pinstriper said:
That sounds like an awful lot of bending down for an old fat man.
The way I grew up crayfishing involved a stick, and a little net (usually made of some cheese cloth, needle and string, and a looped coathanger lashed or taped to a stick,) and I'd just wade around looking, see a cray, put the net a foot or two behind them and then poke the other stick down near their head - boom right into the net. No bending required - except elbows.. And this ain't "spear them one at a time" level either, this is "figure out how to tie a large bucket to yourself while keeping both hands free, and don't empty it until it weighs you down." You can get more than one into your net at a time with a little practise, and with the cheapo coathanger nets, you can just bend them to fit the type of rocks and such you're working with - need a pointy-ended net to get into that crevice and seal off all escape? Piece of cake, 3 seconds' of work for a 10 year-old!
Many buckets full from coastal streams and the Umpqua.. Did it in the stream that runs out through Yachats a few years back, when my family owned a place by that T intersection just over the bridge a few miles upstream where Spring Drive stops (one side cuts north up a gravel/dirt road, the other cuts south toward cape perpetuaand eventually comes out on 101 or 34, iirc).. We filled 3 5-gallon buckets full within 75 yards of that bridge, for our family reunion.. Took a few hours and a few people, but nothing like the work involved in trying to use a snake-pinning stick on crayfish underwater, while figuring out the diffraction!
My folks sold the house since then so feel free to go up there and try for them crayfish, I've thrown a few traps in and gotten enough to top a single serving of pasta or something similar, but it seems like you kinda need to check your traps regularly, or they self-limit at very small numbers.
Hawk said:
Sometimes in the summer I like to go out at night to a nearby pond, creek, or river to do a little fishing & catch some crawdads. I put a piece of night crawler on a fair sized hook, using a short rod. I can see them with my light. They grab the worm, I yank them to the shore....
...lots of Fun....I usually use a 12volt light attached to a deep cycle battery, or I use a led light attached to my ball cap.
Other times I've done pretty good using a trap. I know a guy who used to get many crawdads out of Lake Billy Chinook. I'm not sure it's allowed anymore there.
When I was very little we used to do this in muddy sloughs during daylight hours, at a place that belonged to some relatives of mine down in So Cal (I think near Bakersfield, I was VERY young, definitely near the desert).. We'd take a fishing rod with line and a big swivel (or just a paperclip on a stick with string or line) and a piece of turkey skin or chicken skin.. Drop it down to the bottom, wait a half a minute, pull it back up slowly and evenly - and crayfish on the end almost every time, no need to see them once you get a rhythmn and/or half a feel for them nipping the bait while you're hovering just off the bottom.
