Long craypot lines.
This is a bitch to you halfwits that insist on leaving miles of line floating on the surface above your pots!. Several points come to mind, if of course you are capable of reading this. First, the entanglement risk is very high, particularly when heading back into the sun, or manouvering around pots. Second, I don't think it does any favours to to the leg and trim system when you get pulled up at speed or worse, when the line wraps up tight around the prop. I wonder how often people think their pots have been moved or stolen, when they have simply been dragged out of position, or actually cut off. Third, it demonstrates a total disregard for others and piss poor seamanship. It's not hard to put a weight a couple of metres down and/or shorten your lines to suit the depth you're fishing in for Christs'sake. Try being even vaguely considerate to others for a change.
sea-kem
Posts: 14983
Date Joined: 30/11/09
It's literally mainly pro
It's literally mainly pro pots I see with heaps of line on the surface, fucks me off when they insist on laying their pots across one of the main channels out to sea from where I am. They are the ones who don't give a fuck.
As a rule I'm in 8m and have 12m of rope more than enough and they don't bounce.
But I guess metro this time of year is a cluster. Good luck with that!
Love the West!
wifecallsmegrumpy
Posts: 146
Date Joined: 09/01/12
I agree completely, we have
I agree completely, we have in the past hit floats and it's bloody dangerous. All our ropes have a small bit of lead core rope spliced in so the rope hangs vertically.
lots of people do the righty, often coiling and dogboning extra rope but for those dickwads that don't you will get the chance to buy a new pot when it goes missing!
Reefsta
Posts: 314
Date Joined: 03/08/19
Hazard in low light
Lately I have dropped a couple of pots in 12m west of Stragglers and there has been a line of new floats and ropes, that looked like pro pots, running along the same reef edge contour. Saw them pulling them yesterday. All had very long near ropes at or near the surface, so not weighted. I figured they have been using rope lengths better suited to deeper drops later in the season and just hadn't bothered to shorten everything up for the 12m drops. It would have been a headache coming back through there at night, even if you spotted the floats.
carnarvonite
Posts: 8669
Date Joined: 24/07/07
Ropes
Most pros cut their ropes at 10 , 15 , 20 and 30 FATHOMS and add extra coils as they head further out and to sheepshank each pot rope in shallow water would take that much time its not possible as once the crays start to walk its adding more each few days and nothing worse than dropping a pot over and see the floats disappear because the rope is too short
Reefsta
Posts: 314
Date Joined: 03/08/19
Get it but
Understand the time side for the pros for sure, but itis a bit of a hazard in the shallows. The lines i saw in 12m had a fair bit on the surface from the float, so probaly 15 fathoms was being used. The lines streamed out quite a few metres before curving down to the pot, so I wondered there was any weight spliced in, like recs do, to take it down directly under the floats.
Roughas
Posts: 58
Date Joined: 24/08/17
Speaking of cut-offs, I
Speaking of cut-offs, I remember watching one of the ferrys depart Thompson's Bay. When the skipper put it in forward a shit load of cray pot lines streamed out in the prop wash. A crewman from another ferry said they had to regularly get a diver to cut 'em free. As I've said before, I reckon a lot of "stolen" pots are the result of cut-offs.
Brock O
Posts: 3226
Date Joined: 11/01/08
Nothing worse, lost a
Nothing worse, lost a transducer quite a few years back due to this exact same thing.
Seen the pros come in close to collect there pots plenty of times, nice big circle with zero fks collecting anything and everything on there way through, that size they dont have much choice.
little johnny
Posts: 5360
Date Joined: 04/12/11
Almost got one today
Miles of rope out . No idea.100 percent agree people would loose pots due to this. I put a length of chain on mine . A stopper 5 metres down. Impossible to run over straight up and down . . If floats happen to come off chain slides off rope floats up.