The Rain Wins This Weekend — and What Still Works

Good Thursday morning from The Seawall.

Cruisin' the Coast turns thirty on Sunday, and the National Weather Service is forecasting one to three inches of rain on this coast between Friday and Sunday night, with localized amounts up to five.

Both of those are true. The second one is the one that changes your weekend.

Here it is in plain language. Deep tropical moisture — what is left of Hurricane Polo, reaching us from the west by way of Texas — is moving into the region at the same time as a weak cold front that stalls out right along the I-10 corridor. NWS New Orleans says the two meet over us and bring widespread rain with embedded thunderstorms Friday through Sunday, and that heavy rain and localized flash flooding are a real threat. The severe threat, in their words, is near zero: low-topped, weak storms carrying a great deal of water, not a squall line.

This is not a hurricane and it is not a named storm. Polo stopped being a storm days ago, and what reaches us is leftover moisture with no eye, no name and no landfall. It just carries a great deal of water, and this one is handing it to a front that isn't in a hurry.

So here is the honest shape of the weekend. Cruisin' the Coast opens Sunday, October 4 in Gulfport and Gautier — and Sunday is the wettest day of the three. But Cruisin' runs eight days, through October 11. If you have been waiting all year for this, you have not lost it. You have lost the opening.

What's left is a genuinely good indoor weekend, and this issue is organized around it: a silent vampire movie with a live band improvising the score in Bay St. Louis, forty thousand square feet of haunted warehouse in Gulfport, and Jon Pardi filling the Coliseum Saturday night.

Full guide below — plus the first House of the Week that's actually ours, four bedrooms in Diamondhead at a hundred and sixty dollars a foot with an open house Sunday afternoon, and a senior dog at the Gautier shelter we've now asked about eight times.

Everybody who has lived here a while has a rain plan, and it is usually just a door. A room with a band in it. A theater. Somebody's kitchen. The Coast has never been short of places to wait out water — we have had a lot of practice. This is a weekend for one of those, and for checking on the neighbor whose driveway holds a puddle.

Today, Thursday: a chance of showers and thunderstorms, mainly after midday. High near 87. 35%.

Friday: Showers and thunderstorms likely, mostly afternoon into the evening. High near 86, low 75. East wind 5–10 mph. 70%.

Saturday: Showers and thunderstorms. High near 84, low 74. East wind 5–10 mph. 85%.

Sunday: Showers and thunderstorms. High near 83, low 70. Northeast wind 5 mph. 90%.

Bottom line: this is the wettest weekend of the fall so far, and the one to plan around rather than through. NWS New Orleans is forecasting storm totals of one to three inches across Saturday and Sunday, with localized amounts up to five along and south of the stalled front — that is us — and says heavy rain and at least localized flash flooding are a threat. The heaviest is Saturday into Sunday.

What that means for your actual plans. Thursday and Friday morning are the driest hours you're going to get; if something outdoors matters to you, that's the window. Saturday and Sunday are both 90%, and Sunday — Cruisin' opening day — looks like the wettest of the three. Anything on grass or in a field is a coin flip. Don't drive through standing water, and if you park downtown anywhere that puddles, move the car before the afternoon.

In the tropics: no named storm is in this forecast. NWS New Orleans attributes this weekend’s water to deep tropical moisture from the remnants of Hurricane Polo, arriving overland from Texas — leftover moisture, with no center, no name and no landfall. It pools along a weak front stalled over the I-10 corridor, and that front is the whole story of the weekend.

🚗 Cruisin' the Coast — opening day · Downtown Gulfport and Hardy Court Shopping Center · Sun Oct 4 · free to watch View the Cruise takes over downtown Gulfport 8 AM–5 PM. The Hardy Court cruise-in with KOTO runs 9 AM–2 PM, with TV host Courtney Hansen there 10–noon and again 1:30–3:30. ⚠️ Sunday is the wettest day of the weekend at 90%, and this is cars parked outside in a field and a lot. Owners of show cars are not famous for sitting in thunderstorms. Cruisin' runs eight days, through Oct 11 — if it's a washout Sunday, the rest of the week is the answer, and the schedule is right there.

👻 Terror on the Coast · Hollywood Warehouse, 3420 Giles Rd, Gulfport · Fri & Sat, gates 6 PM, haunt 7–11 · $25 GA / $35 Fast FEAR Forty thousand square feet of haunted warehouse, ninth season. Indoors, which this weekend is not a detail — it's the whole argument. Probably the single safest plan on this page.

🦋 Butterflies in the Pass Monarch Festival · War Memorial Park, Pass Christian · Sat Oct 3, 10 AM–1 PM The monarchs are moving through on their way to Mexico, and the Pass throws them a party — releases, vendors, and people who will happily explain milkweed to your kids. ⚠️ Three hours, entirely outdoors, on a 90% day with storms in it. Check whether it's still on before you load up, and if it is, be there at ten.

🧛 "Nosferatu: An Improvised Symphony of Horror" · 100 Men Hall, 303 Union St, Bay St. Louis · Sat Oct 3, 7 PM · $25 Murnau's 1922 silent vampire film, scored live and improvised while it runs. The Hall calls itself an African American landmark, and it's the room that keeps the memory of James Booker — the New Orleans pianist raised in Bay St. Louis who went on to mentor Dr. John and Harry Connick Jr. A silent movie and a live band in that room, on a night it's supposed to rain. If you only do one thing this weekend, this is the one we'd do.

🌽 Southern Promiseland Farm — corn maze and pumpkin patch · 1212 Raygan Ln, Kiln · Sat Oct 3, 11 AM–8 PM · $8 ages 12+, $7 ages 3–11, under 2 free · cash only Second Saturday of the season — it opened Sept 26. Corn maze, pumpkins, hayride, play area. ⚠️ A corn maze on a 90% day with heavy rain in it is a call the farm will make, not us — ring them first. Their own website is years out of date, so WLOX's fall guide is the current source on hours. Cash only is not a suggestion.

🚗 Cruisin' Through the Decades + drive-in movie · Gautier · Sun Oct 4, noon–5 PM · movie 5:30 · free to watch Gautier's whole Cruisin' day, and on a dry year it would be the best-value item in the issue: a car show that turns into a drive-in showing Stroker Ace, the 1983 Burt Reynolds stock-car movie. ⚠️ The 2025 edition was cut short by weather, and Sunday is a 90% day with storms. A drive-in is at least a car with a roof, but call it before you go.

🎨 Zonta Arts & Crafts Festival · Downtown Pascagoula · Sat Oct 3, 9 AM–5 PM · free The Zonta Club's long-running juried festival fills the downtown streets. ⚠️ Eight hours outdoors on a 90% Saturday — downtown Pascagoula at least has doorways, but check the club's page before you drive over.

🎺 Levitt AMP Moss Point — OKAN · Sat Oct 3 · free OKAN is a Canadian Afro-Cuban duo, and they are playing a free lawn show in Moss Point. That sentence shouldn't be possible. ⚠️ It is, however, a lawn, on a 90% Saturday — Levitt posts weather calls on its own page, so look before you pack the chair.

🥬 Ocean Springs Fresh Market · L&N Depot Plaza, Ocean Springs · Sat 9 AM–1 PM, every Saturday

Jon Pardi · Mississippi Coast Coliseum, Biloxi · Sat Oct 3, 7 PM · ticketed The biggest room on the Coast, the biggest name in it this weekend. ⚠️ Pardi's own site says 7 PM; the ticket listings say 6:30. Check your ticket, and get there for the 6:30.

"Nosferatu: An Improvised Symphony of Horror" · 100 Men Hall, Bay St. Louis · Sat Oct 3, 7 PM · $25 — see Hancock above.

Friday: Sam Forshey Blues Band, 7 PM. · Saturday: brunch with Raiwylde, 11 AM, then Vince Vance & The Valiants at 7. · Sunday: brunch with Candace Bush, 11 AM, then First Sunday's Appreciation Awards with Dave Mack, Kandy Janai and Columbus Toy & Band. ⚠️ Covers aren't posted on the venue's page for either evening show; tickets route through TicketWeb.

Island View, Gulfport — Lisa Lee Albritton, Sunset Bar, 7–10; New Direction, Stage Bar, 8–11. Both Fri and Sat.

Silver Slipper, Bay St. Louis — Razzoo Friday, the Toni O. Band Saturday, Stage Bar, 7–11. Beach Bar Sunday Sessions, 1–3.

Hollywood Casino, Bay St. Louis — Storyville The Band, HollyDeck, Friday 6–10. The All Nighters, Stage Bar, 7–11 Fri and Sat. Anderson Domingues, HollyDeck, Sunday noon–4.

Thin, and we'd rather tell you why than make something up. The Shed's next posted show is October 9. Shaggy's Pass Harbor shows "no events" for October on its own page. Government Street Grocery, Murky Waters, the Julep Room, Nine Toes, both Blind Tigers, Chandeleur and Crooked Letter either haven't posted October dates or publish only to Facebook. In a week like this, call before you drive. And if you run a room on this coast, we'll print your weekend free — we just need it by Tuesday noon.

Beau Rivage Theatre (38 Special, Oct 9). Hard Rock Live (Better Than Ezra, Oct 16). The Biloxi Saenger (Zach Rushing, Oct 23–24). The iMPAC (Morgan Freeman, Oct 17). IP Casino's Studio A, nothing on the calendar.

"Nosferatu" at 100 Men Hall, Saturday at 7.

This was the pick before the forecast turned, and the forecast has only made it more right. Jon Pardi will sell more tickets and nobody will fault you for going. But a Saturday with three inches of rain in it is exactly the night for a silent vampire film with a band making the score up as it goes, in a room on Union Street that matters to this coast's music for reasons that have nothing to do with vampires. Twenty-five dollars, a roof, and you will not see it again.

Venue owners and bands: send your weekend dates to [email protected] by Tuesday noon and we'll print them free.

🦪 Waveland gets its first oyster bar. The Sand Bar is opening on Coleman Avenue — open-air bar and snack kitchen downstairs, oyster bar and a Gulf-view patio upstairs. It's from Thomas Genin, who also runs the Blind Tiger and Tiger Beach. Waveland has never had an oyster bar of its own until now. (WLOX, Sept 25)

🛍 A children's boutique on Government Street. Coral Kids opened at 1515 Government St. in downtown Ocean Springs — preemie through size 14 — run by sisters Kaleigh Busby and Reagan Row, who already run Coral Boutique. (WLOX, Sept 5)

Freddie Mac PMMS, week of Sept 24: 30-year fixed 7.03% · 15-year fixed 6.42% (Freddie Mac)

The thirty-year crossed seven. Five straight weekly increases — 6.66, 6.71, 6.76, 6.95, now 7.03 — and the fifteen-year jumped sixteen basis points to 6.42. A year ago the thirty-year was 6.30%. The weekly move is small in dollars; the year is what costs you, and nobody who waited twelve months for a better number got one.

Here's this week's House of the Week run through it, listed at $355,000. Twenty percent down means borrowing $284,000.

Same house. About $239,000 apart. (Principal and interest only. On this one, add about $394 a month for 2025 taxes and $86 for the HOA, plus insurance. Arithmetic ours.)

That gap is the whole argument for the shorter loan, and why I'd rather help you buy a house you can carry on fifteen years than stretch into one you can only carry on thirty.

🏠 Thinking about selling? The number in your head for your house is probably from 2022. Let me build you a home value report on your actual address — a real CMA out of the MLS: what's active near you, what's pending, and what has actually closed in the last five months. Free, no obligation.

🔑 Thinking about buying? I can represent you on any house on this coast — and this week, for the first time, the House of the Week is one of mine. Before we go looking, we run your numbers — I'm a Ramsey-trained financial coach and I've led Financial Peace University classes at my church in Ocean Springs, so I'd rather tell you what you can carry than help you buy a payment that eats you alive.

Either way you're talking to me, not a call center. Reply to this email or call or text 228-325-1502.

— Rob

Robert Recio · Licensed Real Estate Salesperson, MS #S-62221 · REAL Broker, LLC · Serving Hancock, Harrison & Jackson counties. This week's House of the Week is our own listing, as disclosed above. Equal Housing Opportunity.

No. A pre-approval is the bank telling you the most it is willing to risk on you. It is not a statement about your life.

Those are two genuinely different questions, and the second one is the one you have to answer yourself, because no lender is going to ask it.

A pre-approval is built from your income, your credit and your existing debt, against a debt-to-income ceiling. What it does not know is your daycare bill, the car payment coming due next year, what you put into retirement, how much you keep back for the month the AC dies, or that on this coast wind and flood insurance can run more than the property taxes.

And rates went up five weeks running. If your letter is from August, the payment behind that same number has moved. Have your lender re-run it at today's rate before you fall in love with a house at the top of it.

So do it in the other order. Start from the monthly payment you actually want to live with — all in, including taxes, wind, flood and any HOA — and work backward to the price. Then shop below that number, not at it. The house at the top of your pre-approval is the one that makes every other decision for the next ten years.

I sat with a lot of families on the budgeting side of this before I ever had a license, and I have never once heard somebody say they wished they'd bought more house.

County: Hancock (off the usual rotation on purpose — read the first line)

85035 Pohaku Drive, Diamondhead

Full disclosure, and we're putting it at the top instead of burying it at the bottom: this week's house is ours. Every House of the Week we've ever run has been another agent's listing. This is the first one that isn't. Read it knowing that, and then look at the number.

It's a 2024 build — Elliott Homes' "Dune" plan, two stories on a slab — with four bedrooms and three full baths in 2,219 square feet, listed at $355,000.

Run the division: $160 a square foot.

Now here's the number that makes that mean something. The last time a homeowner resold a recent build in this same subdivision, it closed at $180 a foot. Not a builder sale with incentives and a rate buydown — an actual owner, an actual resale, in Diamondhead Lakes. Twenty dollars a foot is about forty-four thousand dollars on a house this size.

We're not going to insult you by pretending Diamondhead above $350,000 is a hot market. It isn't. It's a patient one, and inventory up there has been building all year. That is exactly why this house is priced where it is instead of where a seller's feelings would put it — and it's why the per-foot math is worth your attention rather than a shrug.

What you get for it: four real bedrooms, which at this price point on this coast is genuinely hard to find; three full baths, so nobody is negotiating over a shower on a Tuesday morning; and a house two years old, which means the roof, the HVAC, the water heater and the windows are all somebody else's problem for a long time yet. The lot is 0.193 of an acre — small, flat, and if your idea of a weekend is not edging a half-acre, that is a feature.

The HOA is $86 a month, both assessments included. Diamondhead gives you golf, the marina, and streets that have carried Hawaiian names since the place was laid out — pōhaku is stone.

And the flood question, because this is Hancock County and it's the first thing you should ask. The listing data shows flood insurance is not required on this address. ⚠️ Unlike our usual House of the Week, we could not independently pull this one from FEMA's National Flood Hazard Layer — no public geocoder resolves this parcel. We're printing what the listing data says and we'd want a lender's determination in writing before anybody relies on it. Two weeks ago we featured a Diamondhead house that came back Zone VE with a 22-foot base flood elevation, so on this coast the question is never rhetorical.

Open house: Sunday, October 4, 1 to 3 PM. Yes — the wettest afternoon of the weekend. That is the argument for it. It is dry inside, it is ninety minutes out of a washed-out Sunday, and you will have the place to yourself while everybody else waits out the rain. No appointment. Come kick the baseboards.

The numbers: $355,000 · 4 bed / 3 full bath · 2,219 sq ft · 0.193 acre · built 2024 · HOA $86/mo · 2025 taxes $4,728 · MLS 4163456

Listed by Rob Recio · REAL Broker, LLC

Leo is a senior Black Mouth Cur, and we are going to be honest with you: this is the eighth time we have put him in this newsletter since June.

He's been at the Gautier shelter that whole time. The shelter's own write-up opens like this: "At 13 years old, this charming Black Mouth Cur mix should be curled up in a cozy dog bed, not waiting in a shelter kennel." They say he's eager to embrace his golden years and wants "a loving family, warm places to nap, and companionship that values the devoted heart of a senior dog." He's medium-sized, already neutered.

Nobody adopts the old ones. Everybody says they should. A senior dog is the easiest dog in the world to live with — he's done growing, done chewing, done testing you — and somebody reading this has a couch and a few good years to spare. It's raining Saturday. He does not care about the weather at all.

And one more, because they came in together. Chicka is a five-year-old Australian Cattle Dog mix, spayed, and the shelter says she "embodies personality, charm, and an abundance of love" — past the chaos of puppyhood but still up for the adventure. She arrived with another dog named Sarah, and the shelter will let them go together or separately. If you have room for two, they'd rather not find out which.

Jackson County Animal Shelter · 4400 Audubon Lane, Gautier · (228) 497-6350Mon–Fri 10 AM–4 PM · Sat 10 AM–2 PM · closed Sunday The adoption fee is $50, and it covers initial vaccinations, worming, spay or neuter, and a Jackson County Veterinary Society certificate good for a free exam.

Caption: "Thirty years of Cruisin', and he finally found a class he could win."

Forward this to somebody who'd use it. New readers can subscribe at theseawallms.com. Venue owners, shelter folks, and anybody with something happening: [email protected], by Tuesday noon.

And if you know somebody thinking about moving here — a kid coming home, a coworker transferring in to Keesler or the shipyard — forward them the Ocean Springs video instead. Seven minutes on what the town is actually like, tradeoffs included.

Thirty years of Cruisin' starting Sunday — and running eight days, which this week is the important half of that sentence. A vampire movie with a live band in Bay St. Louis. A haunted warehouse in Gulfport that does not care what the sky is doing. Four bedrooms in Diamondhead at a hundred and sixty dollars a foot — ours, and we said so. And a senior dog in Gautier who has now waited through eight of these newsletters.

One to three inches between Friday and Sunday, five where it sits longest. Stay out of the standing water, check on the neighbor with the low driveway, and pick something with a roof on it.

Take someone with you.

— The Seawall