Every shrimp pot benefits from being weighted, so we present to you, the cheapest way to weight your shrimp pots!
Now, of course, one can always use something they already own or plan to discard, but if you have to purchase something, we want to share our solution to weighting shrimp pots on the cheap.
We just go down to the local Home depot or Lowes and buy your standard masonry bricks for like 2$ / brick.
You also need a masonry drill bit so you can drill a hole in the middle of the brick to run a zip tie through. Use safety glasses/mask and drill out the approximate center of the brick all the way through and you will be ready to zip-tie the bricks to the inside bottom of your pot.
Each brick weighs about 4 lbs, so you can use about 4-5 and be in good shape. We want our pot to weigh about 30 pounds in total.
Compare this to buying the plastic-coated lead weights and holy cow what a cost savings! 60$ for 10 lbs…look everything is more expensive these days so, it’s critical to save cost wherever we can.
I just bought a new Mckay Shrimp Pot of the extreme jumbo variety that I’m excited to use this shrimp season and I will be weighting it with these drilled bricks that I already use on my crab pots.
Why is it so important to weight your shrimp pot?
If your shrimp pot is weighted, it’s less likely to move in heavy current, but additionally there’s another important thing to consider…
Shrimp openers almost always come with massive amounts of boat traffic, right? So…when you have adequate floatation for your pots, but they aren’t weighted, what do you think your float bouncing around on the surface might be doing to your unweighted pot?
If you are shrimping in say 320 ft of water with 400 ft of line, you can almost guarantee that boat wakes are causing your pot to bounce and move around…what do you think that does to shrimp trying to enter your pot?
We don’t have a ton of time to mess around in these 4-hour openers and I don’t know if you are like me, but my goal is to limit early and be back on the ramp before I have to wait behind 20+ other boats trying to get in after the 4-hour window closes…
Weight your pots!
For more tips on catching spot shrimp in Puget Sound, head over to our comprehensive guide to Puget Sound Spot Shrimp here.
