PASCAGOULA, Miss. ( WALA ) - With rain already falling by mid-morning Wednesday, folks in Jackson County were making final preparations for Hurricane Francine .

Francine is no Hurricane Katrina. But veterans of that landmark storm were not taking any chances.

“I rode out Katrina in Raceland, Louisiana,” said Moss Point resident Michael Manry. “We was right in the middle of the eye. It was some of the worst hours of my life. I’m 31 years old. I was 10 then, and it still gets me.”

Manry is one of some 11,300 employees of the Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula. That includes nearly 1,900 who live in Alabama. The company operated a normal 6 a.m. shift on Wednesday but announced it would end the second shift early at 7 p.m. and cancel the third and fourth shifts.

Manry told FOX10 News that he was taking advantage of getting out early.

“I’m putting metal over the windows, wood over the windows,” he said. “Everything I can keep outside that’s loose, not tied down, is going in a shed or in my house.”

He added: “I hope I’m ready.”

Others were securing their boats. Harry Joe Schwab has owned the Angela Michelle, a 33-foot Hunter sailboat, for 34 years. He was tending to it at the Pascagoula Inner Harber Marina on Lake Yazoo.

“I’m just putting longer lines on so when the tide comes up, we can adjust the lines,” he said. “But other than that, there’s just not a whole lot left to do. … We put the boats out in the middle of the lake for Katrina. Everything went good. Yeah, we’re just waiting, saying a prayer everything goes well.”

Dick Dixon, a west Mobile resident who grew up in Pascagoula and keeps his 42-foot Beneteau sailboat in the city-owned marina, said he changed out his lines and made other preparations.

“I’m gonna spend the night here tonight, as I did last night,” he said. “But I’m here just to loosen lines and take care of the boat as necessary. Generally, in hurricanes, we move out. We have a hurricane clan, all of us boat owners here in the harbor, and we move out and stream the boats out and get them away from the docks. But we’re not expecting that kind of severe weather for this.”

It was a different story at the Singing River Yacht Club, about 2½ miles to the east on the Mississippi Sound, which is more exposed. Rocky Bond, a two-time commodore of the club, said the elevation under the yacht club is about 6 feet. He said the parking lot frequently floods during storms.

Most boat owners already had moved their vessels by early Wednesday afternoon.

“That guy with that truck right there took his boat up the river to the bayou,” he said. “And he’s stuck in the bayou and wants somebody to come pull him off. Well, everybody’s put their boats up. Why would you want to move your boat on the day of the storm?”

Manry, the Ingalls shipfitter, said every hurricane since Katrina has made him nervous.

“I hope people are taking it serious, because I think during Katrina, a lot of people did not take it serious,” he said. “They just, they kind of laughed it off. … Then we got ripped a new one for that. We should have been more serious.”