Shrimping in the Strait of Juan de Fuca out of Sequim Bay in June 2019 produced mixed results and some good lessons on bait and locations.
We were up in the Sequim Port Angeles area looking for potential vacation properties, and staying in one of the John Wayne Waterfront Resort cabins. Apparently, the John Wayne family still owns and operates the resort, which offers plenty of camping, RV spots, and cabins for rent.
So while we were up there, it only made sense to get out and do some shrimping!
One of the most important considerations whenever you are heading out in the Strait of Juan de Fuca is to consider the weather conditions.
The Strait is big water. It’s directly connected to the Pacific Ocean, and when you get a strong west wind or even north wind, you can have some seriously dangerous conditions for mariners.
Keep an eye on any town which borders the Strait’s weather situation and you will see a constant stream of small craft advisories and gale watches.
You can check out our introduction to harvesting Spot Shrimp for a primer on the topic, and also information about the 2019 spot shrimp season. Attempting to Shrimp on a Thursday, Friday or Saturday means very early mornings for the best shrimping tides, which can be exhausting to do multiple days in a row.
I guess it’s just training my body for the 4 am wake-ups all July long when salmon fishing gets going!
The first early morning we got out there, we were the 2nd boat leaving Sequim Bay and we headed north to an area which looked good from an underwater topography perspective. As noted in the section on locations in the Puget Sound Spot Shrimp page, Shrimp are current-sensitive and like areas that offer some shelter from the main current.
The above image is from the Navionics app, which is a great aid in planning shrimping trips. I had never shrimped this area, but the fish (shrimp?) checker later confirmed this is a good location for getting limits without venturing too far into the Strait.
Even though the wind was not blowing too bad that morning, the Strait was coming off of an earlier gale warning, and so venturing much beyond the more protected areas just north of Sequim Bay resulted in being in some seriously big stirred up water.
The first major issue we had on this trip was that our bait was too runny. When it comes to shrimp bait, you want to have about half of your bait still left in the canister after you pull your pots. Too much bait left means you probably didn’t milk out enough bait to draw them into the pot, too little and it means that the shrimp likely entered your pot and then immediately left as the bait ran out. We were suffering from the latter condition on the first day of the trip.
When shrimping the Strait or the San Juan’s, you really need a more viscus bait mix because of the greater currents and water movement that can occur vs shrimping hood canal or other interior puget sound locations.
From this trip, I’ve now added “extra bait” to my pre-trip checklist so that I can adjust my mix on the fly in the event that I don’t like how it’s fishing. It’s pretty frustrating to be out there, and on some shrimp, but dealing with underperforming bait and not having the ability to correct it.
The following day we got out there and faced excellent flat calm waters and we did much better as I added more prawn pellets to my bait mix to improve the viscosity. We shrimped a new spot a few miles ESE of where we were the day before and found some shrimp concentrated in one location, but generally, we were grinding it out to get our limits.
The ridge running west to east in the middle of the chart has some shrimp, as does the ridge running south to north, with further north yielding better results.
Even though we had some struggles on this trip, we still wanted to publish how we did and what we learned. It’s one thing to always write about the great days on the water and big catches, but sometimes you learn more from the tougher days and failures.
As long as you learn from them and ensure you don’t make the same mistake multiple times, you will get increasingly better at whatever you aim to succeed at. At PNWBestLife, we wanted to publish as much about the experience, including the learning process versus just sharing expert advice.
If you wait to become an expert at everything before sharing, you may miss an opportunity to share about a mistake someone else may learn from that you will have forgotten about by the time you arrive at expert status.
In summary, we had an outstanding time on the water, got some tasty shrimp, and we look forward to coming back here soon.
Especially when the Salmon seasons open up on July 1st and we are hearing crab may open on July 4th. Last year, the shrimp quota in Area 6 hadn’t been reached until several days into July, so we actually had days where we salmon fished, crabbed, and shrimped on the same day!