My first shrimp report! Yes, my first one and there is a reason for that, I don’t like shrimping. That said, maybe I can come to change my mind on the whole subject, they are tasty little buggers... We purchased new shrimp pots this year and rigged them to be a bit more user friendly so what the heck, we were going shrimping.

We pulled out of the driveway headed for the State Park launch at Cornet around 6:00 am. Tragically there was a fatality head on collision on the Deception Pass Bridge and WDOT had Highway 20 closed. Not complaining and our heart goes out to the families involved but we were trapped in the backup for hours. It was close to 9:30 before we slid off the trailer and with the later than planned launch, we had to revise our original trip plan.

With the big tide swing we had planned to shrimp the low slack tide at either Partridge Bank or Eastern Bank. Nosing out of Deception Pass on a flood tide confirmed that we had missed our slack tide window so we broke out backup plan number one. We decided to try Lawson Reef and then bail if the tidal current was running too much. After a bit of a cluster-boink we got a pot over the rail and the current just about pulled the Minion buoy under. Gear back on board do we call it a day and head in or shoot for backup plan two?

Backup plan two won and we were on the move. I had studied the charts and found a very promising area outside the popular Waldron Island shrimping grounds. I figured that a flood tide would be broken up by a reef and that we would be able to shrimp even with the running tide. After a very pleasant cruise through the islands we arrived at our chosen spot about noon or so. I metered around a bit and found some likely spots for our first drop. The first pot was set in about 200 feet of water and the second in around 250 feet of water. All was good, the current was cooperating so we set an alarm for an hour later and the wait began. While we were waiting, we motored around and enjoyed watching the porpoises, seals and eagles.

An hour after the first pot was dropped, we pulled it and the pot and came up just short of a limit. Not bad and after rebaiting we set it in about the same area. Pot 2 had 20 shrimp or so, enough to complete the first limit but that was about it. The pot was loaded with small dungeness crab that were munching on the shrimp. We moved that pot to about 300’ and again set an alarm. With our second 2 pot pull of the day, we easily filled our boat limit of 160 shrimp and dumped 100 or so shrimp back over the side.

Our new pots are the 35” weighted Ladner style pots. We were using 400’ of 5/16” leaded rope, our named yellow floats and a LD1 safety float (our Minion float). The bait was nothing special, just a blend of 3-year-old shrimp pellets, The Food Warehouse canned mackerel, both wet and dry seafood cat food and some fish oil. I mixed it up the night before and packed it into the bait jars as we set the pots.

To be honest, we got lucky and just happened to find the shrimp. Lucky or otherwise we established a shrimping routine for our boat. With a few adjustments I just may come around to tolerating this whole shrimping thing! Over all we had a wonderful day on the water, ended up with our limits of spot shrimp and even enjoyed a beer and bowl of ramen at Blakely Island on the way back to Deception Pass.