Prawn Star
Active Member
Does anyone know why sometimes you only get female crabs in a trap? Also, when prawning does your sonar detect prawns? Do you get a different bottom colour reading?
Does anyone know why sometimes you only get female crabs in a trap?
Are you allowed to leave crab traps overnight ?I'm sure read somewhere that your not allowed or in certain areas , I leave mine out for a hour or two and do pretty well but I get away from the crowd and find the bigger ones I won't keep any crab that's under 7 not much meat on the barley legal ones .
http://www.pac.dfo-mpo.gc.ca/fm-gp/rec/tidal-maree/a-s28-eng.html#28-6-7-9-11-12I read it a couple months back it said it was closed for overnight crabbing in the harbour so basically Point Atkinson to Point Grey and the from Point Grey to The green bell at the south arm . Also a little bit in the Howe Sound Area to.
I read it a couple months back it said it was closed for overnight crabbing in the harbour so basically Point Atkinson to Point Grey and the from Point Grey to The green bell at the south arm . Also a little bit in the Howe Sound Area to.
This is likely because sometime in the last year, they busted poachers who were hauling out females during the night by the bucketload from Sooke harbour. There might be lots of males now, but likely next year, there will be a drop in the overall population.Simply because the males get taken and the females don't and the commercial fleet has a huge impact on the distribution of males. That said, we crabbed in in Sooke basin end of July, beginning August and experienced a bit of an anomaly in that 90% of the crabs in the pot were male even though the commercial boats were in operation. Meanwhile back in Caddy bay, it was the usual 90% female.
This is likely because sometime in the last year, they busted poachers who were hauling out females during the night by the bucketload from Sooke harbour. There might be lots of males now, but likely next year, there will be a drop in the overall population.
Prawn Star.
View attachment 35561
This is the trap we pulled yesterday on the way in from Ho fishing. 18 legal keepers to 7 and a quarter inches. Needless to say we released most of them but kept a few of the larger hard shells. Don’t think there were any females, but a few undersized males that were too big to escape out the escape holes.
I use to have a trap like yours. Essentially a small light weight all stainless copy of the large commercial traps. Bought it new with rope and float etc for around $150. It never fished near as well as the larger true commie traps. Further the smaller trap was subject to the crab thieves far more than my current traps which in two years have not been touched. Once they unscrewed the zinc and stole it and then on the last day before we were going to remove the smaller trap and pull the boat for the winter, they stole the trap.
We picked up some large well used commercial traps for $40.00 each and a thousand feet of lightly used lead core commercial rope for $20.00. So far the thieves don’t seem to be interested in these traps, to big, too heavy, too much work to pull, dirty, tend to damage the gelcoat, harder to transport, harder to sell and not worth much. We leave them heavy and don’t cut out the heavy rusty rods on the bottom as some sport guys do to make them lighter/easier to pull and handle. The thieves seem to be more attracted to the easy, light, low hanging fruit traps in shallower water. Not to mention we place both our traps where we can and do watch them from shore and some of us know each other at the marina and keep an eye on each others traps. Keep the camera handy. It helps to keep your float set up large and unique so that it does not blend into the mass of sport and commercial trap floats and is easy to identify from a distance. Far safer for the thieves to pull a trap float set up that looks like many others.
As for gate escape, it is far less of an issue on the large commercial traps as the strong stainless tines close down into a bracket that does not allow the crabs to push them side ways. I have had a gate jammed open once, tines bent on rare occasion and twice have had a tine (not sure what to call the thick stainless wires on the gate) broken off. Possibly Otters could have been involved since at the time the trap was placed off an Otter colony beach. The cheap square traps, tend to let crabs escape out the corner edges of the trap as well as the gates.
What does happen is that if left for a while the big males some times will start to cut through the stainless wire of the trap body, usually around one of the escape rings and can eventually make a hole big enough for the crabs to escape on the outside of the escape ring. I think they get part way out the escape hole and then try to make it bigger when they can’t get through it. For animals with a tiny brain, operating on instinct they are rather smart. In season we make temp. repairs with zap straps and will patch them up with stainless wire in the off season. Once with a broken gate tine, we zap strapped closed the broken gate and the trap still fished very well with just the one gate until the gate tine was replaced in the off season. We go through a lot of zap straps, - love the dollar store. We also repair the heavy bait bags with zap straps when the crabs cut into them.
Best bait for us are a large amount of fresh Salmon or Halibut heads and fish frames. The 4 large fresh full chicken legs from Walmart for $4.50 to $5.00 dollars work great. Lots of fat on them to ooze oil and carry the sent for distance in the current. The bait has to be protected or it will be gone fast and stop fishing. Even protected in bags the very small shrimp will get to it and eat it up but it will last longer.
Thanks Rockfish. Excellent tutorial on crabbing. When searching for a "crabby" area what should I look for? Depth, structure, current? I know of areas around CR but they have traps on them all the time. One FN trap at the mouth of the Campbell just off the spit must produce well as it is there year round.