02:14 PM CDT on Friday, September 2, 2005

Cain Burdeau / Associated Press

BILOXI, MS -- The farmers of the Gulf of Mexico -- the tough-skinned sun-burnt shrimpers -- picked a sheltered waterway here to make a furious last stand against Hurricane Katrina aboard their boats. An uncounted number of their bodies lay in the murky bayou Friday.

Those who survived may never recover from the catastrophe.

"We fought the hurricane for 16 hours straight," said Danny Ross, who lost a 50-foot boat, the Captain A.J. "It's gone. I don't even know where it's at. The only thing left is the anchor."

From Alabama to Louisiana, fisherman lost their boats, homes, docks, boat slips, and in some cases, their lives, in the storm.

How many fisherman were killed riding it out on their vessels is still unknown. Also unknown is whether one of the country's oldest fleets will be able to recover.

The frightful damage on the shrimp industry was evident Friday on the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway in Biloxi, where large and small shrimp boats took shelter during the storm. As far as the eye can see, wrecked vessels littered the canal.

Some big ones, 100 feet long, were jacked up with their sterns hoisted over the top of the canal's bank. Overturned boats floated in slicks of fuel, their skimmers ghostly arms beneath the murky water. A few were at the bottom of the waterway.

No bodies have been pulled from the water, but shrimpers said they thought about a dozen of their colleagues drowned trying to ride out the storm.

Boats broke loose, swirled down the bayou then smashed together, survivors said. One vessel, the "Santa Maria," had 10 boats bucking and straining against its side. The captain kept his engines roaring for hours to keep the flotilla from taking him under.

Men screamed and cursed as boats collided, overturned and went down. One boy, on his first outing ever as a deck hand, reportedly made it to safety by jumping from sunken boat to sunken boat as the storm raged.

"Very, very bad," a Vietnamese shrimper, Hai Hong Ta, said in broken English. "100 percent. My boat down."

Like so many others on the bayou, he also lost his home on shore.

Recalling the chaos, the shrimpers on the canal shook their heads. One smoked his last cigar. At least, some were better off than the people on shore, who have no electricity, no showers and no TV. Many had on-board generators, living on wrecked boats like they would anyway, with showers and electricity.

But they faced an uncertain future and plenty of questions.

Why go out and catch shrimp when there is no dock to unload? How could they make a living with fuel prices so high? Would they be able to trawl with nets in waterways still choked with debris?

"There's no port from Louisiana all the way to Alabama," said Binh Truong, a second-generation Vietnamese shrimper on his family boat, the Captain Sen. He saw no way out of the predicament.

"We're a dying breed, I guess," he said, his body cut and

bruised from the ordeal of keeping afloat during Katrina. His gaze

was steady as he muttered, "We need help," before he climbed onto

shore in his white shrimp boots.

Chuck Adams, a marine economist with the University of Florida's

Sea Grant program, compared the devastation in the Gulf to how the

tsunami destroyed the fishing industry in the Indian Ocean.

"It's going to be decimating to the industry," he said.

But there was hope, even in the hardest-hit areas.

Richard Gollott, the owner of the Golden Gulf Coast Packing

Company, along the "Back Bay" in Biloxi, said he has faith, even

though his shrimp factory was severely damaged by Katrina's waters,

along with nearly every ice house in Biloxi.

"We went through Camille. This is worse than Camille. But we

bounced back," he said.

(Copyright 2005 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)