Crabs taking the bait, and what to do about it

Before treating a crab problem it is worth confirming you have one, because three other things strip baits and each has a different answer. The hook comes back with a signature.

CRABS: the bait is gone or reduced to a shred of skin left round the shank, the hook is otherwise clean and undamaged, the bait elastic is cut through in places, and there were no bites on the tip at all. Often the whole bait disappears within five minutes on every cast, which is the tell — a crab problem is relentless and consistent rather than occasional.

SMALL FISH, usually pin whiting, poor cod, pout or small wrasse: there WERE bites, often continuous fussy rattling, and the bait is nibbled untidily from the ends inwards with the middle sometimes intact. The answer to this is a bigger or tougher bait and a bigger hook, which is close to the opposite of what works for crabs.

HERMIT CRABS AND WHELKS: much slower, so the bait is partly there after twenty minutes rather than gone after five, and you sometimes retrieve the animal itself. Common on clean sand where shore crabs are scarce.

SANDHOPPERS AND SHRIMP in the surf line: the bait is peppered and pitted rather than removed, and the effect is mostly cosmetic.

AND THE ONE THAT IS NOT AN ANIMAL: if the bait is gone and the elastic is INTACT and unbroken, the bait came off in the cast. That is a tying problem, not a crab problem, and no amount of moving marks will fix it.

THE POINT OF THE KEY is that the treatments conflict. Recasting frequently beats crabs and wastes bait on small fish. A tough bait beats both. A bigger hook beats small fish and does nothing to a crab. Getting the diagnosis wrong means an evening spent applying the wrong remedy harder.

The description lists the answers in order of effectiveness. This is how the best of them are actually executed, because "use bait elastic" is advice that fails when it is done badly.

ELASTIC IS A BINDING, NOT A WRAPPING. The common error is to wind elastic round and round a soft bait until it is a sausage — which crushes the bait, stops scent escaping, and still lets a crab pull pieces off the ends. What works is a few firm turns that hold the bait AGAINST THE SHANK at the head and again at the tail, leaving the body loose enough to work in the tide. Finish by tucking the end under a turn rather than tying a knot, which is faster and undoes cleanly.

BUILD OUTSIDE-IN. The most effective anti-crab bait is a soft attractive core inside a tough skin: a soft worm wrapped in a strip of squid or a fillet of mackerel skin-out, or a bunch of worm sheathed in a whole squid tube. The crab has to get through the tough layer, which takes it far longer than the fish need.

HOOK LENGTH IS PART OF THE ANSWER AND IS ROUTINELY IGNORED. A long flowing snood puts the bait on the seabed and holds it there, which is exactly where crabs are. A short snood on a rig that stands the bait up — or a small buoyant bead or a sliver of float foam on the hook length — lifts the bait clear of the bottom. Fish that hunt above the bottom still find it and crabs walking the sand do not. On a bad crab ground this is often more effective than any change of bait.

AND CHANGE THE TEMPO. If crabs are stripping in five minutes, a two-hour cast is not fishing, it is decorating the seabed. Recast every ten or fifteen minutes with less bait on. You use no more bait overall and there is something on the hook the whole time.

WHEN TO STOP TRYING. If the ground is rough, warm and weedy, and everything above has been tried, the honest answer is that this mark is not fishable for bottom-fished bait tonight. Move to clean sand, move into the surf table, fish a float or a lure in the same session — or come back in colder water, when the problem largely disappears on its own.