How to Run a Trotline for Crabs

[Music] what's up guys roger and joe we are out here on the magazine river on this beautiful friday morning and we are about to run a trotline so right now we're just going to kind of go over parts of the trotline um and part number one is going to be the trotline end so what we have here is a big old weight that's excessively heavy to keep this trout line down so we're gonna have a weight we're gonna have a bunch of line at we usually do 20 to 25 feet of line that is going to run up to this buoy which is marked with joe's name and his dnr id and then we go another line which is going to be about the same 20 25 feet that's going to go down on the end of that line we're going to have a chain that's going to keep the trot line held down the bottom and then we're going to have a clip on the end of our trot line and then that's where the lines are going to start and you can see joe pre-baited this line for us last night thank you joe he's got these little we call them snooze just little bungees there and then we have our chicken net uh bungeed around that uh and we got how big is this 1000 feet this is 600 foot 600 feet of this line to lay so we'll cut for a minute get this ready to go and then show you how we actually lay this out picked a spot uh we got consistently about eight to ten feet of water um so we're gonna start laying our line first thing we're gonna drop this weight in joe's gonna keep the boat nice and straight for me that's going to go in we're going to drop the ball in that's going to go to our chain which is clipped to the trot line and then we're just going to start laying it in you want to keep a little bit of tension on it not too much and then most important you want to make sure it doesn't start to get tangled up like that joe slow down yep just like that there we go we're back it might pull out so as you can see tangles like that will happen from time to time even with experts joe's the expert not myself so i'm attaching the chain to the end of the trout line perfect timing we're gonna drop that in and same kind of thing on the other end we got a line going up to our buoy and then i'm just going to hold this for a minute stretch it out put some tension on the line and then drop it in and that's that we set the line so i'm getting ready to put the trotline puller on the boat this is homemade made out of pvc certainly homemade that is for sure to be able to run the line on the side of the boat so we can dip crabs so i'm going to install it right now it just kind of locks right on the side that's beautiful and there we have it we're going to all right so we're approaching the trotline now uh what i'm going to do here is take this boat hook grab the end of it get it up in this little slot over here in our trotline arm and that way you know you'll have the line come up over the arm go back down into the water and then we'll net crabs as we go so you kind of got to do this quick grab that just throw it in there we'll drop that and then i'll grab the neck and we'll start checking the trout line and hopefully start netting here pretty soon these baits come pretty quick so you gotta be ready for them you gotta be very quick with the net as well otherwise they'll drop off [Music] the first run was really good so now we're gonna call out make sure we have all of our crabs that are five and a quarter inches this is one of the jumbos that we just caught no need to measure him really he is a hammer so yeah just gonna go through these we did really well on the first run um yeah i don't even know how many 18 15 i don't know a bunch of them probably get at least a dozen keepers out of that so we'll see how it goes what's up guys joe and roger just got back in from running that trotline uh we ran it a few times not the best morning but we definitely caught a few dozen crabs um so i think probably our biggest problem was we ran the line a couple times and the tide stopped so if you're going to go crabbing you definitely want moving water not necessarily incoming is better than outgoing you just want some kind of tide you don't want to crab on a slack tide exactly i mean yeah otherwise you're going to be out there all day and you're going to couch crabs intermittently right but best bet is to get out there whenever you can start laying your line and that's when you start catching your best crabs right earlier the better but again tide dependent it could be 5 30 in the morning you could be crabbing but they're slap tied you're probably not going to do well so yeah early morning but tide dependent as well so just a few things to keep in mind and we're gonna go home and eat some of these crabs thanks for watching guys [Music]

Channel: Anglers Annapolis

Views: 12,457

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Id: 6KrRYOJu9-s

Length: 6min 20sec (380 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 01 2022