of-town guests were told the parade was canceled. Terrebonne Sheriff Jerry Larpenter’s Water Patrol was pulled off the assignment.
But the apparent easing of the weather gave Verdin pause.
“I thought, if the weather has turned better we have to have these boats blessed, to make sure they are blessed in case they open the season before it can be rescheduled,” she said. “I thought if we wait until May and the season opens, these people are going to be out shrimping and they won’t have a chance to be blessed.”
Verdin and her husband, Ernest, volunteered their 50-foot wooden trawler to bear the priest down the bayou.
Another shrimper, Joseph Verdin, ferried the priest up the bayou, in shallower waters, so that vessels there could receive the blessing. Then, back at a berth across from the church, Father Joey boarded Virginia and Ernest’s vessel, for the trip south.
A water patrol officer who lives in Dulac, Larry Phillips, responded to the church in his patrol boat at the request of Commander Tommy Odom, escorting the vessel.
The blessings were not limited to shrimp boats. Tugs and barges along the way, as well as boats from the Terrebonne tuna fleet and small crab boats, were blessed. The blessing was also bestowed on recreational boats docked at pricey camps and hardscrabble bungalows.
A single vessel, the trawler Kimmi Alayna, rocked at its Shrimper’s Row mooring, decked out in multicolored pendants, a reminder of the usual outward signs of celebration that mark the occasion.
At the junction of the ship channel and the bayou, Father Joey read solemn prayers beseeching for all who venture on the water that his God “protect them from the perils of the deep.”
He then tossed a colorful wreath prepared by members of Holy Family’s altar society into gray waters still not warmed totally from winter’s chill, and the vessel made its way back to port.
“This was an act of faith,” Father Joey later said. “We do recognize that God is the lord of the sea and the sky, of the shrimp that enter the nets, and of those who catch them.”
The Rev. Joseph “Father Joey” Pilola scans the waters of Bayou Grand Caillou while blessing shrimp boats and other vessels Sunday afternoon, from the bow of the trawler “Master Christopher,” as guests of owners Ernest and Virginia Verdin. Threatening weather canceled the traditional decorated boat parade, but the Verdins insisted that they and their neighbors be blessed before the start of next month’s shrimp season and Father Joey acquiesced.
