Meggan Monday: Biloxi Shrimping Trip
Shrimp season opened last week and fishermen are out in the Sound and the Gulf of Mexico searching for a bountiful harvest.
We wanted to give you an up-close look at what goes into catching the shrimp that lands on your plates. Join Meggan as she climbs about the Sailfish and take a ride with Captain Mike Moore with the Biloxi Cruise Company to see how it is done!
“This is the Sailfish. She’s called the Sailfish because she sails like a fish in the wind. She is the original Biloxi shrimping trip. She was built in 1953 and this boat has been doing shrimping trips in the same channel. Seven local families have owned it and we’re the seventh family. We had the honor of running the business for over 15 years. We get to meet many people from all over the world. We get to share our Coasts with them. At one time we were considered to be the shrimp capital of the world, even the seafood capital of the world. We had the canning industries in the late 1800s, early 1900s and put Biloxi on the map. Lot of key families here are driving forces, providing seafood to the world.”
“We just like to show anybody and everything. If there’s anything in that net. If it swims or it comes from our ocean or from our sound, we like to tell everybody the commercial value of it, whether if it’s just good for environment, or doesn’t have a dollar figure to it and what times of the year you’re able to fish for them and how.”
“The way a shrimp trawl works is it’s basically designed like a funnel in the water. It has a cork line and chain line and that’s what overs her up vertically. And she cones off that makes a tail and a tail makes a bag and when you make a bag of a tail is you just tie a knot at the end of it. It’s a series of slip knots in a row that we do. We like to call it a shrimper man’s knot. Once we get the net prepped to throw and we literally toss into water and water pressure lets it go out. From there, in front of the trial is a tickler chain. It runs about a foot and a half in front of the trawl and it basically beats the mud up and tickles shrimp up, that’s why it’s called a tickler chain. It kicks them up off the bottom because shrimp bury themselves in the mud. And then what the trawl does mean it’s shape like a cone. It acts like a vacuum cleaner; it sucks them shrimp up and goes to the back of the trawl into the bag and then from there we bring it in.”
“We started working on an oyster nursery. Right now, we’ve got over 3 million larvae that have been grown out into seed right now. We are trying to show people all the different stages of how oysters grow and how we can produce oysters and not only how we bring them to the table and how can we help save our Gulf.”
“There’s a lot of loving in that water down there in that mud. At the end of the day, we have a really rich environment, that mud that slits in from the Mississippi River, provides a great habitat for these fish to hide. From Louisiana, basically to Bayou La Batre, Alabama has some of the sweetest tasting oysters, shrimp and blue crab, hands down facts, people can’t argue with.”
