The Sweet Olive is leaving City Front.

Mississippi River Tours Co-owner and tour guide Jim Jones, who operated the business with his wife, Ann, said they have closed the business after nine years and are putting the tour boat up for sale. He said they are making plans to move the boat from its mooring at City Front to an undetermined location.

“We’re letting everyone know that we are closing down and to thank them for their business and for referring people to us,” he said.

The boat, which carried up to 40 people, usually traveled south from the Yazoo Diversion Canal into the Mississippi River and turned around south of the Interstate 20 and U.S. 80 bridges.

The departure leaves a void for residents and tourists who want to get a closer look at the Mississippi.

“We’re sorry to see the Sweet Olive leave the river,” Vicksburg Convention and Visitors Bureau Executive Director Bill Seratt said. “Our tourism strategy is to connect the Vicksburg National Military Park with the river, and now the public has no access to the river.”

Seratt said he has received a call from someone interested in buying the Sweet Olive and continuing the tours, but would not give a name.

Jones gave several reasons for the decision to leave, citing the economy, river conditions and stricter U.S. Coast Guard regulations as the main influences.

“Business has been so slow,” he said. “It started dropping when the economy changed in the last four years. We were hoping to continue into the fall and have the school tours, but we decided not to. We felt it was time to wrap it up.”

He said the 2011 spring flood, when the Mississippi River reached record heights in Vicksburg, cresting on May 19 at 57.1, 14.1 feet above flood stage and nine-tenths of a foot above the great flood of 1927, the Sweet Olive was forced to shut down for the spring and much of the summer.

“Now the water’s low, and the media is telling people the Mississippi’s drying up,” he said.

Mississippi River Tours began in 2003, Jones said, adding, “It was my father’s (Jimmy Jones Sr.) idea.”

The tours were conducted in the summer, spring and fall from the City Front. One of the business’s mainstays was school tours.

“We did school tours for seven or eight years,” he said. “We had a contract with the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, and we had schoolchildren in grades three to 12 come from schools all over the state to take the tours.”

“We’ve operated the tours for nine years,” he said. “We felt it was time to move on.”