Even as Ponzi scheme architect Bernard Madoff serves a 150 year prison term, his notoriety made new financial waves Tuesday as an auction of three of his former boats and a family luxury car raised more than $1 million for burned investors.

Spirited bids came from 70 prospective buyers who put up the $100,000 deposits required to bid on Madoff’s mini fleet, a sport boat once owned by his top aide and other vessels seized by the U.S. Marshals Service in forfeiture actions.

“Sales for the Madoff assets far exceeded all expectations, which equates to more money that will go back to the victims,” said Neil DeSousa, acting U.S. Marshal for Florida’s southern district.

A restored 55 foot Rybovich yacht named Bull was one of the auction stars, fetching $700,000. National Liquidators President Robert Toney, whose firm ran the Fort Lauderdale auction, said Madoff’s crew kept the 1969 sportfish model in top condition, “with all the brightwork and teak shining.”

Madoff’s former 38 foot Shelter Island sport runabout, named Sitting Bull, went for $320,000. And the 24 foot Maverick center console he dubbed Little Bull got a winning bid of $21,000.

A black 1999 Mercedes-Benz CLK 320 convertible that belonged to Madoff’s wife, Ruth, went for $30,000, bringing the total to $1,071,000.

The Dorothy Jo, a 61 foot Viking sportfish powerboat once owned by former Madoff lieutenant Frank DiPascali, brought in an additional $950,000.

Like Madoff, DiPascali pleaded guilty in the scam that victimized charities, celebrities and average investors. He’s now cooperating with prosecutors.

The Madoff tally more than doubles the $1 million raised at Saturday’s auction of some of the financier’s other belongings including a New York Mets baseball jacket with his name stitched on the back. The Madoffs’ former Montauk, N.Y., oceanfront home sold last month for $9.41 million.

Would be owners still have a chance to buy Madoff’s former Manhattan penthouse for $8.9 million, down $1 million from the initial asking price, or his Palm Beach, Fla., mansion for $7.9 million.

Public safety officials from Louisiana to Florida said they will likely order evacuations today as Hurricane Ida the only hurricane of the season so far to threaten U.S. shores nears the Gulf Coast.

Escambia County, Fla., already ordered barrier island campgrounds evacuated, said Mike Stone, spokesman for the Florida Division of Emergency Management. Other evacuations will likely affect the “immediate coastal areas, mobile home residents and anybody in a flood prone area,” said John Kilcullen, director of plans and operations at Mobile County (Ala.) Emergency Management Agency.

Louisiana and Alabama also said evacuations were likely.

Jim Wright, who captains a charter fishing boat in Dauphin Island, Ala., said residents and boat owners on that barrier island in the Gulf of Mexico were either tying down or clearing out Sunday.

“We’ve got additional lines on the boat and buffers to protect it from the dock,” Wright said. “Some of the boats have pulled out and gone where they can get away from the winds.”

Ida packed 100 mph winds Sunday as it passed Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and was forecast to weaken as it travels north across the cooler waters of the Gulf, said Dennis Feltgen, spokesman for the National Hurricane Center in Miami.

The hurricane center forecast the storm’s center to hit land Tuesday with winds of 70 mph, and to deliver up to 8 inches of rain and a storm surge of up to 5 feet. A hurricane warning was issued for Pascagoula, Miss., to Indian Pass, Fla. Ida is forecast to turn east after landfall and to cross the Florida Peninsula as a spread out and disorganized storm, heading over the Atlantic Ocean by Thursday.

In Biloxi, Miss., some people were not fazed by Ida.

“I’ll probably decide tomorrow whether we need to put up hurricane shutters,” said Mike Lerner, owner of the Balmoral Inn. “It’s projected only to be a Category 1. Even if it’s a Category 2, I don’t even board.”

Also Sunday, more than 120 people died in mudslides and flooding in El Salvador. Feltgen said a Pacific Ocean storm was at fault, not Ida.

These days, the Cod is pretty much gone from the Cape. Bob Luce, 63, sits on a bench and explains why. Luce, who has an artificial knee from the wear and tear of fishing and knuckles tattooed “love” and “hate” in honor of the Robert Mitchum movie The Night of the Hunter, fondly remembers the days in the 1970s when he could drop hooks to the seafloor 15 miles out and reel in 30 to 50 pound cod. By the 1990s, the Cape Cod fishing grounds were barren. Fishing had gotten too efficient for its own good, says Luce.

In 1980, many fishers began switching from hooks that caught individual fish to nets that snared cod by the gills, whole schools at a time. At the same time, big trawlers began dragging rollers across the rocky seabed to force the bottom-dwelling fish upward into nets, capturing massive amounts of cod and, some critics claim, destroying its preferred habitat. “They caught all the big ones and wiped them out,” says Luce. Now New England is trying to rebuild its cod fishery, opening deep divisions among fishers in places like Chatham.

When cod stocks collapsed in the 1990s, the federal government closed thousands of square miles of fishing grounds and limited fishers’ “days at sea.” The cod population has rebounded, says Steve Murawski, a scientist at the National Marine Fisheries Service, but to reach historic levels, the total mass of cod still needs to grow eightfold on Georges Bank, east of the cape, and about threefold in the Gulf of Maine.

Regulators have now proposed slashing the allowed days at sea by an additional 55 percent and reducing the daily limit on Georges Bank codfish from 2,000 pounds per boat to 500 pounds. Some trawler owners think they could live with such cutbacks. Barbara Stevenson, who runs three 87 foot trawlers out of Portland, Maine, supports lowering the daily catch limit on Georges Bank. “That’s the most stressed stock,” she says. “Many people in the industry are frustrated more hasn’t been done to date.”

Fishy numbers? But other fishers argue that the proposals are based on little more than guesswork about what the ocean contained lifetimes ago. “How do you compare what we’re doing today to when friggin’ Adam and Eve were around?” fumes Craig Pendleton, a Saco, Maine, fishing captain.

While trawlers can go after some 16 other fish species, hookers and gill netters depend more heavily on cod, and many say the cuts will put them out of business. Sustainable fishing practices will be hurt the most, says Paul Parker, director of the Cape Cod Commercial Hook Fishermen’s Association. “For hundreds of years, cod were caught using a hook and line on Georges Bank, and it was sustained for generations,” says Parker as he sips a pint at the local watering hole, the Chatham Squire. “Fish don’t bite all the time if the current, tide, or wind is in the wrong direction. That built in inefficiency allowed some to escape.”

By contrast, he says, the trawlers inevitably scoop up baby cod, and the gill netters often snag much more than the 2,000 pound limit, throwing the excess overboard. The trawlers dispute Parker’s contentions, noting that they’ve switched to larger mesh nets that allow small cod to escape. They also say the hook fishers have done the most damage by snagging juvenile fish, before they have time to reproduce.

Regardless of who bears the most blame for the cod decline, Chatham’s hook fishers worry that their rustic municipal pier will give way to a tony yacht club and that Nickerson Fish & Lobsters market will be replaced by a seaside restaurant serving fish trucked in from somewhere else.