The building of commercial vessels is very much a boom and bust business. Those of you that have been around for a while remembers the oil and gas boom days of the late 1970's and the bust that followed in the 1980's. Most of the southern shipyards did not actually recover from those dog days until the late 1980's when passenger vessel owners started ordering excursion/dinner boats in significant numbers. Typically these vessels had two or even three enclosed passenger decks with passenger capacities in the 450-600 range. Following on this mini-boom was the emergence of the gaming boat, actually an excursion boat with slot machines.