Setting Your Crab Gear Up For Success! 4
One of the most underrated aspects of life in the Great Northwest is harvesting and enjoying Dungeness crab with friends and family. This wonderful tasty privilege comes with a responsibility to fish your crab pots in a way that prevents gear loss and a wastage of this valuable aquatic resource. Many pots that folks assume is “stolen” are really just under-weighted pots that merely drift away when a high tide lifts the floats. The currents in our tidal bodies of water are quite strong and if your crab gear is not right where you left it, its quite often simply lost crab gear that keeps fishing until the required cotton rot cord latch rots and the pot opens up.
That said, here’s one way to set your gear up for successful crabbing and make sure it’s right where you put it when you return to pick it and bring the crab home for dinner!
Let’s start with the “raw materials” namely an SMI three entry tunnel pot with built in bait tube, floats, 100′ of leaded line and a 12 pound downrigger ball.
Why a downrigger ball and what do you do with it? Great question! Most if not all sport pots are intended to have weight added to fish effectively. Simply zip-tie the ball to the center of the pot and you’re in business!
Now it’s time to make your “bomb-proof” line attachment to the pot. I start with a strong edge where the pot mesh is double strength and throw a clove hitch.
Lock the clove hitch with the “boater’s friend” aka the bowline…
…and lock the bowline with the “Yosomite finish” which is simply tucking the tail of the bowline around the loop and back along the main line.
Add your combination of floats (I use the required red and white and add a second float to allow quick identification) Marked one float with the length of line and finish with a bowline end loop. Store the whole works inside the pot and you’re set!
Every afternoon in Puget Sound should look like this!
And every evening dinner should look like this!
We have a wonderful crabbing opportunity and resource and it’s up to us to fish responsibly and not lose our crab gear to minimize waste. Keep a copy of the WDFW fishing regs in your boat, measure and record each keeper and you will not end up in an episode of Nat Geo’s Rugged Justice!!
Tom Nelson
The Outdoor Line
710 ESPN Seattle
www.theoutdoorline.com
Old weights from exercise equipment are great to use for weighing down your pots. You can pick them up cheap used at garage sales or thrift shops. Much cheaper than a downriver ball.
Thanks for the tips Tom! I'm going to give the down rigger ball idea a try. I have had pots move around when using bricks in high current situations. It's my opinion that the flat surface on a brick acts like a sail. There's no substitute for lead and the round shape of and down rigger ball has me intrigued. Twelve pounders are around $26 at Sportco, money well spent for piece of mind. I set then fish and don't want to babysit my pots. Never lost a pot yet "knocking on wood" but have seen dozens of others running away with currents in the south Sound. Great info!
A better tip than a $40 lead downrigger ball would be to know what the tides are doing when you drop your pot and use your depth sounder to determine how deep your gear will be set at. Droing pots where the current is ripping is already a mistake unless you're targeting red rocks. Need extra weight in your pot? Grab a brick. Need more weight? Grab a $4 bag of cement from the hardware store, a 2 liter and make your own weights using the 2 liter as a mold. Dropping a $40 downrigger ball with your pots is not a good tip at all IMO. It would be great to fish for king salmon, tell the wdfw to cut commercial quotas so we can have a season in area 10 and next year. What have our fishery managers done for us sporties lately?
Hey G, Knowing the tides and currents is no substitute for fishing adequately weighted pots. I often fish my crab gear overnight and having those pots weighted -however you choose to weight them- is one very important step to doing just that! Now, the A10 debacle? That's another subject altogether!!