Abundance
2012-10-17 07:52:53
First, a person needs to consider gear. It is no simple matter to get all of the gear that you need. For a beginner, it would be best to buy out somebodies old pots and buoys at a steep discount. You may have 140 small (bottom diameter of 124 inches)pots, or 100 large (153 inch) pots. Both sizes have their advantages. The large pots will catch more shrimp per pot, and will be easier for a small crew to work multiple times a day. However, they will only catch more if there are a lot of shrimp. An important thing to understand, and I will repeat later, is that shrimp will only crowd so tightly, and no more. They will also sink faster and not get carried away by the tide as far, which can be a real problem with the small pots.
The small pots are the ones that I have the most experience with. They are lighter and easier to handle, and will usually catch on par with the large ones after a few days fishing has thinned the population. With the extra forty pots, a boat fishing them can easily surpass a boat fishing the big ones at the end of a season. I've observed that boats fishing big pots do better moving around frequently and pulling once a day, to allow shrimp to accumulate and make use of the extra space.
Another issue is whether to go with the featherweight stainless steel pots or the bulky rubber coated Ladner pots. We tend to go fifty-fifty on our boat. The stainless steel ones are a breeze to work with, and a small boat can carry a full load of them without getting overloaded, but they can drift for thousands of feet in the tide or get bounced into the deep by tide chops or swells. The much heavier Ladner pots will sink to the bottom much more reliably. They both fish the same. Ladner pots perhaps a fraction better, likely because of their tendency to land where you want them.
After pots, you would want to get buoys. Bright red, big inflatable buoys would be the best choice. The extra buoyancy of the large buoys will help if your gear gets into deep water. Several times I have gotten ahold of lost gear, the buoy still attached and popped by water pressure. A bigger buoy would have held the two or three pots that were likely pulling them down. Red is the most visible color, which is important, both for your own ability to find strings, and to establish your territory. More on that later. Of course, buoys are very expensive, and a beginning shrimper would likely use whatever gear that the permit holder that their buying out had lying around.
It would be best to buy brand new lines. Old lines tend to get weak and frayed, not always visibly. They would be the cheapest part of the setup to buy new, and most important. Buoys last for many years, and pots will fish until the mesh rots off. Having a line snap on you with thousands of dollars of gear on it will really wreck your day.
Pots are required to have a slit the length of a dollar bill cut in the mesh and sewn back together with biodegradable twine. It’s a surprisingly easy thing to forget, but not something that you want to get caught for. After the cuts are made, you have to redo the bio’s every year before you put them back out, or else you are going to be practicing catch and release without intending to.
After you have the basic gear, you have to get the pots out and fishing. When choosing an area to fish, a person should go somewhere that they are familiar with. You should know the anchorages, the general layout of the bottom, perhaps have sport shrimped there already to have an idea of their location. The weather in the autumn and winter can be spontaneous and sever. Bring shorelines, and be ready to use them. Winds of over a hundred knots can be weekly occurrences come December through March. You will not have the ability to run around and find new area in the middle of the season. An opening may be only a week or two. A single day wasted because of surprise weather or searching for a good shrimp patch can mean a significant difference in how well you do in a season. However, if you are reading this for making future plans, than you are likely to be the newest fisherman in the area. The spots considered to be the best will likely be taken by people who have shrimped for decades.
Finding your own spot is not actually that hard. Shrimp aren't everywhere, but they are everywhere. Look for hard or rocky bottom, about 35 to 60 fathoms deep. That is the standard. I've caught spots in above 20 fathoms, and below 100. They are quite often in the mud, but almost never in steep rocks. I've seen them around my boat in five fathom anchorages. I've heard stories about people catching loads of them big enough to cradle in your arms like a puppy down in 200+ fathoms. I don’t really believe it, but you could prove me wrong. There are many places to check out. Start from a safe, familiar place and work out from there. We generally have about fifteen or twenty pots that we keep moving around in new areas each day, looking for a new bonanza. It happens sometimes, and we have a brand new spot to fish.
Shrimp are far more complex creatures than you might think. They follow patterns and dictates not yet understood by science or fishermen. They travel and migrate. Sometimes there here, sometimes they’re there, often within days. On strong tides, they seem to not move until slack, except when they do. The best thing to do is drop the gear in a likely spot and hope for the best. There is rarely nothing, except when there is nothing. That’s fishing. Shrimp abundance appears to be on the upswing, either due to better management or natural population cycles, or some combination thereof. I still saw some absolute water hauls this last trip. It happens.
By law you can have only up to five pots on one buoy line, but can have as many as you want with two buoy lines. Which one is better depends on how you want to fish. A person can get fish fourteen ten pot strings a lot faster than he can twenty eight five potters. We tend to split the pots into ten or more potters for fishing long trenches and flats, smaller one buoy strings for fishing in little humps and bumps. We fish mostly on humps and bumps. Five potters will catch more shrimp per pot, but you will be able to pull fewer pots at the end of the day because of time spent running from string to string. It’s your call.
As for bait, you do have some variety available. You can run “hanging bait”, usually chunks of salmon or bottomfish, or bait jars, or both. You really cannot overdo it on bait. The more food there is available in a shrimp pot, the more shrimp will come in and stay in. A bait jar has only room for a few shrimp to feed on it, so only a few shrimp will bother staying in the pot after a few frustrating hours. Pots are not traps, as the shrimp can come and go at will. If the bait is eaten too quickly, the shrimp will leave before you can get the gear back up. Bait jars work the best for soft, easily eaten food like herring or sardines. Exposed bait will bring more shrimp in fast than a bait jar, but a bait jar will hold some shrimp in the pot longer. A herring left exposed will be eaten before a few hours have passed. Mixing fish oil and fish meal pellets works well in bait jars, but has gotten expensive enough that we couldn’t even get any this year. The fish plants should have frozen salmon that they will be willing to sell back to you. I think that I recognized some of those chums and pinks. You will also catch a number of small cod and assorted sculpins and greenlings in your pots. Not only do pacific cod taste good slow baked in garlic butter, but shrimp like them even better raw.
When you do have an area that you want to fish, be sure to spread the gear around pretty evenly, leaving as few gaps as you can. This is where your big, obnoxiously loud colored buoys come into play. Mark your territory, and hold it. Don’t be aggressive, going in close to somebody else; just make a show of ownership. This will make things easier for you, and the other shrimpers. Good fences make good neighbors, as Robert Frost said.
It is important for you to realize early on to that many shrimpers are not nice people. The season is too brief and intense for any kind of community spirit to develop. Shrimping is a sideline business for people of all different fisheries. Trollers, seiners, gillnetters, crabbers, they all jump into the frenzy of trying to make as much money as they can in a few weeks. Many shrimpers that fish within sight of each other every year have never talked, and never want too. They just want the other guy gone so they can get his spot. This is wrong. One thing that I hope an influx of trollers in the industry would do is reduce the paranoia and cutthroat activities that I have seen so far. A sense of responsibility and ethics would be nice. If somebody tries to force you out, try talking to him. Be nice, be reasonable. The other guy might not even know any other way of fishing, particularly if he’s not troller. Many of you probably read a post I made last year ranting about an idiot bully out on the shrimp grounds. This year, he tried it again. This time, we pulled up alongside him and talked. He seemed nervous, for good reason. Most people he had met in his career were probably just as aggressive as he was, and I have a hard time imagining that another one him not trying to thump his brains out. It was hard enough for me not to want to. But we were warm and friendly. We said nothing bad about his activities, just letting him know what our plans were and where we had our gear. He didn’t just go away, but he did lose his fire. Eventually, he did move out. Even though he pulled his gear out of our place at night illegally, we were glad to see that our talking face to face pulled it off.
This really is the point here. We trollers go fishing because we love to fish. I hope I didn’t scare you too much. Shrimping can be a lot of fun. You can only fish from 8 am to 4 pm, so the workdays are brief, if hectic. Enjoy the experience and exploration that it offers. Ever seen a ten foot octopus? Ever eaten a wolf eel? A scaly lithodid crab? They are obscure relations to the king crab, and taste like it. You will see varieties of starfish and snails that you would never know existed. Seashells of exquisite beauty, fan corals as big as a man, barrel sponges, all sorts of sights to see. Southeast Alaska in the wintertime is a beautiful, stark, wonderful, volatile, terrifying and endlessly adventuresome time. Those places that still have quota left when shrimping ends at the end of February are truly lonely places. A person may go for months without seeing another person. There are seven hours of daylight, seventeen hours of darkness. When the wind isn’t blowing so hard you think the world is going to rip itself apart, the incredible silence and stillness is truly shocking. That time of year, wolves wander the beaches openly, bears are sleeping away in their dens, and the deer are poking around on the beach, eating twigs and kelp to get through the winter. North of Prince of Wales Island, across Sumner Straits, the temperature takes a steep drop. The snow starts to get deep, and goes from sea level thousands and thousands of feet to the top, white as a sheet and silent as a grave. The birds and tourists have gone south, what few ever come there. It’s a time that few summer fishermen ever get to see, much less understand.
Finally, continuing with this in mind we are fishermen. We aren't going to get rich. I know a very old fisherman. He’s fished every piece of water from Panama to Nome. He’s seined, trolled, gillnetted, longlined and jigged every kind of fish that somebody would buy. He has had multi-million dollar seasons. He says that he never has had a year that he didn't wish that things had gone better. If you’re fishing for money, than you’re never going to have enough. I've seen $ 100k come into the boat in a couple of weeks shrimping, and I've seen months go by wondering if this was the trip where we were going to finally make our fuel expenses. There is nothing even close to guarantee that you will make back your investment. If you get into it, don’t count on it making your season. Just try to enjoy it. It’s not really worth doing if you don’t.
I hope that answers most of the questions that people have for me. I will be happy to try to answer any others that you can think of. Good fishing!