Bayliner Boats - Gulf Coast still recovering

Hi gang, Rick here from Bayliner Boats. Long before this Gulf Coast city became the gambling capital of the Deep South, tourists came to fish the warm waters here for tuna, sharks, snapper and red fish with charter boat captains such as Jay Trochesset.
The lean and tan Trochesset, 59, learned the charter boat business from his father. Both of his sons are in the business. He has weathered dozens of hurricanes and tropical storms, but none has had the reverberating effects of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the region a little more than two years ago.

Most of the charter boats here and along the battered Gulf Coast survived by sailing out ahead of the storm. But Katrina wiped out the marinas, bait and tackle shops, ice houses, fuel stations and hotels that support the charter industry, Trochesset says. Adding to those woes are skyrocketing fuel prices, higher insurance premiums and a "gun-shy" customer base that's reluctant to return to the region, he says.

Trochesset's largest boat, a 50-foot catamaran, is docked at Point Cadet, one of the few Biloxi-area marinas to survive the storm. Many of Trochesset's fellow captains have gone elsewhere or gone out of business.

"Hopefully, they will come back when things get a little more stable," Trochesset says. "We've got a lot to offer."

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There has been progress in the region. Charter captains in southeastern Louisiana say they are edging closer to pre-Katrina levels.

"We did not take as severe a hit as some other places," says Capt. René Rice whose Cherece IV charter boat business operates out of Grand Isle, La. Rice, who has been a charter boat captain for 23 years, says his business suffered greatly during the first year after Katrina. Now the business brings in about 70% of what it did before the storm, he says.

Many Louisiana marinas have been rebuilt, and a lot of the support industries are back, but the industry is hurt by a public perception of the Gulf Coast as a wasteland, Rice says. "The majority of us have weathered the storm and are back up operational," he says.

Harry Blanchet, dock assessment program manager for the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, says that although some marinas near New Orleans "got smeared," most have rebuilt since the storm. Venice in Plaquemines Parish, La., has rebounded strongly as one of the region's "big game" fishing outposts, he says.

In Mississippi, where state tax records show gambling receipts from the Gulf Coast topped $122 million in July and regularly exceed pre-Katrina levels, the state's charter boat industry has not rebounded as quickly.

Licenses are down nearly 30% in the two years since the hurricane, according to state records. Jimmy Taylor, who represents the charter boat industry on the Mississippi Commission on Marine Resources, says the number of captains who have gone out of business since the storm is higher.

"It's just been a real struggle for the guys," Taylor says. "They can't make a living right now."

Many went more than a year without any income at all, he says.

"Up until about 12 months after the storm, you couldn't even get in the harbor because there was so much debris," Taylor says.

Many captains have been forced to take second jobs to survive until business gets better, Taylor says. The Mississippi Department of Marine Resources has tried to help by employing charter boats to conduct post-Katrina fish surveys, he says.

"It's probably kept a lot of them above water," he says.

After two years of virtually no business, Lee Fraiser, a charter captain since 1998, sold his 31-foot charter boat and put the business on indefinite hold. "There just simply aren't enough people," he says.

A former electrical contractor, Fraiser, 60, says he is looking to get a job to hold him over until the charter business picks back up. He says it will take several more years before people start thinking of the Gulf Coast as more than a disaster area with casinos.

"People still don't really realize that we are back in business," he says. "There is no reason why you can't go fishing, and the fishing has been pretty good."

Janice Jones, spokeswoman for the Mississippi Gulf Coast Convention and Visitors Bureau, says the charter boat industry has been hampered by a lack of facilities. The city-owned Point Cadet Marina still does not have electricity, and boat owners have to pay to have a special line run out to their slips, she says.

Repairs to other municipal marinas have not begun while cities wrangle with the Federal Emergency Management Agency over what it will cost to rebuild them, she says.

Trochesset is confident Biloxi's charter industry will rebound, hopefully rising on the tide of the successful return of the casino industry. "I've read that they had charter boats in Biloxi in the 1800s, and I think there will continue to be charter boats," he says. Chris Joyner reports for The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss.

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Rick Ostler, Bayliner Boats.