Biloxi Schooners & Schooner Pier

Every feature of a Biloxi schooner is an answer to a local problem, which is why the type does not look like a New England fishing schooner and does not sail like one.

The Sound is shallow — much of it around twenty feet and a great deal of it far less — and the oyster reefs are shallower still. A deep-keeled boat cannot get to the work. So the hull is broad and flat with very little draught, and a centreboard drops through the middle to give it something to grip the water with when sailing to windward. Raise the board and it will float in water you could stand up in.

The cargo shaped the deck. Oysters come aboard wet, heavy and in bulk, and they get shovelled. That wants a flat, clear working deck with the accommodation kept small and low, which is exactly what you get: a boat that is nearly all deck and almost no cabin.

The rig is two masts, fore-and-aft, with large simple sails a crew of a few men could handle. There is no sophistication in it. It is a lot of canvas over a shallow hull, designed to move weight across sheltered water quickly and cheaply.

Engines ended it. Once a marine engine became affordable, a boat that could work regardless of wind beat one that could not, and by the early twentieth century the fleet had converted or been replaced. The type effectively vanished within a generation.

Both boats are replicas, not survivors, and the museum is straightforward about that. The originals were working craft built of wood on a hot coast, worked hard and then abandoned when they stopped paying; almost nothing of the fleet survived.

Glenn L. Swetman came first, in the late 1980s, and Mike Sekul followed in the 1990s. Each is about sixty-five feet, two-masted, and built to the lines of the boats that worked here. Both names belong to men from the Biloxi seafood industry, which is the correct way to name a boat in this city — you name it after a person everybody on the waterfront knew.

They are sailed rather than exhibited. That means a professional skipper, volunteer crew, real running rigging and passengers who get asked to haul on a halyard when the sails go up. It also means the ordinary constraints of a sailing vessel: no sailing in a thunderstorm, no sailing in too much wind, and occasional time out of the water for maintenance, which on a wooden-hulled replica is not optional.

If both boats are in commission you may see them out together, and there are days in the year when they race each other. Photographs of two gaff-rigged schooners on the Sound with casino towers behind them are the single most Biloxi image available.