Lorren Peters beat the rain and nearly everyone else to a plum spot at City Front to watch the Corps of Engineers’ Mat Sinking Unit float on to another revetment season.

“My fiancé is on the Benyaurd and he just got back with them,” she said, flanked by daughter, Allie, 6, and Jared, 3, just before a morning shower covered the Yazoo Diversion Canal with a gray curtain of rain during a formal blessing of the fleet ceremony.

“This is the first time we’ve really seen them off,” she said.

Viewing the first blessing of the unit’s motor vessels, the Benyaurd, William James, Harrison, Mary Wepfer and the Mississippi V was first set for the outdoor stage atop the Corps’ inspection barge. Rain forced the Rev. Sam Godfrey, rector of Christ Episcopal Church and Lt. Col. Mark Mitera, an Army chaplain, to read blessings from the sheltered comfort of the barge’s events room.

“We bless the crews and their families as they wait for their return,” Godfrey said as part of the blessing, which in effect involved showers of two kinds — a steady stream of water from a deck gun atop a waterfront bulkhead and the rain from above.

The Corps’ key riverbank revetment unit is expected to lay concrete mat along areas of the Mississippi River bank left uncovered late last year after high water on the Lower Mississippi ended the “mat season” about two months early. The floating city of push boats, towboats, quarter boats, and living quarters plans to place 200,000 concrete squares this year, or enough to pave about 80 miles of highway, Corps spokesman Greg Raimondo said. Eleven sites along the river left undone will be addressed, starting at Kemp Bend, near St. Joseph, La. The unit then moves downriver to New Orleans.

The unit had sunk nearly 436 acres of concrete mat along 23 sites on the river between midsummer 2013 and early January, when the 150 or so workers were called back to port. The Mississippi’s record flood in 2011 built up massive amounts of sediment that was exposed in 2012 during near-record low water on the lower river system. Higher than normal stages on the Lower Mississippi last winter caused a stop-and-start season.

Flooding in June on the Upper Mississippi has not affected the wider, muddier Lower Mississippi system. The river at Vicksburg was 28.81 feet and falling for much of Wednesday, or 14 feet below flood stage.