Prawns for salmon?
- Thread starter islandboy
- Start date
Stress Medicine
Member
Sounds like a waste of good prawns to me when you can use a smelly old herring. Don't recall hearing anyone using prawns. However I have caught at least 2 snappers with small prawns in their gullets.
Winter springs do feed on sand shrimp,sand lance and prawns at times. Quite often you will notice there is scraping on their gill plates when caught. This comes from racing along a sandy or muddy bottom on their sides and catching sand shrimp. We have many bottom areas like this in the North Georgia Strait area and I have caught winters with shrimp in them. I am sure that they eat prawns too as I have seen parts in their digestive system. It may be something that they take on occasionas a taste, same way they will occassionally strike bait.
I use tiger prawn hootchies with great success over the winter and spring.
In one area with a flat sandy bottom right now we fish right on the bottom with the spin of the flasher and the cannonballs occasionally bouncing.
I also found the following information
Looked up this article from a Whatcom Salmon Recovery and also noticed when doing a search there are places that sell ghost (sand) shrimp to use as bait. So they must work.
There were some sites that showed how to rig them.
January 2005
Q. What do salmon eat?
A. What a salmon eats depends on age, species, and location. When salmon are young and still in freshwater they eat tiny zooplankton and adult invertebrates. However, this varies among species. For instance, young coho salmon typically feed during the day and prefer aquatic insects at the surface of a stream, such as, mayflies, caddis flies, and stoneflies. The young chinook salmon prefers plankton off the river floor, as well as, terrestrial insects and small crustaceans. Another food source for a young salmon is found on overhanging riparian plants. Larvae and insects feeding on this vegetation often fall into the stream adding to a salmon’s diet.
As a salmon matures and eventually leaves the freshwater for the ocean, their diet may change. While chum and sockeye salmon prefer to continue eating zooplankton and occasionally other small adult fish, other species begin to eat larger fish and aquatic insects. This includes shrimp, surf smelt, sand lance, crab, herring, amphipods, and krill. When a salmon returns to freshwater to spawn, feeding efforts virtually stop to conserve energy for the journey upstream, producing eggs, and digging a nest (redd).
I use tiger prawn hootchies with great success over the winter and spring.
In one area with a flat sandy bottom right now we fish right on the bottom with the spin of the flasher and the cannonballs occasionally bouncing.
I also found the following information
Looked up this article from a Whatcom Salmon Recovery and also noticed when doing a search there are places that sell ghost (sand) shrimp to use as bait. So they must work.
There were some sites that showed how to rig them.
January 2005
Q. What do salmon eat?
A. What a salmon eats depends on age, species, and location. When salmon are young and still in freshwater they eat tiny zooplankton and adult invertebrates. However, this varies among species. For instance, young coho salmon typically feed during the day and prefer aquatic insects at the surface of a stream, such as, mayflies, caddis flies, and stoneflies. The young chinook salmon prefers plankton off the river floor, as well as, terrestrial insects and small crustaceans. Another food source for a young salmon is found on overhanging riparian plants. Larvae and insects feeding on this vegetation often fall into the stream adding to a salmon’s diet.
As a salmon matures and eventually leaves the freshwater for the ocean, their diet may change. While chum and sockeye salmon prefer to continue eating zooplankton and occasionally other small adult fish, other species begin to eat larger fish and aquatic insects. This includes shrimp, surf smelt, sand lance, crab, herring, amphipods, and krill. When a salmon returns to freshwater to spawn, feeding efforts virtually stop to conserve energy for the journey upstream, producing eggs, and digging a nest (redd).
P
Pablo2079
Guest
I remember that in Lake Washington, they catch coho fishing with live sand shrimp just off the bottom. Of course, people use sand shrimp in rivers to catch steelhead and salmon too. Might be worth a shot...
Rum Buddies
Well-Known Member
I've caught springs with bellies jammed full of krill or tiny shrimp and of course there is the whole tiger prawn hoochie that works for many guys.
Pretty hard to mooch anything these days with fewer fish spread over large areas.
Pretty hard to mooch anything these days with fewer fish spread over large areas.
A coho will hit anything you put in front of it. If there were winters feeding on prawns on the bottom, maybe, technically it may work, but a prawn hanging in midwater would probably be too out of place to entice a salmon. And in sparser fisheries like ECVI, I think you would want to troll around as much as possible to cover ground. If doggies are a problem, drag around hoochies, spoons or Tomics at around 4-5 KTS. Yes, it's too fast for bait, but at least you are still fishing, and covering ground. And I find, myself, that doggies rarley hit in shallower then 50 feet of water in the area where I fish onshore, so sticking to the shallower points may also be an option as opposed to dragging the bottom.
Well I'll be hooked, I wouldn't have ever thought so, but can't argue with all those voices.[:I]
99.9% of my ocean fishing has been Summertime and out of perhaps more than 5,000 sportcaught fish I have never seen a prawn inside a salmon (except on the BBQ
.) Maybe the winters are more likely to feed on them - they're certainly aggressive enough.
99.9% of my ocean fishing has been Summertime and out of perhaps more than 5,000 sportcaught fish I have never seen a prawn inside a salmon (except on the BBQ
.) Maybe the winters are more likely to feed on them - they're certainly aggressive enough.Similar threads
