Crafting the Perfect Lampara Net for California’s Evolving Bait Fishery

By Paul Molyneaux.

Eureka, California fisherman and innovator Ken Bates strives to build the perfect lampara net. Into his 70s now, Ken Bates has seen decades of fishing on the coast of northern California. He spent 35 winters gillnetting row herring in Humboldt Bay and fished for sardines and anchovies with lampara net, but markets change and tastes change. “We lost the freezer for sardines here. Now we use a lampara net to fish for live anchovies for the albacore bait boats,” says Bates. “And we build the nets.” Bates company, Cloudburst Fishing primarily supplies equipment used in the bait fishery for albacore tuna, including the lampara nets used to catch the bait.

Like purse seines and ring nets, lampara nets are used to circle schooling species of fish or squid. Unlike purse seines lampara nets, which use a single vessel to set the net in a circle around a school of fish, Much like Danish seining, or fly shooting, the captain and crew first set one wing-end on a buoy and start a wide circle as they pay out that wing, then they set the bunt, or bag as it’s often called. Then, the next wing circled back to the end of the first wing, and both wings are hauled simultaneously.

“Some guys will use a lazy line on the first wing and start hauling it as they set the second wing, so they come together when they finish the set,” says Bates. “The important thing is to keep it as circular as possible. If there’s any current at all, even a quarter knot, you have to have the bag up current.”

Being off bottom, a lampara depends on fish staying up in the water column. “The fish don’t know the rules,” says Bates. “Sometimes they go under. We do best fishing at dawn, that’s when they’re bunched up near the surface.

Image Credit: PICRYL.