The Art of Shrimping

The gear:

- Pots to drop and catch the shrimp.



- Bait to attract the shrimp. We got quite a bit of advice from other shrimpers, most of which was to use food with really oily fishy smells, like tuna cat food or salmon carcasses. We used shrimp pellets and cat food. Friskies!



- Weights to keep the pots from getting carried away in the current. We used plastic coated rebar. 

- 600 feet of leaded (weighted) line per pot. You need 20-30% more line than the depth you are planning on fishing at (so with our 600 ft of line, we could fish at a max of around 450 ft). The current can drag your pot, and if it gets dragged deeper than the amount of line you have, then your buoy will get pulled underwater and you'll lose your pot. The line must be weighted because by law, all line attached to the pot must be below the surface of the water so boats do not run over it.



- Buoys to mark where you dropped your pots. Buoys must be labeled with the shrimper's name, address, and boat license number.



- A GPS, a depth finder, and an underwater terrain mapper and fish finder. Yeah right! We didn't have any of these fancy gadgets. 

- An automatic crank and reels for pulling in the pots and collect the 600 feet of leaded line. Yeah we didn't have this rigging system either. We had our hands though!

- Money... to buy the gear, get a fishing license, a shrimping permit, to launch the boat, and to rent a slip at the marina.

The strategy:

- Deep and steep is the shrimper's mantra. You want to drop the pot in deep, cold water, and have it land on a steep, rocky cliff.

- Shrimp travel in columns. If you attract one, you'll most likely attract the whole bunch of them. If you don't attract just one, you won't get any.

- We learned from local shrimpers that you can drop pots at the base of waterfalls, since the shrimp feed of the nutrients that the waterfalls dump into the ocean.



- Most shrimpers drop lines of pots, but since we only had two pots, we didn't have this luxury. So, we picked two separate waterfalls to drop each pot. We planned to let the pots sit overnight and "soak" for 13 hours. Then we would go pull the pots. Whichever pot had more shrimp would be where we would rebait the pots and drop both of the them back down to let them soak for a few more hours before pulling them and heading back to Fairbanks.

The results:

The first two pots soaked for 13 hours overnight. The next morning I pulled up the first pot. 600 feet of wet, leaded line by hand, with a shrimp-filled pot on the end (hopefully). And our first pot was........ empty :( waa waaaa.



Even though our first pot was empty, all of our bait was gone. My conclusion was that the bait shifted to the corner of the pot, so the shrimp ate it from the outside and didn't have to swim into the pot to get it. I rigged some bait baskets by emptying Coke cans, filling them with shrimp pellets, and then poking holes into the sides of the cans, and then had Nate suspend the Coke cans in the middle of the pot to attract the shrimp inside.



Alana pulled up our second 13-hr soaker pot. And... we had shrimp!! About 14 of them! Whoop! We got spotted shrimp and striped shrimp. The spotted are the largest species in the Passage Canal, so we were pumped about catching these guys. They were as long as my hand! Once you catch shrimp, you have to keep them fresh, but they don't keep well when they are alive, so you immediately need to separate their heads from their tails. You wrap one hand around the head, one around the tail, and then press your finger into the neck to separate the shrimp. Toss the head, put the tail on ice, yum! Breaking the live shrimp in half was kind of crazy though. Ugh I did it with bare hands and really wished I'd had gloves because right when you're separating the head,the tail clinches in your hand! Ah! I almost dropped a few of them because it felt so crazy!



So after our shrimp catching excitement, we rebaited the two pots and dropped them again. We would let them soak for about 4 hours before pulling them up again. During the 4-hour soak, we went back into harbor and had fish and chips and battered shrimp for lunch, then we jumped back out on the boat to cruise around for a few hours.

The weather today was AMAZING! I think we got one of the four days a year that there is no rain. And that wasn't even the best part! Today there were no clouds, no fog, and no wind! Sunshine and blue skies, beautifully calm turquoise ocean water, and clear green mountains with huge glaciers at the tops melting into incredible cascades down into the Passage Canal. It was incredibly picturesque. I love comparing the pictures I took from this day to yesterday's rainy day. The difference is insane! Alana and I just hung out on the top of the boat, took pictures, and enjoyed the sunshine and warmer weather. We even found four sea otters hanging out at the surface of the water, so we cruised around them for a while and got awesome pictures!







So then we went back to pull up our pots! Chip pulled one and got about 15 shrimp, and then Nate pulled the last one (our rigged Coke can one) and got over 20 shrimp! Our best pot! Whoop! 

It was so surprising that our pots that soaked for less time had much more shrimp, and it was fun talking about why that could've happened (placement, bait, time of day, etc.). I'll tell you one thing, shrimping is ADDICTING! There is so much anticipation when pulling up the pots! And when you pull one up and it's full of shrimp, all you want to do is rebait it and drop it down again. And when you pull one up and it's empty, then all you want to do is rebait and try again! Haha I loved the rush of getting shrimp and separating them and then strategizing where to drop the next pot. It's kind of sad though because once you drop all of your pots, then all you can do is wait. I guess that's when we would go fish for more halibut!