The focus of this article is negative. We focus not on something, but on the lack of something, namely, the lack of whale watching cruises in Mississippi. As far as we can tell, there are in fact no whale watching cruises in the entire Gulf of Mexico. There are whales in the Gulf of Mexico, so you might think that you’d be able to sail out to see them from a departure point in a place like Mississippi, but these Gulf whales are evidently quite hard to see, so there are no cruises that are designed to enable whale spotting. Mississippi is, in short, not a good place for whale watching, but below we explore some possible alternatives, such as they are, to whale watching in the state, although these may not satisfying those looking to go whale watching.
Despite the lack of whale watching in the Gulf of Mexico, three of the five states that line this body of water – Texas, Florida, and Alabama – have a decent number of boating tours that focus on marine life. In almost all cases, these tours focus on dolphins, and since the object of these cruises is to sail around the ocean searching for mammalian ocean dwellers, they bear an obvious resemblance to whale watching tours. (Whales and dolphins are closely related, after all.) In other words, for someone interested in taking a whale watching cruise, a dolphin watching cruise is a pretty good alternative.
However, in the remaining two Gulf states – Louisiana, and our present concern Mississippi – there aren’t even particularly good alternatives to whale watching. In both states, there don’t seem to be dolphin watching tours, and in fact there are barely any tours that focus on marine life at all. The closest thing we could find to a nature tour by boat in either state focuses on swamps. In Mississippi, these tours are run by a company called Eco-Tours of Southern Mississippi, and although these actually look quite cool, they aren’t all that similar to whale watching cruises. If you are simply interested in marine life in general, the Institute of Marine Mammal Studies might be worth a visit, but this museum hardly seems to have any orientation toward whales, and in any case a museum visit is related to whale watching in only the most tangential of ways.
So, the simple truth is that there are no whale watching cruises in Mississippi, and indeed there is nothing really like whale watching in Mississippi. However, if you found this article, you were probably looking for information related to whale watching in the state, and we can save you a lot of time by pointing out that your search will, alas, be fruitless.
