Shrimping Report

[Bear]

This is more of an equipment report than a shrimping report.

Unfortunately my work schedule did not allow me to get out shrimping this season. However, my pot and puller went with my friends Murray and Nancy a couple of times including yesterday.

A couple of years ago I bought a garage sale shrimp pot for 10 bucks. It’s the standard vinyl covered, welded wire, square pot with 4 cone type openings. It was weighted and had a bait holder and a bridal. I never used it so I stripped the goodies off of it for crabbing and hung it in the garage. Murray mentioned he was short pots so I gave him that one and lent him my Ace Line Hauler “Brutus”. Brutus works excellent for crabbing and I have been very pleased with the performance and I really like the portability.

Murray also purchased a new octagon pot with the new style wide rectangle ramps. In side by side tests, with identical bait and bait holders, the octagon pot with rectangle ramp openings outperformed the old cone type pot by a huge margin. Thanks to Tobeck's secret bait recipe they did manage to limit pretty easily and the old pot did catch some shrimp but the difference in performance is substantial. On the first pull with an hour soak they had over 100 shrimp in the new pot and less than 30 in the old pot. In a second pull, with a 30 minute soak, they high graded the shrimp in new pot to get down to their limit and the old pot had only 5 shrimp.

About Brutus… shoulder surgery gave me the excuse I needed to purchase a new electric puller and we used the 2010 model Ace Line Hauler all of last season for crabbing in 75-130’ of water and it performed very well even on the rare occasion when we plugged a pot. According to Murray, Brutus worked adequate for the shrimp but left a trail of escapees because the line speed wasn’t fast enough to pin them to the floor of the pot even with Murray assisting with the load. I guess it’s a tradeoff I still really like the Ace even with the slow speed retrieve and the shrimp were mighty tasty.

[Salmonhawk]

Glad to hear you got some shrimp Bear, glad to hear my recipe advice worked as well. It's funny when comparing the pots like that. I went twice with Nelly and the first time I fished my pots similar to the one you described and Nelly brought his big octagon pots. Both fished well but mine did better so of course I made sure to let Nelly hear about it since he made some remarks about mine earlier. Next time he brought only his pots, and his that were like the ones I brought and the one you described barely got anything. Funny thing but does it have to do with pot design, pot placement, or something else goin on with the pot? I hear the pots have to be seasoned, they could also have something on them that could repel the shrimp. Anhyone else have any ideas on this?