If you have been used to catching your limit of spot shrimp in depths of 250+ in recent years, then 2022 has been a serious curve ball.
We typically shrimp in Hood Canal and we have a spot we hit where we routinely pull up 100+ shrimp per pot in 45-60 minute soaks. So on the first mid-week opener in May when we were pulling up 20-40 shrimp per pot in the exact same spot, it was a bit of a head scratcher.
Shrimping is an event for my friends and family, and I always try to fill my boat with 6 people and see how fast I can limit. Usually, in previous years, we’ve been the first 6-person limit back to the launch on each opener.
I’m a pretty competitive person, but I usually try to tone it down a bit when it comes to recreational harvest activities, but for some reason, shrimping really brings it out of me.
If you’ve been shrimping long enough you will eventually be tossed a curve ball where your normal shrimping spot won’t produce as much per pot. In these 4-hour openers, you have a major decision to make after that first pot comes up under expectation…
Do you move or do you stay and grind it out?
This is the classic fishing conundrum…when you are having some success, but not what you believe you could experience. It’s why you get these old adages like “Don’t leave fish to find fish” and “Stick and stay and make ’em pay”.
I would say more often than not, the stay-and-grind-it-out approach is the right decision, but sometimes, you just have to move and try your luck somewhere else. For those who did that on the first opener and moved their pots shallower, they quickly unlocked the 2022 spot shrimping secret…the shrimp were in depths as shallow as 150’ and in great abundance from 150-200 ft.
Moving your shrimping operation in a 4-hour operation can become a real pain. There’s a serious rhythm to shrimping that if done right, lets each pot soak for an optimal amount of time and gives you a small break between checking and re-dropping your 4th pot and starting the process over at pot #1.
Moving the whole operation may require putting multiple pots back on the deck, and getting on your main (motor) to find your next spot. Additionally, unless you have a really good idea of a plan B, you’re likely going to have to spend (waste?) sometime looking for the shrimp on your sonar and working around other people’s pots.
It’s far easier to move depths and really this should be tried first before wholesale moving to a new location you hadn’t scouted ahead of time.
The hood canal shrimp opener on June 9th, 2022 was special in that I decided to move spots slightly compared to my usual location and target the depths of 150-200. I had 6 people on my boat so we needed 480 shrimp. You don’t get 480 shrimp in 4 hours by pulling up pots of 20-40, so we needed to score big.
So when my first pot in the new location came up dry, I immediately felt it in my stomach “This was going to be a long day”. Let’s not even dwell on the fact that the ridiculous atmospheric river was bearing down on us, providing ample wind and soaking rain to keep things suitably miserable.
I made the decision to move locations immediately and we started to stack pots and run up north to another new spot we had a tip about from the previous opener. On the way though I was passing by my previous sweet spot, and I said, “You know what I’m just gonna drop one of the pots there in about 200 ft of water and see what happens.”
Fast forward a bit and all the pots had been set again. I asked my scorekeeper (someone who notes times, pot#’s, and counts while shrimping) about that pot we dropped in my old sweet spot: “How long had it been soaking?”
“About an hour” was the reply, so we headed over to check it.
And wouldn’t you know, but 120 shrimp came over the deck in that pot!
We quickly scrambled to get it back down in the exact same location and ran over to pull pots in the new new spot which was slightly north and those only yielded 30-40 shrimp per pot, so we again made a major move to the 200-220 depth range of my old honey hole.
Could we pull off 2 major pot moves and still limit 6 people in a 4-hour opener?
We were seriously up against the clock now, with only just under 3 limits on the boat, needing 3+ more limits to fill the boat.
We could only get 3 more pots down to soak for about 45-60 minutes before we would run up against the 1 pm stoppage.
It drives me nuts to not limit out the boat, but it also annoys me to shrimp all the way to 1 pm…It’s a massive turd domino effect. Your wait to get back on the trailer elongates from a few minutes to an hour plus sometimes (depending on where you launched). You are also now guaranteed to hit traffic on the way back towards Pugetropolis.
We started pulling those final 3 pots and the numbers were fantastic, pulling up more than a limit in each pull, we finally hit 489 shrimp with the last pot pull at 12:57! I let out a triumphant yell as the count came in.
Screw my pride about being the first 6-person limit back to the dock, I was just excited to limit the boat in these challenging if not somewhat self-induced conditions while working non-stop for the past 4 hours.
Here’s a big fat lessons learned though…It would have been far easier to just move slightly shallower in my usual spot, then over thinking it and starting some place new.
Also, I really need to study my old pics of spot shrimp on the sonar JUST before a shrimping trip, as I have this bad habit of forgetting what spot shrimp on the sonar look like, getting faked out by some other shrimpy-looking fuzz until I see the real thing and then I go “Oh yeah, that’s definitely shrimp there” to the eye roll of my family who heard me say that about the stuff that wasn’t spot shrimp just an hour ago.
Where will the spot shrimp be on 6/23? I would bet they will be at similar depths, but I’m gonna go back to my tried and true spot and figure it out. For more about spot-shrimping techniques, gear, and strategies, check out the dedicated page on the topic here.
See you back at the dock at 11:30 this time 😛