Always trying to weasel in a practical math lesson, we are trying out our home made shrimp traps and catching lots of shrimp and prawns!
I know people can catch way more, but put this in perspective: first time making the traps, first time using them, and first time shrimping at this location. Pretty darn good for a first time.
We used our home made shrimp traps side by side with a couple purchased traps all weekend and found they worked as good or better than the expensive ones.
We fished for 3 1/2 days and averaged a couple hundred shrimp and prawns each day, fishing just 5 minutes from shore. I'm pretty confident we'll find better spots, specifically it would be great to figure out where all the giant prawns are at, they are 10 times the size of shrimp.
While we were generally shrimping, our friends were catching spring salmon. Luckily our friends are terrific and invited us to get in on the action.
If you have some old buckets, these traps would only cost 2-3 bucks each, even if you have to buy the 5 gallon buckets, it would land you around $10-15 each. We found the plastic mesh at a hardware store and it worked great.
Anyways, you can easily make these shrimp traps at home, with or without the home school geometry lesson. Dave might even go shrimping in a canoe! Good luck!