Cruisin' the Coast at 30: How It Started and Why the DMR Is Boiling Shrimp

The biggest car show in the country started because a handful of coast business people got tired of watching the money leave every Labor Day.

Nobody in that first room was chasing chrome. They were chasing September, October and November — months with good weather, quiet hotels and no reason for anybody up north to point a car south. Hot air balloons were seriously discussed, right up until somebody pointed out the wind could put you down in Wiggins. Boat races came up too.

What they landed on instead grew into a week that shuts down nothing and fills up everything, from Bay St. Louis to Moss Point. Three decades on, it has also become the best chance the state gets all year to put Mississippi shrimp and oysters in front of people who have never tasted either.

🚗 A tourism fix that happened to involve cars

Woody Bailey was in the hotel business back then, along with real estate and building supply, which is why he was in the room with the casino executives trying to solve the same seasonal riddle. As Woody remembers the question, it was simple enough: “Why does everything stop Labor Day?”

One of the casino general managers had worked in Reno and remembered a car show there that pulled crowds in without much else going on. The group jelled around the idea, and in 1996 they tried it.

They also picked the calendar on purpose, ending the event on the Sunday before Columbus Day so the federal holiday would give travelers one more day on the coast. It does not always work out that neatly anymore, but people still get the day, and they still spend it here.

The first year, 374 vehicles registered. Last year the number was 10,334, and this year Woody is preparing for 11,000.

🛣️ The event that pulled whole towns back in

Growth like that does not stay in one parking lot. All three coast counties and all twelve cities now work the event together, which is how places that never saw much tourism ended up hosting cruisers.

Waveland was one of the last cities to come back on board after being part of it before Katrina, and Moss Point is in now too. Woody grew up when Moss Point, Gautier and Pascagoula were not tourism towns in any sense, and watching those main streets fill up is the part he points to first.

The reach runs a lot further than the county line. Pre-registration this year stands at 9,274 vehicles, which is 802 ahead of the same point last year, with forty-two states signed up along with Australia, Canada, England, Germany and New Zealand. Around 1,300 of those registrants have never set foot on the Mississippi Gulf Coast — better than twelve percent of the field, for an event turning thirty.

The last economic impact study, done in 2021, put the number at 33.1 million dollars for the three coast counties and 36.1 million statewide. Another study is being done this year, and the event has grown since.

🦐 Three shrimp in a cup, and the reason behind them

All those first-timers arriving hungry is exactly why the Department of Marine Resources got involved. Mississippi Gulf Fresh Seafood is the presenting sponsor, and Joe Spraggins, the DMR director, brings his crew out to boil fresh Gulf shrimp where the crowd already is.

The setup is deliberate. They boil at the show center in Jones Park on Monday and Tuesday, where cars check in, then move to Town Green on Wednesday for the downtown block party. They run mornings, stop in the middle of the day, and start again in the afternoon, because as Director Spraggins puts it, “we don’t want to compete against the people who are trying to make a living selling some of the seafood.” The food trucks and restaurants are sponsors too.

People line up before the pots are ready. A cup with three shrimp in it is enough to start a conversation, and Director Spraggins has had visitors from Louisiana ask where on earth the shrimp came from.

Booths also go up in Ocean Springs on the main strip near Dee Dee’s, in Pascagoula and in Bay St. Louis. Shrimpers, Director Spraggins says, already have their orders lined up for the whole week, because people show up with coolers and drive the seafood home.

🦪 Oysters, opened early on purpose

The shrimp are only half of what the state wants those coolers carrying. Oyster season opens October 1 this year instead of the usual November, a change the DMR worked out with the oystermen about a week before it was announced. October has the weather, the water temperature is fine, and there is no reason to make anyone wait.

There is a harder reason too. Mississippi’s oyster harvest went to zero in 2019, and everything since has been rebuilding. The first year with any harvest at all brought in 8,400 sacks — the most the state had taken since 1918. Last year came in a little over 50,000 sacks. This year there are more than 120,000 sacks available to harvest, out of over 400,000 sacks of harvestable oysters sitting in the Mississippi Sound, against a goal of half a million.

They are three to four inches and, by the director’s account, taste like it.

The timing does one more thing. Texas is not open. The East Coast is not open. Most of Louisiana is not open. For a few weeks in October, the market belongs to Mississippi, with a hundred thousand visitors already standing on the beach road.

If I’m not ready, this thing is coming anyway

Woody

🍤 The question they want people asking at the table

Selling oysters in October is a short win. The longer play is getting diners to ask a question before they order. The new Mississippi Gulf Seafood logo makes its soft debut during the event, handed out on hats at the booths, backed by a 2.3 million dollar contract with Gulf Coast Tourism and a five-year campaign the DMR expects to run around nine million dollars.

Signs are going up on the roads into the state — Interstate 10, 49, the routes in from the north and east — so people arrive already looking for the name. Restaurants whose seafood is mostly American or Gulf get the logo for their doors and menus, and the menus are meant to say plainly which items are domestic and which are imported, crab legs from Canada included. Commissioner Andy Gipson is taking the northern part of the state on the agriculture side while the DMR works the central and southern part, with a bigger rollout expected around January.

The director’s ask of restaurant owners is short. “all we want you to do is tell me the truth” is how Director Spraggins put it to one of them over lunch, and the arithmetic backs him up: the young captain from Keesler Air Force Base sitting with him said he would pay more for domestic Gulf shrimp over imported, for no reason other than buying American.

That matters because a lot of imported shrimp is raised in ponds Director Spraggins describes as sewage systems. What comes out of the Gulf, you can stand behind.

An event this size runs on a small office, twelve car clubs supplying about 650 volunteers, and somewhere between 1,200 and 1,400 people total to make a week work. But when Woody talks about the seven straight years USA Today has named it the number one car show in the country, he hands the credit somewhere else — to the folks who stop when an old car dies on the shoulder, and who tell a stranger where to find a good shrimp po’boy. “the people of the Mississippi Gulf Coast are our secret weapon,” Woody said.

That is the same bet the seafood campaign is making. Biggest is a number worth chasing, and Woody would take 11,000 cars if they come, but what brings people back is a place that is honest about what it is serving and proud of where it came from.