Northwest Fishing Reports

Hey all, my friends and I want to try our hands at catching some shrimp but need some tips since we've never done this before.

- The only boat we have is a cheap inflatable two-person raft with oars.
- We bought a good shrimp trap with 200+ feet of leaded line and a yellow buoy.

- From what I understand, for coonstripe we should be dropping our trap at around 150ft, right? Anything shallower than 100ft won't work?
- Should we be looking for areas that have a steep and sharp drop to 100ft? Like an underwater wall area?
- We also want an area with some tidal flow, right?
- Do shrimp usually live in mud bottoms, sand bottoms, etc?

- We were initially thinking of doing Port Gamble Bay because there should be extremely minimal currents and there's very little chance of losing our trap, but the deepest it gets is 65ft, so I'm assuming this won't work? What about Port Gamble for dungeness or red rock crabs?

- Any other help would be greatly appreciated. We're probably going to be staying at Seal Rock campground in Marine Area 12, so no shrimping there so we'll be dropping our trap somewhere else and going crabbing and oystering at Seal Rock at other times.

Most shrimping I do is for spot shrimp, but generally you want a bottom that is more gravel than mud, and good stinky bait!

The most important thing for shrimping is to keep track of the currents. I say currents because sometimes they will not match quite up with the tide books. Always want to make sure you drop pots in and soak during slack current. If its a real big tide day and slack water isn't very long we never even bother to put the pots out. For spot shrimp we never soak the pots longer than 71mins. (not sure how we got to that number but we did!)

As for bottom geography we tend to like to drop a pot on the correct depth line, but we want a decent slope down into deeper waters from that spot.

Hopefully some of this can help with getting some coon stripes, last spot pots of this season we must of had 30 coons in each one as well.