Seafood exchange rates

June 27

Everyone has their little secrets when it comes to the bait they use to catch fish and shellfish around here. You can use official “prawn bait” – but I can only seem to find it in 5 gallon bucket quantities. And we don’t keep that much of anything on board unless it has alcohol in it. Besides that, this official prawn bait just seems to be repurposed dog food.

For crabbing, the most successful people seem to use fish carcasses, but despite the amount of fishing we do, we don’t ever seem to catch anything. So that’s out.

My solution to all of this, is to use cat food (tuna or salmon flavored, of course) to catch prawns. Just poke some holes in the top of one of those smelly cans and they seem to come running (or whatever it is that they do down there…scrunching?). Once we capture those spiky guys, we rip off their heads, feast on their tails and use the offal as crab bait. So far my scheme is working well, and I love that we can turn cat food into prawn and crab deliciousness!

$.69 = 1 can of cat food = 20 prawn
5 prawn heads + 3 chicken gizzards = 10 crab
So therefore 1 crab is about $.02 in food from the supermarket*

*This, of course, is not counting all of the time I failed to catch crab, prawns, fish or anything besides uneatable starfish. See last year's post about the cost of each fish if you really add everything up.