When Hurricane Frederic tore through the Alabama coast in 1979, it didn’t just batter Dauphin Island — it severed the island from the mainland entirely, ripping apart the bridge that had connected the two since 1955. For the three years it took to rebuild a new bridge, one man’s fishing boat became a lifeline for the island’s residents, and he still lives on Dauphin Island today with the story to tell.
Mike Thierry rode out the storm aboard his 60-foot sport fishing boat, the Terolyn II, alongside a friend, after motoring roughly 30 miles up the Alabama River to find shelter from the approaching hurricane. He anchored the boat with three separate lines, kept the engine engaged to ease the strain, and wrapped the ropes in chafing gear to keep them from snapping against the hull through the night. “It was a rough night,” Thierry recalled. “You pray to keep yourself safe.”
When the storm passed, Thierry and his friend made their way back down Mobile Bay toward Dauphin Island as soon as conditions allowed. The scene along the way told the story of the storm’s force. “Coming down Mobile Bay, I remember seeing roofs and a lot of debris floating,” Thierry said. Back on the island, his wife Ann described their home as largely intact structurally but filled with 18 inches of mud, silt, and displaced sea life. “There was mud and muck and silver eels and other dead things,” she said.
With no working phones and the bridge destroyed, Ann said it was days before she even heard from her husband, though she never doubted he’d made it through safely given his experience on the water.
In the storm’s aftermath, the state of Alabama turned to Thierry’s boat to help solve an urgent problem: getting people and supplies on and off an island suddenly cut off from the mainland. With room for roughly 49 passengers, the Terolyn II was fast enough and large enough to serve as a makeshift people ferry. What officials initially expected to be a temporary arrangement lasting a few weeks stretched into about four months of continuous runs.
Thierry made three round trips a day, each leg taking roughly an hour and 15 minutes, ferrying island residents, first responders, and a steady stream of cargo. “We transported everything: people, babies, dogs, cats, plywood,” he remembered. A priority system gave island residents and emergency crews first access to seats, and two sheriff’s deputies rode along on every trip to help manage the operation.
During the ferry months, the Thierrys stayed with friends on the island before eventually relocating temporarily to Mobile, running their fishing business out of Fowl River once a car ferry took over the transportation duties. But neither ever considered leaving the island community for good. “Never any doubt I was going to stay here and stay in the fishing business,” Thierry said. As soon as the new bridge opened, the couple rented a house on the island’s west end before building a permanent home and moving their business back to Dauphin Island, where they’ve now lived for roughly four decades.
Today, Thierry still runs charters out of Dauphin Island’s marina aboard a boat called the Lady Ann. As for the Terolyn II, the vessel that once served as the island’s lifeline, Thierry believes it’s still out on the water somewhere, possibly working the East Coast under new ownership.