Prisons of Atlantis - NAPS Ghost Crab Pot Removal Program
- NAPS
- Aug 27
- 8 min read
Updated: Sep 15
by Andy Sitison, NAPS Project Lead, Ghost Pot Program
Last year, I began a project to collect "ghost pots" from a tidal river off the Chesapeake Bay. You might ask, "What is a ghost pot?" A ghost pot is a lost or abandoned crab trap. These crab pots are cage-like structures placed on the riverbed with a float (also known as a "cork" or "buoy") on the surface, connected by a rope called a "line." These can move around due to currents or human activity, such as being dragged by boats. Abandoned pots are those the crabber forgot or failed to retrieve, and they can remain in the water for years, continuing to trap and kill marine life in an endless cycle. The traps catch not only blue crabs but also "bycatch"—non-target marine species such as turtles, baby otters, cormorants, toadfish, perch, kingfish, blues, drum, sea trout, and other opportunistic feeding fish. It is estimated that ghost pots trap about six million blue crabs annually in the Chesapeake Bay, with half dying in captivity (source: VIMS https://www.vims.edu/newsandevents/topstories/2016/derelict_pot_cb_report.php).
“I lose about 100 pots a year…I’d love to not lose those pots” – Local Crabber
Crab pots cost around $60 each and can last many seasons
So, how do these pots lose their floats? Three main reasons: Mats of underwater grass pull the float under, the knot comes undone, or most commonly, boat propellers sever the line. During summer, hundreds of corks can be seen floating in busy channels, and it’s easy for boaters to miss seeing them in choppy water. In our project, 60% of retrieved pots were lost without floats.
How can you find a ghost pot sitting on the bottom? Sonar is the answer. There are various types of sonar including chirp, down scan, side scan, and forward scan. These systems can range from $300 to $4,000 per unit. The best tool, and the most expensive is forward scan, which allows you to look forward under water and drive to the pot directly, but using side scan and map coordinates (called track points or way points) can be a very productive approach as well. A good system for a commercial team would cost approximately $1,200 in today’s market; however, our team this winter wanted to see what was possible with a more economical set-up for our prototype project. We used a system that cost $400 and moved it between boats.
You may wonder why the project was scheduled during the winter when the conditions are uncomfortable and risky? Our permit allowed us to pull lost and abandoned crab pots only during the off-season – January 1 to March 15 (the season ends December 15, but VIMS allows crabbers two weeks to recover their own lost pots). Additionally, each pot we pulled from the water must be recorded in a mobile app noting coordinates, pot condition, and marine life contained (alive or dead). The team was small, the conditions were mostly arduous, and the work was exhausting. We used a small 14’ by 3’ skiff and kayaks for our project during snow, ice, gale force winds, and average water temperatures around 42º F. There was The majority of the days we worked were during a small craft advisory, so we always wore Portable Floatation Devices (PFDs) and additional winter gear. Conditions as they were, we tidal river.
The winter project aimed to develop practical knowledge, tools, and techniques. Initially, we struggled to retrieve pots without floats, but with time, we improved. What once took 90 minutes per pot eventually took only 3–8 minutes.
This work was done in the name of a 501(c)3 called “NAPS” (napsva.org), the board approved the purchase of the project gear, and appointed myself as project lead, assigned to organize the plan, build a team, and execute. The small team started testing the fish finder gear in a portable unit that could move between boats. Over 80 miles of tests were run to find crab pots in the fall, using the crabbers in season pots with floats to test us how to identify a pot by approaching the float on top of the water.
Fall was productive. We marked many ghost pots and learned to differentiate them from oyster cages, schools of fish, and submerged debris using sonar. We also developed gear such as boat hooks, grappling hooks, meat hooks, drag racks, and a traditional nail rope—a heavy rope fitted with hooks to snag pots. We worked diligently to get really good at putting the pot right under the keel of our boat and be able to turn on it. This we thought would be our collecting technique. Once the winter project started, we quickly learned this would not be our winning approach.
Additionally in the late fall we started building the gear. That consisted of items like boat hooks, grappling hooks, meat hooks, drag racks, and a nail rope. A nail rope (aka drag line) is an old waterman's go to tool which consists of a heavy rope, with a large nail stuck through the coils of the rope, bent in the shape of a hook, and then clamped to the rope with a hognose ring. The nails would run every 2’ for 50-100’ length of the rope. We build a prototype on a budget with a 100’ of line and some galvanized nails, and old metal ends from decommissioned fire hoses.
January waters were very rough, and questionably safe for our small craft, and our initial tests of planned techniques weren’t very successful. There was so much learning at a macro and micro level, to which side to run the lines, how to set up the boat, to adding stainless steel meat hooks to grab the top of the emerging pot to enable an easier pull into the boat. We also went back to the drawing board. We realized our efforts to get right over top of the target pot meant our gear was actually missing the target. The pot needed to be 20-40’ out from the boat, and then we needed to elongate our circle turn to properly snag the pot. As important to the change in technique was to reconfigure our nail rope by adding more weights to the “near weight”, “mid weight”, and “far weight” sections of our nailed section of the rope, and adding a “far weight float”, which was a crab buoy attached to the farthest weight on the line with 10’ length of rope. This allowed us to understand the geometry of the rope under water and see our crescent to put the pot into as we passed. These changes with a little practice made all the difference to our success.
As mentioned we additionally used kayaks to find and pull out ghost pots. This wasn’t considered feasible in the ghost pot community, before we attempted it. As an avid kayaker and fisherman, I felt it was a viable approach. The primary kayak was a 13.5’ with a 36’’ beam large pedal fishing kayak that is very stable. It could go out and easily find the pots, and then retrieve one or possibly two before heading back to the shoreline to dump them. Even though this was a big kayak, there were times where it was a real balancing act to not flip when pulling up a heavy pot.
The weight of each pot ranged dramatically from an estimated 20 to 80 lbs. Nice commercial pots are large, with rebar bottoms which make them heavy when dry, but then add 8’’ of mud, oyster colonies, sea grapes, and by catch, these pots can be difficult to lift at the shoreline, much less a small skiff or kayak. We knew going into the project our boats were not optimal for a commercial effort, and scaling up this program in future years would require a different plan for the boats used.
On March 15 we pulled our last pot of the project, 30 in total. These came from an area of about 5 miles of river, done by a novice team, with budget gear. We believe this shows the value in solving this problem that grows each year in the crabbing areas of the Chesapeake, and frankly everywhere seafood is trapped. Our plan is to continue with the effort, tune it, and expand going into the next few years.
Our learned optimal goal is simply to retrieve pots at the time of their loss. They have material and product value to the crabber, they are damaging to marine life, and they are a net negative to the fishery as they corrode in the brackish and salt waters. If we could bring down the pot loss per crabber from 20% a year to 10% it would have a win-win impact on our community, and the crabbing industry. It's just a matter of making it productive for a crabber to grab a lost pot when they notice they have lost it. Here’s the beginnings of our ideas: we are socializing with our community, the industry associations, local civic organizations, and the crabbers themselves. We’re not selling, we’re solving… Everyone needs to help refine this into a practical solution we can all get behind. Our conceptual three part plan.
Enable the Crabbers - We want to continue the conversation with our local watermen, their associations, civic leaders, and our community to work on a win-win scenario where the crabbers value getting the pots back out of the water at the time they are lost. We are looking to setup an on-going program that helps crabbers gear and train to get them in a place to do so. e would like to see the average number of yearly pots lost to drop from 20%, to single digits.
NAPS Team Needs a Work Boat - A flat-bottom skiff would significantly enhance our efforts, including training, ghost pot retrieval, and river cleanups. We are starting a boat donation program for our 501(c)3
Continue our Winter Project Work - Even as we look to enable local crabbers, there will continue to be many ghost pots remaining in local waters. We plan to grow our volunteer team and continue refining our techniques from January to March each year.
These guide our next steps. Let us know if you have interest in joining us in some manner, or just want to hear from us as we grow.
Epilogue
In the days after the project, and now 17 days into the start of crab season in Virginia, there are still no crabs in the water yet, returning from the saltier waters of the southern bay where they spend their winter. Yet, in 17 days I have already seen 3 detached crab floats float up to my shoreline. One of them, I got in my kayak with our gear and found the float’s lost pot, about 1/10 of a mile from my property. The sad news is we can not touch it for 273 days, until end of season, until we are permitted again to collect ghost pots. I documented this specifically in this video
Sources
All non-project metrics and data points on ghost pots come from the work at VIMS-CCRM and their work on the National TRAP Program
A video journal of NAPS winter project is provided through this playlist: NAPS-GPP
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