Scup

Thanks Zac for your kind offer!

The problem I have is I been diagnosed with ADD. I really do not see where it affects me in any way, except I have more difficulties than most in trying to do two things at once and I keep on getting lost no matter where I drive. I really want to get this town hall business behind me. There is no rush right now for anybody in this area to get hopped up on grass shrimp just yet. It is a warm weather technique. The main reason why I had to give up using this technique when I came to Connecticut is I could not catch four quarts of grass shrimp. My self imposed rules were not to even try for bass unless I had a minimum of four quarts. It may seem like a lot of shrimp, but this is the minimum needed for one or two persons to even get started for a days fishing. In Jamaica Bay, I used to be able to catch sometimes as much as two or three gallons in a single low tide. The problem I have in Connecticut is the marshes seem far more muddy than in Jamaica Bay. The shrimp are there, but every time I tried to work my shrimp net, I sink halfway up to my knees in muck. Not only could I not work the net, I had a hard time just getting back to the shore without losing wader shoe or two. However, this does not mean that our New York friends couldn't do what I had done. Besides, there must be a zillion places in Connecticut that I have not tried, and all of these cannot be as mucky as the places I have been in so far. I will show you how to make a net that will catch grass shrimp. I will also provide the exact coordinates of several places in Jamaica Bay that I got my shrimp from. Whether or not these spots would still be productive after fifty years, who knows. But the locations are still there. Thanks to Google Earth and aerial photographs, it is no longer a big deal to provide coordinates. There are grass shrimp in our coves, I see them every time I go crabbing at night. What I do not see is the massive numbers that Jamaica Bay held. Fishing Jamaica Bay is vastly different from any place I have fished in Connecticut. It is a massive bay with a character all to itself. When you fish the back reaches of this bay the tide rises and lowers, but there seems to almost no current. I am not sure just how well grass shrimp would work in other areas, but it sure was a bass killer in this bay. I find it hard to believe that if provided with a gallon of shrimp, any of the bays and large rivers in and around CT and RI wouldn't provide suitable action. I never fished Newport RI, but when sitting in my Middletown office (before retiring) and overlooking that massive bay, well it sort of looks like heaven to me. What I obviously cannot do is provide exact locations everywhere one could find suitable numbers of grass shrimp that are catchable. I can tell you what to look for, but you will have to find your own spots, assuming they exist, and then guard them with your life.

Bob & Mag

A pre-post question only because of the time of year....
Can the grass shrimp be frozen for next year? The reason I ask is our bait traps catch far more grass shrimp and they are much larger in the fall than in the summertime.
Thanks,
Bob

__________________
Due to recent budget cuts and the rising cost of food, electricity, gas, and oil, the light at the end of the tunnel has been turned off.

Smoke free 4 Months!

Scup

Frozen grass shrimp are useless. Keep in mind that you would be chumming with a live entity. When tossed over the side, they naturally swim for the bottom. I just cannot picture a dead shrimp swimming anywhere but floating away on the surface. Another point is that when they are fresh they are very fragile. Giving them the deep freeze is not going to make things any better. It is always going to be a concern on how to bait a hook with these creatures, make them look more tempting than the live shrimp you are chumming with, not to bust them apart getting them on a hook, and still leave one alive to tempt a bass. Actually it turns out to be be not that bad to implement but the key is to be able to catch large quantities of them. I have found this not to be so simple in CT, but easy in Jamaica Bay. I have caught hundreds of grass shrimp in my killie traps. Not enough! Take a gallon jug and dump what you have caught in it. Now you will have a better understanding of how many you really need. If you cannot fill up the jug to the top with live grass shrimp, then you do not have enough ammunition to even begin chumming.

Bob & Mag

Thanks, but I'm low on ammo ;)
There was maybe a quart of them tops in my trap today.

__________________
Due to recent budget cuts and the rising cost of food, electricity, gas, and oil, the light at the end of the tunnel has been turned off.

Smoke free 4 Months!

stormy c

Don't get me going on property taxes. My wife and I plan to retire in Delaware in 8 years or so, looked at a really nice house last summer about $450,000 or so. Property taxes were $1,100.00 a year. My little $300,000 ranch here in Rocky Hill $4700.00. No De. sales tax, 3% state income tax yet things seem to run quite well there. But hey back to the grass shrimp, a very productive method of Striper fishing in the Chesapeake Bay is the use of Clam chum. Shells and all they just mash it up in a bucket and in it goes. Some clams on a hook drifted back in the slick works well. Looking forward to your article.

Scup

Whoa! You have got it made. I never even came close to getting a quart of grass shrimp in all my traps put together. One of the things that I will have to post is the simple construction of large bait box that you can drop off the end of your boat, or pier, to hold/store live shrimp until needed. Actually, it will store just about anything you would wish to keep alive as well. Like everything else in fishing, sometimes the catching would be great, and at other times poor. I would always store my surplus shrimp to insure a good supply for when shrimping did not go too well. If you can catch a quart of them at a clip, then simply store them until until you have enough. Perhaps, because I live on a marsh I have forgotten that not everyone has easy access to the water. I do exactly the same thing with killies for fluking. I usually put out three traps, but every morning I check them, grab the cream of the crop, re-bait the traps, save the eels, dump the unwanted killies, and store the good ones in a holding box until needed. The whole operation takes less than ten minutes and I never leave my property.

It is going to be interesting in corresponding with you. If shrimp abound so plentiful in your area, then there is a very good possibility that you could clean up with a seine, assuming of course, the footing will allow you to work a seine. I always suspected that there were areas in CT that would hold a goodly amount of grass shrimp, but I could not find any that were close enough to my home to be convenient.

Scup

I commercially fish for scup here in CT. The fish wholesaler here in Stonington sells a four gallon bucket of clam bellies for $10.00. This is the bread and butter for the commercial fishermen. We simple refer to it as chum and it does have quite a few broken shells mixed in with it. While I do not hold a RI or NY license, many of my commercial associates do. They fish the reefs off the eastern end of Fisher's Island and two guys consistently land hundreds of pounds daily. They brag about how much chum they use and it appears they go through at least a four gallons every time they go out. Probably the only difference between what you describe and what they do is the placing the of chum in a large weighted 1/2" wire mesh box. I do likewise, and the purpose of the box is to keep the scup close to the boat. Not only does this technique work, sometimes it seems that the fishing slacks off for all of the recreational anglers in the area, while you are still pulling them in. Chumming does draw the fish to you and probably away from everyone else.

What I find amusing is that I had no intention of starting a THREAD on taxes, especially in a fishing form, but just look at what I started inadvertently.