Puget Sound Spot Shrimping Report – June 11, 2020

Like many of you, I have been waiting patiently for one of the most anticipated Puget Sound openers… our Spot Shrimp opener. I’ve had gear prepped for a week and did my trolling at the grocery store pet aisle, loading up on cans of cat food. Bait was prepped the night before. Set the alarm clock and drove down the hill to the Puget Sound to take my family out for our hallowed one day opener in Marine Area 9.

Today’s crew included some VIP’s: my dad, brother and his girlfriend.

It was a very beautiful morning on Puget Sound, with no wind or chop. And an easy cruise from the Shilshole Boat Launch up to our shrimping grounds near Edmonds.

I had the bait mixed up the night before in a 3 gallon bucket, to make things easier. I mixed up some shrimp pellets with canned mackerel and plenty of cat food. With the short soaks that we do in Puget Sound, I’m not so sure that the pellets are necessary, but I add everything to them the night before to allow them to soften and soak up all the liquids from the mackerel. It makes for a really good bait when you open it up the morning of the opener.

We showed up just before the 7am start time. There was a pretty good number of boats out, but I wouldn’t consider it crowded for the opener. It looked like everyone had spread out pretty nicely.

We collected the gear in the stern of my tiny boat and baited up all the pots. Once 7am hit, we were already hovered over our spot and my brother deployed the first one. I fired up the motor and ran a slow circle around the pot, to help dispatch the 400′ of line quickly. That little detail helps save about half the time, but you need to make sure that your lines are clean and untangled, and that you have someone vigilantly tending the lines as they leave the boat. Although shrimping is usually pretty good on the opener, I’m a fan of saving as much time as I can. But more important than saving time is making sure that working the gear is stress free, which it was with my stud crew!

We had all four shrimp pots out of the boat in about 15 minutes, and decided that a full hour was enough time to wait.

We started pulling at 8am, and for the first set of pulls we had a great start! Out of four pots, we yielded about 3 limits. I ran the boat and my brother ran the gear. It was a solid team.

After an hour soak, we once again pulled pots and got our fourth and final limit in the first two pots. The last two pots pulled were rail dumped with at least another limit! Great opener and I wouldn’t be too upset if we were blessed with another day in Puget Sound to hit up Spot Shrimp!