Salmon season is closed. Lingcod doesn’t open until May. What is an angler to do? Prawning baby!

We started prawning in 2020 out of Vancouver and that’s when we got ourselves hooked to the luxury of spot prawns. Turns out when you share them with friends and family they become hooked as well. Now that we live in Nanaimo we find that we are able to spend more hours on the water and truly fine tune our process. For us the later sunsets mean evening sets! We’ve learned a trick or two along the way but always appreciate advice from others who share our passion. A lot of what we know has been passed down to us from friends and experienced anglers. My hope is that maybe a trick or tip that we have learned along the way can help someone else with their prawning success.

Our Setup:

We use two square 24″ traps on each set, making 4 traps total. In our trap we have a 5 pound square weight and a canister of bait (see below for bait tips). We have trap 1 followed by 30′ of line then trap 2, followed by another 30 feet before our 5 pound weight we clip on the line. Recently we have added a 1 pound weight that we clip on near the final 50 feet or so. We do this just to make sure all of our line is underwater and not putting other boaters at risk. When we end up in a new area that isn’t as deep it also helps to take care of excess line. Typically we set at about 310 feet deep.

Lessons we learned:

There is such a thing as too much weight on your traps: When we first started we thought they had to be heavy to prevent moving around the bottom. While yes, that is true, there is such a thing as too much. At some point it just becomes unnecessary and causes more work for your hauler. We now use a single 5 pound weight in each trap.
You don’t need a ton of bait: We use 1 cup of prawn bait pellets and half a can of yumyum soft bait in each trap for an overnight soak. We used to soak the pellets overnight in scented bait oils but cut that process out when we forgot too many times and it didn’t seem to improve our catch. If you are short on yumyum soft bait you can always use a can of Friskies cat food! Thanks Andrew!
Set on the slope, not on the bottom: If your traps are not as full as you expected, chances are you missed the slope and landed after it.
De-head sooner rather than later: The longer you wait to take the heads off the softer the meat will get due to the enzyme they release. I know some people keep them in the cold water for a bit so they flush out anything in their system first. We will do this as well but like to do the heads within 45 minutes. I am also very picky so part of my process is taking the veins out before freezing anyway.
Soak in salted ice water overnight: We freeze all of our prawns without their shells and deveined. On accident we discovered that if you soak the prawns (head off) overnight in icy salt water, the peeling process is remarkably easier. Day of the catch the prawn meat tends to stick to the shell and you can lose pieces of meat or just spend far too much time trying to separate the two. If you do the overnight fridge soak, the prawns will cleanly separate from the shell and quite often you can get the vein as you pull the shell.

Favourite Recipes

White wine cream sauce pasta: This one is a staple in our house. We’ve had to increase the amount of prawns we freeze in each vacuum pack because our kids love them so much.

Cockeyed Prawns: Stemming from a family tradition, this recipe came to life on a family camping trip and will remain part of our traditions.