Fishing for Shrimps in Shilin Taipei 釣蝦場

Last week when I was in Taipei, I was brought to this shrimp-fishing place in Shilin (釣蝦場). You fish for shrimps and you cook them later on. We had to go by car because there's no MRT nearby.

The rent for 1 fishing rod for 1 hour was 350 NTD, while for 2 hours it was 600 NTD. We used the fishing rods to fish for shrimps in this murky pool. As for the bait, my friend bought it for us.

釣蝦場 - Shrimp Fishing Place

There's a certain "art" to catching a shrimp. You have to move the bait slowly around, as if it was moving like a fish. I had to be reminded several times - "that's not how a fish moves!". The bait movement needs to be slow and steady. According to my friend, the shrimp will first test the bait for danger by using its claws (I only found out this day that shrimps actually had claws!). After testing, it will start to nibble the bait and pull at the hook. When it does, I jerked the fishing rod and the shrimp gets hooked! (Ouch). Then I pull out the fishing rod.

My friends, posing with the shrimp they caught

After catching the shrimp, my friend had to pull out its claws (double-ouch! :( poor things). If he didn't pull it out, it would be hard for him to remove the hook from the mouth. I didn't take photos, but there's a bunch of shrimp claws/arms all over the floor. I only tried pulling out the shrimp's claw/arm once.

This is me, posing with the shrimp I caught

For the 2 hours that we've been fishing, I managed to catch 8. Not bad for a first-timer. At the earlier parts, a lot of them managed to get away, along with the bait from the hook (waited for too long before jerking or pulling too slow).

I cleaned those 8 myself. By cleaning, I mean pulling out its legs and the long thing from its snout. I felt really bad doing it... it must be torture for them.

Ready for skewering

After the shrimps have been cleaned, the next step is to skewer them with the BBQ sticks from the tail up to the head. While I'm excited to eat grilled shrimps, I just feel really bad for them. After skewering them all, we lined them up and poured salt to coat them.

Grilling shrimps

After this, we grilled them! I think we overcooked some, but majority of the shrimps were grilled correctly. Of course, the shrimps were fresh. We bought drinks, rice, and other food after this. For the shrimp sauce, they gave us soy sauce and wasabi. For me, I had my shrimps with Heineken.

Cooked Shrimps!

Overall, I had fun! Mixed feelings of excitement over the fishing activity but guilt for torturing shrimps (according to scientific studies, shrimps do feel pain). If I were to do this again, I would probably just behead them from the start and then bring over some pesto, chopped garlic, and lemon for marinade prior to grilling. Yum.

Quick recap of the whole thing!