So, I work for an On-the-Water-Education org in which we set a 16' Otter trawl for a 5 min sample. We are engaged in hands on education with mostly elementary students for now, so we don't really collect much hard data. However, it is important for us to catch fish in order to introduce our students to what does live in the waters of their city.

A few weeks ago we rushed a retrieve of hung down net and ended up with it in our props. As you can guess, we had to buy a new net. We ended up with a 16' Otter trawl, with boards larger than the old net had. It is a single line trawl, so I built a bridle with each line at about 17'. This new net fishes wonderfully compared to our old net. In fact, it fishes much better than the net on our other boat. On my boat, we are catching, say, 30 White Perch while the other boat is catching 3. These are ostensibly the same nets, and they are fishing the same waters, often at the same time. The new net is also catchng fish the old never did. We had caught a Shortnose Redhorse and a Yellow Bullhead just this past week, and and catching many more juvenile Blue and Channel cats than before.

Thinking it over and looking at what we have to work with, I have only two ideas as to what the difference may be:

• Bridle Length
• Door Size

Being a two variable system, and not having the ability to spend some time testing out the variables, I am hoping some of you with more experience than I can help me. If the bridle is short, would that significantly impact the net's ability to fish well and consistently? If the doors are to small for the net and/or conditions would the net still be opening correctly, just to high above the bottom?

Any and all thoughts about running a trawl are welcome. I am more interested in a discussion than a specific answer.

I'm waiting for Greg (Netmaker) to chime in here. He's the resident expert.


Anything you want to know about nets, he's the man to ask.

I see you're interested in a discussion but Brian Zimmerman has been working with a net maker that builds trawlers, we're buying stream bottom nets. Maybe Brian can send you contact info on the netmaker.

Marc Kibbey