Sport Shrimping

Sport shrimping along the space coast is catching on and with the newly built fishing piers on the Indian River, has become increasingly popular with visitors and local area residents.

Here in central Florida sport shrimping is almost exclusively done using circular, long handled dip nets from boats, docks, fishing piers and bridges over underwater lighting arrays such as the ones below.



I had planned on fishing Saturday but the wind was blowing beyond my limits and my truck developed a transmission problem so I opted to stay home.

By 8:00 p.m. I had cabin fever so I took the other truck down to the fishing pier to see if any shrimpers were crazy enough to venture out in the cold.

When I got to the pavilion, I was genuinely surprised to see a band playing Jamaican music and find the lower fishing pier crowed with shrimpers and fishermen.

I took my camera, zipped up my hoodie and started walking the fishing piers to see who was catching anything.

No one seemed to be catching any fish and the shrimpers weren't doing much better.

One guy I talked with caught just a few shrimp in an hour and thought he was doing good.  I didn't have the heart to tell him he needed to go home.

I walked up to the upper pier where the shrimpers weren't doing much better.

The wind was blowing like crazy making the shrimp hard to detect and the temperature was dropping quickly.  The weather report was for 40 degrees tonight with the potential for freezing.

I saw some fish fry on the surface being chased by some decent sized sea trout but not many shrimp.   No one seemed interested in catching the slot sized trout.

I took some pics and a short video of basically nothing and decided that cabin fever in the house was preferable to pneumonia.


Hopefully, I'll be able to get out and do some fishing while I still have some vacation left.

My wife and I planned to hit the keys and do some fishing for a few days in Islamorada  but the damn truck transmission problem put the kibosh on those plans.

Till next time, hope your sport shrimping nets get filled with jumbos!

Tight Lines.