WILD BLOG: Last-minute advice for your Puget Sound Saturday shrimp opener
POSTED April 3o, 2010 / 6:10 p.m.

SEATTLE - Don't blink or you'll miss the 2010 Puget Sound shrimp opener! On the eve of the May 1 shrimp season, here's some last-minute advice from some of our Wild Country shrimp pimps:

The Goo
Darren Largent at Auburn Sports & Marine calls it “Shrimp Poop”: the goopy bait glop that brings shrimp to the pot in swarms. Yes, you can use cat food. And, yes, you can use old fish carcasses. Hell, I know people who swear by mashed vegetables.

Forget about all that. This is the shizzle. Here’s the basic recipe:

• 5-gallon bucket with a lid
• 3 6-pound bags of Super Bait Prawn Bait pellets
• 3 quart jars of Siberian feeder eggs (or several jars of Pautzke eggs and/or Nectar)
• ½ gallon of Pro-Cure Crab & Shrimp Oil
• Frozen, ground mackerel
• ½ quart WD-40

1. Run bait pellets through a blender or food processor – don’t let the wife catch you – until ground.

2. Combine all ingredients into a 5-gallon bucket.

3. Stir, stir, stir. “You want a bait that’s about the consistency of pancake batter, so it bleeds out of the bait cages,” Largent says.

Load up with lead
You have big tides tomorrow morning, swinging from a high of around 10 ½ at 6:30 a.m. to a 2-foot minus tide between 1:30 and 2 p.m. With that much tidal movement, heed this advice closely: L-O-A-D U-P with lead.

“I have 20 pounds in each of my pots,” says shimp Yoda Tom Pollack of Sportco. “With 12 feet of water exchange, it’s going to get hot and heavy. Once I put ‘em down, I’m not going to wander too far from my pots.”

Buoys, "Deadliest Catch" style
That much water movement calls for what Pollack refers to as “Deadliest Catch” buoy backups. In addition to the required buoys for each pot, Pollack runs a 12-foot tether to a set of spare buoys, just in case his regular buoys get sucked under.

“You know in ‘Deadliest Catch’, when they dump the pots and the buoys go under? It’s just like that,” Pollack says. “If you have some old crab buoys (for the tether), so be it. You can use boat bumpers, too. Anything to get that extra lift. I saw multiple buoys sucked under last year because of a lack of floatation.”

-JS

Copyright © 2010, Northwest Wild Country Radio Network, All Rights Reserved