Biloxi Shrimping Trip

A working shrimp trawler departs from the Small Craft Harbor at Point Cadet and drags a net through the Mississippi Sound for seventy minutes while you watch. The crew hauls up whatever lives in the estuary — shrimp, crabs, stingrays, seahorses, small sharks — and sorts the catch on deck. The captain narrates the marine biology and the history of the shrimping industry while the animals wriggle on the sorting table. This is not a museum exhibit. It is the actual work of the fleet, compressed into an hour. The French arrived on this coast in 1699 and built Fort Maurepas, the first capital of French Louisiana, but abandoned it by 1702 after crops died and fresh water ran short. The Gulf itself endured. When Mississippi entered the Union in 1817, the coast held just 2.5 percent of the state's population and remained a frontier. Shrimping became the industry that built Biloxi into what it is now — a working port that also happens to welcome tourists. This trip is one of the most popular family activities on the coast and one of the few that connects visitors directly to the industry. Book ahead in summer.