I just got done with another shrimp season, and I have to say that nothing makes me miss trolling more than that cutthroat business. We were alright for the first week, than a big seiner ran by us, saw our bouys, and decided to set up camp. I wasn't the skipper on this venture, so I was able to watch the proceedings with a slightly more cool eye. first off, the guy followed us around all day trying to figure out our areas and what we were catching. Then he left, or so we thought. when we got up the next morning, we found that every one of our strings had one his laid over it. He illegally set gear all night long just to chase us out. There was miles of water all around for him to go, but he must have figured that we scouted it all out already. We carefully spent the morning disentangling our gear from his, not cutting even one of his pots, just to let him know that we were peaceful. That night he pulled them again and set down a few of our strings. He must have had a bunch of gear that he used only for war purposes, because can't of planned to get it back. The skipper got angry by this point, and was ready to escalate the feud but we convinced him that it wasn't worth it. The other guy must have gotten frustrated with us, and spent the next day just following right behind us, setting his gear over ours once we set it out. He wouldn't respond on the radio or acknowledge our waves as we went by. We were definitely spoiling to fight after this amount of bullying, but we had all seen this play out many times before. The shrimping industry seems to just be full of psychopaths from other fisheries. We knew that once we responded even a little, he would just go crazy and we would get up one morning to find all of our bouys cut. He can't have gotten much sleep, fishing all day and all night like that. We reported his illegal fishing to fish and game, but nothing came of it. Finally he got the message and left us alone, probably because we was losing money with so much gear not being used for fishing. He never let up pressuring us until the day it closed, and did every illegal trick to make another dollar at shrimping that I can think of. It would be one thing if this was an isolated incident, but it happens constantly to everyone. The troll fleet is about ninety percent good guys and ten percent jackasses. The shrimp fleet is about fifty fifty. And most of the bad shrimpers are seiners the rest of the year. The point of all of this, and why its in the stories section, is that as a form of catharsis I would like to see how other people have dealt with bullies out on the grounds. In what satisfying ways have you sent them home sorry for what the have done?
I'll kick it off with a story from when I was first trolling on my own. It was a miserable summer for fishing. I had deck handed for years, but this was my first time on my own boat. It was actually all right for an eighteen year old kid to be not catching, just wandering around and enjoying the freedom to do whatever I wanted. But most people were hungry. I finally found a little hole in Cordova Bay that produced a few fish. it was exciting. I was fishing near the beach, at around twenty fathoms. I found a ten fathom rock in the middle of my drag that wasn't on the charts, but I adapted my drag to go around. A big white boat came steaming by, saw me pull a few fish and decided that was going to take this hole way from me. I didn't really know what was going on for a little bit, but even to a real greenhorn it is obvious when a person fishes belligerently. Finally he ended up right between my floatbags. I went back to my cockpit, pulled my gear, and set it back out to ten fathoms. Then I led him right over top of that hump. Thick black smoke poured out of his stack, and mine too as I pulled out of his way. He left me alone the rest of the day, and I even caught a fish when I went over the hump. Satisfactory indeed.