Re: crayfish traps
ratherbefishin, I don't know if this will help but here is a little info.<br /><br />---------<br />Day or night, a more effective way of gathering crawfish is to toss out a piece of fish or other meat on a string, leave it a while, then slowly draw it to the surface. One to several crawdads will usually be clinging to the bait and are easily caught by slipping a long-handled net under them. With this method you can "pot-shot" individual crawfish you've spotted as effectively as you can "fish blind" in deeper water.<br /><br />Commercial crawfishermen usually employ traps of one kind or another. You can either make or buy crawdad traps, and you'll need several if you want to gather lots of mudbugs in a hurry. One trap form is a cylinder or cube of ¼" wire mesh with a screen "funnel" leading into the interior, which is baited with a fish head or other meat scrap. As long as the crawfish can't get at the food directly through the screen, he keeps poking around till he finds the funnel, crawls through, and then can't find his way out again. Such traps are simply lowered into deep water, buoy-marked, and picked up after an hour or so.<br /><br />Another crawdad trap is a small version of the popular "crab rings" used in the ocean. This trap consists of a wire mesh or cloth net strung on a rigid square or circular metal frame a foot or two across. Folding or collapsing sides a few inches high are tied to a line which leads to the surface. The trap is baited in its center, lowered to the bottom, buoy-marked, and retrieved later by the attached line. Since crab-ring traps aren't enclosed as are funnel traps, it's important to haul up pretty fast so crawdads won't have time to crawl or swim over the sides. Euell Gibbons, the late wildfoods forager extraordinaire, agrees freshwater crawfish are an unsurpassed inland delicacy. He caught hundreds of mudbugs for his own table wherever he traveled and for a time was a commercial crawfisher here in the Northwest. He used about a dozen of the crab-ring traps described above and regularly took 20 to 50 crawdads per haul. He claims 1000 crawfish per day wasn't uncommon, and his commercial success was limited only by a lack of market for his tiny delicacies.
