The old-fashioned way of obtaining
grass shrimp is to catch them yourself. Catching them isn’t difficult, and it’s fascinating. But it is a chore, so most anglers buy the bait.

Catching them involves using your boat
to pull a shrimp trawl that is a net that surrounds a pipe frame. A license is required from the state to trawl for grass shrimp, and regulations apply, such as net size restrictions, a limited season
and other rules.

The net forms a mouth around the frame, and the other end of the net is tied closed. The boat is used to pull the trawl across grass in the bay—they’re called grass shrimp, because they live in the grass. The trawl is lifted out of the water, and its contents are emptied by untying the back end of the net.

Nearly everything that lives in the bay will come up in the trawl, including juvenile fluke, sea horses, various crabs, tiny fish like sticklebacks, and of course the grass shrimp. The shrimp need to be separated from everything else, and the trawling license requires that everything but the shrimp be returned to the water.

It’s somewhat time consuming, and it’s also messy, both while you’re on the water and when you get back to the dock and have to clean up the mud and debris that just covered your boat.

To keep the shrimp alive, Steve uses a plastic tray that hangs in the top of a cooler, such as one of the trays that keeps food or sandwiches above the ice.

He drills holes in the bottom of the tray to keep moisture from gathering.

If the shrimp hits water while being stored, it dies, and the weakies prefer live shrimp in the chum slick.

He packs the cooler with ice, fills the tray with shrimp to keep them separate and above the ice and any water, and the shrimp can live all day like that.

Steve anchors and starts chumming at a likely spot.  The spots are usually tried and true areas where he’s had success at shrimping for weaks in the past. He’s got his own spots away from crowds, and the bay is full of such areas. But there are also well-known locations, like Meyer’s Hole, the 42 buoy, the BI marker, off Gulf Point and Tice’s Shoal.

Shrimping usually works best in an open area with no strong current, as opposed to a place like a channel or a narrow area with a quick current. A fast current disperses the shrimp chum too quickly, and no weakfish will gather in a tight group in the slick.

Although you’re looking for an open area, you still want to target traditional fish-holding structure, like a drop off, or a flat with a drop-off near grass, and so on. The area should also have little boat traffic that will scare the fish away.

Is time of day important? Absolutely, Steve says. He says he likes to be cleaning fish by the time most boaters are leaving the dock.