An innovation tailored 

 To Carolina waters 



One hundred years ago fishermen 

 used row boats, sail boats and 

 seines to net shrimp. Today, it's 

 motorized, mechanized trawlers haul- 

 ing large "two-barrel" or "four-barrel" 

 nets. 



Between the seine net and the dou- 

 ble trawl are a lot of innovations. Some 

 of those innovations, such as the dou- 

 ble rig, were developed outside of the 

 state. But other innovations have been 

 tailored just for the bent of the North 

 Carolina coast. 



Take the sled for instance. It was 

 developed in Georgia during the 1970s 

 as part of the four barrel or twin trawl, 

 a net configuration that allows a 

 fisherman to pull a set of two nets from 

 the port and starboard outriggers. The 

 sled is an "L" -shaped piece of metal 

 placed in the middle of each set of nets. 

 It attaches at the top and bottom line 

 of the wings of each net and helps to 

 keep the nets open vertically. 



News of the twin trawls reached 

 Carteret County by the mid- 

 1970s, and the larger boats that fished 

 offshore began to make the 

 changeover. Some of the small trawls 

 (less than 40 feet) that shrimped "in- 

 side" or sound waters also experimen- 

 ted with the four barrel. 



"I tried the four nets with the sled," 

 says Earl Chadwick, a Marshallberg 

 fisherman. "But I didn't have room on 

 my 26-foot boat for all those nets, and 

 my boat didn't have enough power to 

 pull all that weight." 



Other fishermen experienced similar 

 problems, so the small-boat fishermen 

 abandoned the idea of shrimping with 

 the twin trawl. But the experimenta- 

 tion did introduce the idea of sub- 

 stituting the sled for one or more of the 

 doors. 



The doors are flat wooden structures 

 that traditionally had been attached to 



the wings of the net to spread it 

 horizontally. But shrimping with the 

 four-door, double trawl meant steering 

 problems for fishermen plying the shal- 

 low waters of Core and Back Sounds. 



In shallow water, the prop wash did 

 not pass over the top of the two in- 

 side doors as it did in deep water. In- 

 stead, the prop wash was deflected 

 straight back from the boat between 

 the two inside doors. This presented no 

 problem as long as the boat moved in a 

 straight line. But in rough weather, the 

 prop wash often began striking first 

 one inside door and then the other, 

 causing the trawlers to see-saw. 



And even on calm days, shrimpers 

 had problems steering their vessels 

 during turns. The prop wash would 

 strike the inside door on the opposite 

 side from the turn, causing a great pull 

 on the boat. 



And while fishermen understood the 

 cause of their problem, there seemed to 

 be no solution in sight. No solution, 

 that is, until they saw the sleds used on 

 the twin trawls. Almost immediately, 

 Carteret County fishermen began ex- 

 perimenting with the sled on their 

 double-barrel trawls, says Jeff 

 Johnson. 



First the fishermen tried a pipe, 

 filled in the bottom with lead, Johnson 

 says. The pipe acted as a weighted 

 staff that fishermen hoped would hold 

 the nets open vertically. But the pipe 

 did not prove successful. 



In 1978, several "downeast" fisher- 

 men began experimenting with the 

 "L"-shaped sled, Johnson says. But in- 

 stead of using only one sled between 

 two nets as was done in the twin trawl 

 configuration, Carteret County fisher- 

 men used two sleds between two nets. 

 They ran a line, known as a crossover 

 line, between each sled. Using this con- 

 figuration, the outside doors opened 



Photo by Mark Hooper 



Metal sleds replaced inside wooden 

 doors on shrimp trawlers 



the nets horizontally and the sled 

 opened them vertically, Johnson says. 



The sleds created little or no 

 resistance to the prop wash and boat 

 maneuverability was increased 

 dramatically. "It gets the nets and the 

 doors away from the wheel wake," 

 says Paul Nelson, a Williston shrim- 

 per. "You can pull the nets a lot easier. 

 It's easier to turn around and the boat 

 is more steady while you're towing." 



But the real test for the sled came 

 when fishermen pulled in the 

 nets. "I think the nets with the sleds 

 produce as much shrimp as the nets 

 with the doors, maybe a little better," 

 says Nelson. Johnson says the two- 

 door/two-sled configuration allowed 

 the fisherman to fish a wider range of 

 environments without steering 

 problems. 



Most of Carteret County's inside 

 shrimpers began using the sled. 

 "Several fishermen told me the sled 

 saved the small boat," Johnson says. 

 "The feeling was that the smaller class 

 of shrimp boat (under forty feet) be- 

 came much more competitive to the 

 larger class of inside boat since the 

 smaller boats could concentrate more 

 on shallow-water trawling and had 

 more efficient gear." 



— Kathy Hart 



