Shrimp Boats If you have heard of Bayou La Batre, it may be because it was featured in the movie Forrest Gump when the lead character had the only shrimp trawler in this Alabama coastal town after a storm and he made huge amounts of money. It lies along the Mississippi Sound on the Gulf of Mexico in south Alabama.

We went there very early one morning and were surprised at all the colorful shrimp boats docked along the shore line. Beautiful reflections of each one.

Starting in the 1970s through the early part of the 1990s, Bayou La Batre was the shrimp-trawler-building capital of the world, often turning out more than a trawler a day from a dozen shipyards. During the latter part of the 1990s and the early part of this decade, the business of building trawlers almost stopped in its tracks because of several economic reasons including overbuilding, cost of fuel, scarcity of boat financing and plummeting shrimp prices.

Some of the local builders turned to building offshore workboats with great success, while others divided up what fishing boat business was left. For example, Master Boat Builders built scores of fishing vessels until 2002 but only four since that time. Since 2002, over 50 OSVs have come out of that same yard and almost no other vessel type has.

During the transformation away from shrimp trawlers, many types of commercial vessels emerged from the boatyards of Bayou La Batre including ships used in the Pirates of the Caribbean films. It was a combination of the skills of the boatbuilders of Steiner Shipyard and of the Walt Disney Company’s magicians that made realistic-looking period warships from small self-contained utility vessels.

Shrimp Boats

by Sandra J