a giant cockroach reef and potential world record

The Mississippi Gulf Coast is about to have a new claim to fame.

A giant cockroach fishing reef. We’re talking a world record-sized cockroach. Go ahead and laugh.

Everybody else did when Greg Cenac and Bruno Milanese, both of Ocean Springs, proposed the idea.

“I didn’t believe them at all,” said Will Ladnier of Biloxi, an expert builder and sinker of artificial fishing reefs. “I thought, there’s no way, there’s no way this is going to happen. It was just fun to laugh about. But these guys didn’t rest. They never slowed down.”

No, they did not. Now Milanese, owner of Bay Pest Control, is confident his application will soon have the cockroach reef in Guiness World Records as the largest cockroach sculpture in the world. The steel cockroach measures 70 feet long, with its antennae, and weighs more than 4 tons.

The roach reef is a project of Mississippi Gulf Fishing Banks Inc., a nonprofit founded in 1969 that has worked with the state Department of Marine Resources to develop 15 offshore fishing reef areas, called fish havens. The cockroach reef will join more than 280 offshore reefs off the Mississippi coastline when it is sunk Monday morning in more than 90 feet of water.

The artificial reefs provide habitat and food that allow fishermen to catch red snapper, grouper and trigger fish. Without the reefs, these fish would hardly be found in the Mississippi Sound because the water bottoms are mostly mud.

The organization expects the reef to attract divers as well as fishermen and hopes it will become a tourist attraction, as have artistic reefs in other states.

“We’ve got our fingers crossed,” said Ralph Humphrey, Gulf Fishing Banks president.

The cockroach is permanently affixed to the deck of a 140-foot tugboat that Ladnier has environmentally prepared for sinking. The cockroach reef drew more than a few curious onlookers while docked for several weeks at Biloxi’s schooner pier on the beach.

Ocean Springs fishermen have an idea

Greg Cenac, a member of the Gulf Fishing Banks board, and Bruno Milanese were talking artificial reefs at a Christmas party they attended about a year ago at the governor’s mansion. Milanese seemed willing to have his company sponsor a reef and Cenac had a tugboat in mind.

The Bay Pest Control name would be included on the tugboat, and visited by scores of divers and fishermen.

But a tugboat? That seemed a little generic to Milanese. Cenac said that he was “a couple of bourbons in” when the idea hit him. Why not put a big cockroach on the boat?

Milanese was onboard. He loved the idea.

“For me to get involved,” he said, “I wanted to make it fun . . . Something that’s going to go down in history: the giant roach reef.” On GPS coordinates, the reef will be identified as “Bay Pest Control Roach Reef.”

Milanese is pretty proud of it. He’s a diver and predicts the reef will become a tourist attraction: “Divers will say, ‘Let’s go down and see the giant cockroach.’ ”

And the roach is impressive. It’s anatomically correct, which was no small feat.

Ladnier said he didn’t get the roach just right until his third try. He worked from an image of a dead, pinned cockroach projected against a wall, then traced it out so the joints, back, head and every part of the roach would be built to scale.

‘We really, really wanted it to look real,” said Ladnier, who at first gave the cockroach idea a 1% chance of actually happening.

Milanese checked the internet to find the biggest cockroach sculpture because he wanted a record. He found a 13-foot long roach sculpture in Adelaide, Australia. Ladnier’s giant roach far exceeds the Australian roach’s size.

‘I’m a person who can’t do things a little bit,” Ladnier said. “I couldn’t stop. It just got bigger and bigger. So, we’re blowing away the world record. I don’t think anyone will beat it for a long time and there’s not anybody out there building giant cockroaches, anyway, so I think I’m pretty safe.”

Reefs attract snapper, other fish

Mississippi’s artificial reefs are generally no laughing matter to Ladnier. The fisheries are suffering, he said, from pollution, flooding and overfishing. Reefs help.

“Every time you create one of these reefs,” he said, “it’s like creating a thousand-acre garden that you never have to till, you never have to fertilize. And it will last, easily, for 50 years.”

Travis Williams, director of the artificial reef program at the Department of Marine Resources, said the reef deployment will cost about $120,000, with funding from offshore oil and gas leases in the Gulf. Milanese didn’t want to say how much he spent of the roach (trade secret).

Ladnier was just 2 years old when his father set the anchors for some of Mississippi’s first offshore reefs, Liberty ships sunk in the early 1970s. The ships still sit on water bottoms south of Horn Island.

The roach reef is being sunk due south of Pascagoula. It will be about 15 miles south of Petit Bois Island in the Gulf of Mexico, said Travis Williams, director of the artificial reef program at the Department of Marine Resources.

The fish haven where it will be located covers 8,000 acres, he said, and extends from state into federal waters. The roach has to be planted at a depth that leaves clearance for boat and ship navigation. Mississippi Gulf Fishing Banks has permits for its reefs from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Building an artificial reef is tricky. Physics are involved, said Ladnier, who has built hundreds since he started the work in the 1990s.

To properly sink a boat, the volume of water rushing in and air forced out must be controlled. For instance, he’s covered the windows on the fourth level of the roach’s tugboat so that it’s more likely to stay upright once sunk. The sinking of a boat, he said, is violent.

He will be on the boat when it’s sunk and jump off at the last minute. He insists this is not dangerous.

Ladnier, Cenac and Milanese were at the schooner pier Thursday, showing off the roach reef.

“There will be tons of fishermen enjoying this roach down there,” Milanese marveled.

A hundred years from now, Cenac said, someone will come across the roach reef and it will be like the discovering the Pharaohs from ancient Egypt.

Except the adventurer who discovers the reef will be saying, “They had this cockroach . . . “