Gulf Coast still recovering

BILOXI, Miss. — While gambling revenues along the Gulf Coast have rebounded nicely in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the region little more than two years ago, the charter boat industry hasn’t been able to bounce back as quickly, USA Today reported in a story on its Web site yesterday.

Not only are charter boat licenses down nearly 30 percent in Mississippi since the hurricane, according to state records, many of the region’s marinas still haven’t been repaired or rebuilt.

Jimmy Taylor, who represents the charter boat industry on the Mississippi Commission on Marine Resources, said 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 told the newspaper. “They can’t make a living right now. Up until about 12 months after the storm, you couldn’t even get in the harbor because there was so much debris.”

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.

“It’s probably kept a lot of them above water,” he said.

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. He says it will take several more years before people start thinking of the Gulf Coast as more than a disaster area with casinos.

“There just simply aren’t enough people,” Fraiser told the newspaper. “People still don’t really realize that we are back in business. There is no reason why you can’t go fishing, and the fishing has been pretty good.”

Many marinas in disrepair

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 told the newspaper.

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.

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,” Capt. René Rice, whose Cherece IV charter boat business operates out of Grand Isle, La. Rice, told the newspaper. Rice has been a charter boat captain for 23 years, and says his business suffered greatly during the first year after Katrina. But now the business brings in about 70 percent 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 said. “The majority of us have weathered the storm and are back up operational,” he told the newspaper.

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