Beginner Shrimping

A forum for people who are new to commercial fishing and for talking about the fundamental rules and regulations.
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Abundance
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Beginner Shrimping

Post by Abundance »

I've received a number of requests for information on starting out in the Alaskan spot prawn industry. I have been somewhat reluctant. The shrimp fishery is already overcrowded, and somewhat brutal to newcomers. However, many new people are getting into it anyway, and for a very good reason. They cannot support themselves on trolling alone. If they are going to shrimp, they might as well do it right. A shrimper who knows what he is doing will get into less conflict and help make the fishery better for everybody. After considering that a very large number of shrimpers are also trollers, and that almost all the interest in entering shrimping comes from trollers looking for a way to survive after these consistently underperforming seasons, it seemed appropriate to me to address this on this forum. I will try to give what information that I have.
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!
Garrett Hagen, F/V Abundance
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Re: Beginner Shrimping

Post by jgallagher33 »

Thanks for writing this Garrett. Enjoyed the read.
khaos
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Re: Beginner Shrimping

Post by khaos »

Thanks for the great write up!
I love hearing about the details of different fisheries, it's what makes this forum so fun to read and enjoy.
Write a book - I'll buy one!
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Re: Beginner Shrimping

Post by SilverT »

Garrett,

Very thoughtful of your fellow trollers and one of the best posts. May your holds be filled. Many thanks,

Lane
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Re: Beginner Shrimping

Post by West Foreland »

Garrett,
Great writing and info on shrimping. Enjoyed eavesdropping on your radio chat towards the the end of the season at Neets Bay. You've got a great eye and ear for detail and a vast honesty.
Thanks, Patrick McCarthy F/V West Foreland
Abundance
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Re: Beginner Shrimping

Post by Abundance »

Hey, I remember the West Foreland! Next time we bump into each other I will say hello, Patrick. Thanks for all the good feedback everybody. No doubt you were listening to me talk to the old fisherman I mentioned in my write up. I've avoided mentioning his name since he raises a few hackles with his somewhat reckless fishing style, but he is a well of great stories and makes a great friend, so long as you don't fish too close to him. He has to be getting around eighty, and I don't think he sees too well. Just out of curiosity, do we have any other shrimpers on here? Perhaps somebody who knows about shrimping on the West Coast and B.C? I know that I shrimped around a Canadian once, and the way he fished was so different than the locals that he got into a few conflicts. I don't think he meant any harm, but he fished huge strings of tiny little pots. The problem with that being that the Alaskan style is to clog an area with little short strings. We rely on our ability to set strings close together without hitting someone else's gear. His 20-30 pot strings didn't have that kind of leeway, and he would inevitably drop his gear on other peoples and ours at some point. He got yelled at a lot. I do remember thinking that we were being a little harsh on him, but he really should have figured out what was going wrong after a little while. His boat sank the next year, so I don't know if he ever did learn. I know that Canadian and Californian spot prawn permits are downright obscenely expensive, so I doubt that many of us do it, but I am curious.
Garrett Hagen, F/V Abundance
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Re: Beginner Shrimping

Post by khaos »

Garrett - can you do a write up on cod jigging and dinglebar too? Thanks again for the great posts and willingness to share your knowledge.
Abundance
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Re: Beginner Shrimping

Post by Abundance »

I'm afraid that I don't know the first thing a bout cod jigging. I remember dinglebaring with my Dad when I was little tyke, but I don't remember any details. I hear the price of lingcod is going up. It might be worth looking into.
Garrett Hagen, F/V Abundance
khaos
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Re: Beginner Shrimping

Post by khaos »

Garrett,
With halibut reductions everywhere, lingcod prices should keep getting better and better. Personally, I like them better than halibut and can't figure why they aren't worth more. We can scrape up a few up here incidentally while trolling for kings, but in the end they are worth about the same as chums and you have to catch a lot more than the bycatch percentage allows for. Never have tried it, but the directed lingcod fishery should be worth a shot, I figure I could get 300lbs a day on troll gear if I really worked for them, maybe more. How are ling numbers down your way?
Profit margins seem to be shrinking each season, and like most trollers, I'm looking for more ways to stay on the water and get into new fisheries. Dinglebar has always intrigued me, but I wonder if there is really enough money to make it worthwhile. Sometimes I think the same of trolling winter kings.......
Speaking of which, a friend spent two weeks out of Coffman Cove and reported some really impressive kings. He sent me pictures, because I haven't seen October catches like that in a LONG time! He had 3 over 30 last week! Hope you are getting in on some of those, though I thought you said no fishing until November.
I have to ask - what do you do with a 10 foot octopus? The few we have brought in have always stuck to everything they touch and usually get stuck to the side of the boat or under it. Don't get me wrong, it is one of my favorite meals. Can you sell them as bycatch with your shrimp?
Abundance
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Re: Beginner Shrimping

Post by Abundance »

Those winter kings are sure elusive. I also heard of some nice kings in Clarence/Ernest sound area. I doubt they will be hanging around when I get to them. More than likely we will just do some shrimping when the weather is decent this winter. I fear that we are using our nice weather up this month though. It will problably start storming with a vengeance when I head back out. I have seen lingcod hit my troll gear by the dozens or sometimes hundreds by Veta Bay, in the summer. I have a hard time finding them like that in the winter. I also think that lingcod is better than halibut, particularly deep fried. Halibut may be better baked though. We are allowed to keep 35 percent of our weight in octopus while shrimping, but we honestly didn't bother retaining any this year. Its kind of tricky getting the big ones in. You have to see them coming and have the gaff ready. You still won't get most of them.
Garrett Hagen, F/V Abundance
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Re: Beginner Shrimping

Post by JKD »

My shrimp pot hauling experience is very minimal and getting octopus into the boat is always a challenge, but we found that if you wanted to up your score and it was worth your while to keep them - try having a salmon landing net handy to your hauling station. A lot of trollers have a landing net aboard anyway to corral lost gaffs and/or glass balls. If you can get most of the octo into the net, hold it out away from the side of the boat so that even if they get a sucker [or six] stuck to the side or bottom of the boat, you can break that small amount of suction and quickly lift it aboard. We would have a meal or two and saved all the rest for halibut season.
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Re: Beginner Shrimping

Post by khaos »

It's been a long time since I've been to Veta Bay, but the memories are good. Big schools of hungry coho in August, and it certainly was not crowded. Is there still a buyer at Kelly Cove? Don't recall catching any lings, but there was an a lot of enormous black rockfish anytime I got near the pinnacles. Back then they weren't worth anything, even if you could find a buyer in the area, but we kept a few for dinner (they are very fine fresh!) Did you ever find a market for frozen blacks? That would be the place to target them.
The October kings you are getting in Clarence are a lot bigger than the winter blackmouth we get here. Our average seems 10-15, but you have some real slabs down there. No wonder you have so many sharks!
Hope you get a good price for your shrimp, I think AK shrimp are the very best shrimp in the world!
Nice weather lately, but it's a cold wind already...........
Abundance
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Re: Beginner Shrimping

Post by Abundance »

I actually didn't fish Veta Bay this last year, except for a couple of days in March for winter kings. I think that lingcod populations have grown over the past few years with the lack of commercial pressure. There can really be a lot of black rockfish there, even more at Warren Channel. I know a rockfish buyer who ended up just filleting them out for himself. He literally couldn't get any stores to buy them at a profit over shipping. It's a real shame. The local fish plant took them from me for 25 cents a pound a few years back as troll bycatch. They let me know that they really didn't want me to though. Those things are much too good of eating to sell at that price. Its criminal. With the unlimited troll bycatch allowance for midwater rockfish, a guy might be able to freeze a bunch up to sell for shrimp and crab bait, but that would be a real shame. Better than letting them float though. The troll tender hasn't stopped in Kelly Cove for some time. We didn't even have a local tender for most of the summer on western PoW, but we did have the Co-Op tender pass through occasionally. The buyers are promising a good price for frozen shrimp, but they pay us a little at a time so you never know what the final price will be. Its an insult what the fresh buyers pay guys for shrimp tails, I must say.
Garrett Hagen, F/V Abundance
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Re: Beginner Shrimping

Post by khaos »

Rockfish fillets sell for $5-$6/ pound around here, but I've never been paid more than .35 for our bycatch. Not even worth the space, but you are right, it just isn't right to float them to the eagles. I can only eat so many, but I do appreciate those. It's a shame there is so little value for such abundant and delicious seafood. Then again, I suppose that is what has protected them thus far from exploitation. Cannot imagine freezing them as bait, but it might be a better option for you for shrimping.
Buyers are a little more cooperative up here, but I've got my share of bad looks when I bring in multiple totes of various rockfish.
It's really too bad you don't have more options in that area to unload. I'd be there in a heartbeat if there were tenders closer than 4 hours from all the places I liked to fish out there.
As good as Alaska shrimp are, they should go for at least $9/pound, and I'm happy to buy my share at $6 last year from the local fleet. I'm sure you have no problem selling those.
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Re: Beginner Shrimping

Post by Abundance »

I had a post going yesterday, and the internet ate it apparently. We actually have some very good tender service on western PoW, when there is tender service. There wasn't any this year. I think that one of the things that a buyer told me about midwater rockfish is that they have trouble bleeding them properly, and the bottom fillet comes out purple. Both the buyer and I think that was an feeble excuse by the marketers to pay us the minimum possible price. Fresh shrimp tails are sold for about $2 per lb for smalls, and up to $8 for jumbos. Thats the local cannery rates that I heard anyway. We dont know what our FAS price will be yet. I dont think that I would freezze rockfish for bait either. It feels less wastful to get scraps from the cannery.
Garrett Hagen, F/V Abundance
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Re: Beginner Shrimping

Post by khaos »

I suppose that 3-D imagery would be very useful for shrimping. Do you use it, Garrett?
Abundance
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Re: Beginner Shrimping

Post by Abundance »

I don't have the 3-D program, but every time I see an example of it my thoughts go to how useful it would be for shrimping. Shrimp are perhaps even more tied to specific formations of the seafloor than bottomfish are, and are unwilling to travel very far at all to get to the bait. I think that it would be tremendously valuable to the fishery.
Garrett Hagen, F/V Abundance
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Re: Beginner Shrimping

Post by Salty »

On 3D.
Hopefully someone will develop a program that is easy to use, powerful, and relative inexpensive. Some longliner's pay over $60,000 for a program that shows them the bottom contour and the type of bottom. Might be just the thing for crabbing, longlining, and shrimping. Don't see it working out for trolling. The old program I have is unavailable now and the replacement doesn't work for me. So, if this dies, and there will be no future maintenance, I am looking at tens of thousands for a replacement that most likely will not import my data.

And the chums are not biting the old bugs. Arrgh.
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