Biloxi Small Craft Harbor

A few minutes of looking teaches you most of what the coast does for a living.

Shrimp trawlers are the obvious ones: heavy steel or wooden hulls, a wheelhouse forward, and two long outrigger booms carried vertically against the mast in harbour and swung out horizontally at sea, so the boat drags a net on each side. Nets hang from the rigging to dry. These are working vessels on a seasonal fishery, and how many are tied up mid-season tells you something about how the year is going.

Inshore charter boats are the fibreglass ones: bay boats and centre-consoles, shallow-draught, with a raised platform at the stern for poling or sight-casting, an enormous outboard and very little else. They fish the Sound, the Back Bay, the bridge pilings and the marsh drains, and this is the fishing most visitors should be doing.

Offshore boats are fewer and bigger, with a tower, outriggers for trolling and enough fuel for a long run past the barrier islands. The economics of that trip out of this harbour are covered on the fishing charters page.

The shrimping trip boat is the one that takes passengers rather than anglers, and it does the same job as a trawler at a tenth of the scale, for an audience.

Signs of the working harbour are everywhere: the ice house, the fuel dock, stacked traps, spools of net, boats on the hard with the paint off.

A small boat leaves the Biloxi waterfront, runs a short distance out, puts a shrimp trawl over the side, tows it for twenty minutes or so, then hauls it back up and empties it onto a table on deck. Everybody crowds round while a member of crew sorts the pile and names things.

That is the whole trip and it is better than it sounds, because a Mississippi Sound trawl comes up full of oddities. Brown shrimp and white shrimp, obviously. Blue crabs. Small flounder, croaker, hardhead catfish, occasionally a stingray, sometimes a seahorse, and a mass of other things that get identified, passed round and put back. Children who have been bored by a museum are fully engaged by a pile of live animals on a table.

It is also the clearest single demonstration of how this city made its living. The trawl you are watching is a miniature of the gear that fed the canneries, and the by-catch question — everything that comes up that is not the target species — is right there in front of you rather than described on a panel.

It is short, it is cheap by boat-trip standards, and it runs on a seasonal schedule that is weather-dependent like everything else on this coast. Book ahead in summer. This is one of the very few things in Biloxi that you can genuinely book online rather than by telephone.

Biloxi has blessed its shrimp fleet since the late 1920s, and it remains the one day of the year when this harbour is the centre of the city rather than a working corner of it.

The form is Mediterranean Catholic and arrived with the fishing families who settled this coast. Boats are decorated, the fleet forms up and processes past a priest who blesses each vessel in turn, and there are wreaths for those lost at sea. It sits inside a longer festival weekend. The date moves and is generally in spring or early summer, so check locally rather than assuming a fixed weekend.

The rest of the year has a shape too. Shrimp seasons open and close on dates set by the state, and the harbour empties and fills accordingly. Hurricane season runs June to November, and when a system is genuinely coming the boats leave — running up the Back Bay and into the bayous where a narrow, tree-lined channel gives far better shelter than an open basin on the Sound. An empty harbour in September is not a quiet week; it is a warning.

Late autumn is the harbour at its most pleasant. The heat breaks, the water clears, the fishing is good, and the dock is busy without being hot.