It was another soggy Saturday in the metro, with teeming rains adding to river levels in the area.

“I have never seen rain and wind like this,” declared Greg Simbeck, who was strolling along Upper Landing Park in St. Paul on Saturday.   

Not far away, Watergate Marina was living up to its name, with the Mississippi creeping up boat landings, even as a few hardy souls were out fishing.

“We’ve had a drought the last few years, so I accept the rain, you know?” smiled Travis Plummer, from St. Paul.

Plummer, no fair-weather fisherman himself, said the river levels are the highest he’s seen in a long time.

“It’s pretty extreme,” he said. “Usually, it’s to the bottom of the culvert right there, went up about eight to nine feet.”

It wasn’t hard to find cars splashing through standing water on area roads. High levels shut down Water Street from the St. Paul Yacht Club to the marina. Fourth Street, near CHS Field, is also closed, from Willis Street to Commercial Street.

“To see it this high, just because of rainfall is crazy,” Simbeck said. “I can’t even remember just from the rain being like this.”

At Upper Landing Park, riverside walkways and access points simply disappeared.

“It’s incredible,” says Vanessa Whitney, from North St. Paul. “You can clearly see that the walkway is supposed to go down here, but we’re not able to go.”

All that excess water is causing problems for Sue Rodsjo and her family’s 1966 Chris Craft boat.

“Because it’s an old boat, our boat always takes on water, so it always gets a bit of a leak through the wood boards,” Rodsjo explains.

Rodsjo said that when the river reaches a certain height, the power will be shut off at the dock her family uses. She said that power is needed to keep her bilge pump going and her boat dry, so a temporary move elsewhere on Friday was a necessity.

“We figured it would be better to get to Stillwater than find our boat at the bottom of the Mississippi,” Rodsjo said.

After all the wet weather of the past week, is there such a thing as rain fatigue?

Plummer thinks so and he likely isn’t alone.  

“It’s somewhat scary, and somewhat intriguing to me,” he noted.  “I like the storms, but I think I’ve had enough, because it seems like it’s rained every day for the last two weeks. I’m ready for it to dry out a little bit.”

More than 80 high school and JUCO student-athletes from across Mississippi and the South were invited to learn, grow and network at the 3rd Under The Lights QB camp hosted by Wyatt Davis.

The players say this is a chance to get better, meet other top players and gain exposure.

PEARL, Miss. (WLBT) – Saturday, the Mississippi legislature welcomed the Alabama legislature to Trustmark Park for the inaugural Battle of Tombigbee softball game.

“We got a challenge at the beginning of the year to play the Alabama legislators in a softball game,” said Rep. Troy Smith, who represents Mississippi’s 84th District. “They’ve been doing this for several years; this is our first go around.”

The meeting on the diamond was initiated with the Mississippi Department of Public Safety delivering the game ball to the field via helicopter and kicked off a fun and friendly rivalry between the two states.

“It’s great for the two states to come around and play together, it’s going to be an annual thing,” Smith said.

The state representatives were happy to take a day to have fun with their statesmen and neighbors to the east.

“You can see on the bench, we’re all one team, [we have] camaraderie,” said Mississippi District 1 Representative Lester Carpenter. “We work in the House together, we play ball together, so it’s a wonderful thing.”

“We have a job, we discuss laws, we get a lot of criticism on things we do, a lot of gratitude too,” Smith said. “To come out and mix it with other people who have got the same job, use the same stories, it’s fun.”

While it’s been a minute since some of the state reps took reps on the field, they were able to get back into the swing of things.

“It takes us a while to get used to this,” said Alabama House Majority Leader Scott Stadthagen. “We’ve been stretching and trying to run, but we’ve got to knock the dust off us a little bit.”

“We’ve got one in their 20s, one in their 30s, the rest 40 and above. A lot of us ain’t been on a ballfield in 20-30 years, but it feels good,” Smith said.

The best part of the whole event: revenue generated from the game went to benefit the Mississippi Children’s Hospital.

“The kids are the real winners, right?” Stadthagen said. “Hopefully we raise a lot of money for it, and hopefully it benefits a lot of kids.”

Saturday’s game did not disappoint. The showdown at Trustmark Park went into the 10th inning, and Alabama won 7-5.

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