LES FRERES MICHOT
TRADITIONAL CAJUN MUSIC
1986
Story of LFM swim across the Mississippi River
Tommy, Rick, and David swam across the Mississippi River from Algiers to the Chalmette Ferry back in about 1986 when we were young and crazy! We had just returned from a tour of Communist Poland, where we were the first Cajun Band to play behind the Iron Curtain (see "interviews" page). We were playing music in New Orleans every couple of weeks. We would usually stay with one of our two aunts that lived in NOLA on the west bank, Aunt Jacqui and Aunt Mary Lois. Rick had been living in NOLA while he was studying for the Louisiana Bar exam. He had been staying at Aunt Jacqui's and swimming in the Mississippi River almost every day. On the day in question, we all went for a run along the levee on the west bank at Algiers, then we swam in the River to cool off. While swimming, Rick commented that he always thought about swimming across the river, but wanted someone to follow him in a boat. Tommy suggested that they do it now because they had all been swimming alot during the summer. So Rick, Tommy, and David agreed to swim across and to stick together; Bobby and Mike opted out, though they agreed to take the van and cross to the other side on the Algiers to Chalmette Ferry to pick us up afterwards. So, we set out swimming across the Mississippi River.
We started about 1.5 miles upstream from the ferry. We figured that the current would carry us downstream as we swam across, so we wanted to ensure that we would not miss the ferry landing. There were a couple of ships anchored in the river on the west bank side of the channel, so we planned our swim so that we would pass between the two anchored ships.
The swim across took us about 40 minutes; we started out doing the crawl swim stroke, then we switched to the side stroke and the back stroke at times to pace ourselves. There were times when the southerly wind blowing against the current produced waves of about 3 feet in height, which made swimming a little more difficult. Several large tankers passed, heading upstream, during our swim. We could see them coming from a long way off and we planned our crossing so that we would either be well ahead of them or well behind. For one of them, it took us longer to cross it's path (ahead of the ship) and we had to quicken our pace, using the crawl, in order to put some space between us and the ship. As the ship passed behind us, we could feel pull of it's wake pulling us back toward the ship. That was a little scary, but we made it without being sucked back into the ship.
When we got near the other side, we were adjacent to a refinery just upstream from the ferry landing. We saw some workers in hard hats; they were looking at us and talking on hand held radios. We waved to them as we drifted downstream toward the ferry landing. As we got closer to the ferry landing, we could see that something was going on, and we saw the flashing red lights of emergency vehicles. We also noticed that no ferry boats had crossed the river recently, and it appeared that traffic was backlogged at the ferries on both sides. We said to each other, "something is going on!" As we got closer, we noticed that there were policemen on the dock of the landing and they were all looking our way and pointing at us.
When we arrived at the landing they helped us out of the water and questioned us as to where we came from and they asked us what were our intentions. It just so happened that a Russian mariner had jumped off of a ship into the Mississippi River a few weeks earlier, and had caused quite a news event when he asked for asylum in the United States. As it turned out, the authorities and the workers had thought that we had jumped off a ship, which accounts for their questioning.
After numerous questions, they told us to get into the back of a squad car. We asked, "are you arresting us?" They said, "Look, wise guy, we are not arresting you, we are detaining you for questioning, all right?" So we complied.
They drove us over the levee into Saint Bernard parish bc there was a big discussion about jurisdiction. They were not sure who had jurisdiction: Jefferson parish Sheriff’s office, Saint Bernard Parish Sheriff’s office, the city police of Chalmette, the NO Levee Board police, etc. There were at least 7 police cars, from various jurisdictions, at the scene. One officer drove up just as we crossed the levee; the officer asked another officer, “Who are they? Do they speak English?” Officer #2 replied in his Saint Bernard Parish accent, “Yeh, it’s just 3 fricking morons from Lafayette who wanted to swim across the river!"
At that point they let the traffic start loading up on the ferry again so that things could get moving. Then after their big jurisdiction discussion they decided that they didn’t have anything to hold us on so they let us go.