Prawns and shrimp

Prawns and shrimp are the bait most often ruined between the shore and the hook, and the cause is almost always warmth.

WHY THEY SPOIL SO FAST. Crustacean flesh contains enzymes that break it down rapidly after death, and the process starts in the gut and the head. That is why a prawn dead for an hour in a warm bucket is soft and black-headed while one kept cold is firm.

ALIVE IS BEST AND IS GENUINELY ACHIEVABLE. A bucket of cool, aerated sea water in the shade, changed regularly, will hold prawns lively for a session. What kills them is heat, crowding and their own waste, in that order — the same three things that kill every live bait.

DEAD BUT COLD IS THE PRACTICAL ALTERNATIVE. Straight into a cool box on ice, kept out of meltwater. Kept properly they will be usable for a day or two.

FREEZING WORKS if it is done immediately and properly: brine-frozen or tightly wrapped, in small portions, used from frozen and never refrozen. Frozen prawn is softer than fresh and needs support on the hook.

WHAT NOT TO DO. Leave them in a bucket of water that warms up, which deoxygenates and cooks them slowly. Freeze them after they have already softened, which preserves a poor bait. Or buy cooked prawns expecting them to behave like raw ones — cooking changes the texture and much of the scent, and cooked prawn is a different and generally inferior bait.

Obtaining prawns is easy and obtaining them well is a question with three different answers depending on how they are being got, and each carries a different set of constraints.

BUYING IS THE PRACTICAL STANDARD AND THE DISTINCTION THAT MATTERS IS RAW VERSUS COOKED. Raw shell-on prawns from a fishmonger or supermarket are a good bait and freeze acceptably; cooked and peeled ones fall apart on the hook and are close to useless. That single distinction accounts for most disappointment with bought prawns, and it costs nothing to get right.

BUYING LIVE IS A DIFFERENT PROPOSITION AND A BETTER BAIT. Live prawns from bait or aquarium suppliers provide movement no dead bait matches, and for several species the difference is large. The cost is the care described in the record's storage section — aeration, cool clean water, low density — and a live-bait plan that does not include that is a plan to arrive with dead prawns.

COLLECTING YOUR OWN IS THE THIRD ROUTE AND IT IS WHERE THE PERMISSIONS ARE. Push netting and drop netting in shallow inshore water is straightforward, effective and traditional, and it is also regulated in most jurisdictions — variously by gear type, mesh size, season, area, minimum size, quantity, and by whether any permit or licence is required. Those rules differ between neighbouring districts and they change. FishingHQ does not state what any of them are; the local competent authority does, and checking before rather than after is the whole of the advice.

THERE IS ALSO A PUBLIC-HEALTH DIMENSION WHERE PRAWNS ARE TAKEN FOR THE TABLE, since crustacean and shellfish gathering grounds are classified and may be closed. That is a separate regime from the fisheries one and it has its own authority. Bait use does not exempt anybody from a closure that exists for another reason.

AND THE GROUND ITSELF IS THE THIRD CONSIDERATION. Prawn collecting takes place in shallow water among weed, rock and structure on a falling or low tide — slippery, uneven ground with a tide behind it — and the practical hazard of the activity is the shore rather than the animal.

FINALLY, LEAVE THE GROUND AS YOU FOUND IT. Weed pulled apart and rocks left turned reduce the habitat that produced the prawns, and the sourcing section on crab bait makes the same point for the same reason: a stripped shore stops producing.