So on the way out of the wood the other night Louann makes me stop so she can scoop a few fish out of a ditch to feed to one of her snakes. It's dark so she just takes a few random swipes in the ditch and deposits whatever is in the net into a bucket. When we get home it turns out that she has a bunch of tiny crawfish and only one or two fish.
So the next day at work I am talking to one of our commercial fishermen, this guy catches catfish and eels for us, and he mentions that one of the guys he knows has been catching crawfish in some of the farm ditches using eel pots as if they were crawfish traps.
Upon hering this it occurs to me that there is no reason that Louann and I can not set a few eel pots in the ditches out where we are hog hunting.
Now you've got to realize that this is NE FLorida and while we have crawfish hardly anyone catches them except to use as bait.
So I borrowed a few eel pots from one of the other fishermen and baited them with catfish heads and after we finished looking for hogs the other night we tossed them in the ditches.
When we went back we had ( Only 5 traps ) about 5 pounds of good sized crawfish. Not a stellar performance but interesting.
Not having any more catfish heads to bait them with we rebaited them with some croaker and snapper heads. When we went back tonight, not so much to check the traps as to listen for turkeys, we had about 3 crawfish. Seems that the crawfish have a decided preference for catfish heads. Fortuinately we had more catfish heads to rebait with tonight.
And no, we did not hear any turkeys. Even though we did have two of them going off on Sunday morning.
We'll keep messing with the crawfish as we turkey hunt.....which is probably a good idea, because if we are as good at it as last year the crawfish are about all we will leave the woods with!!!!!
So the next day at work I am talking to one of our commercial fishermen, this guy catches catfish and eels for us, and he mentions that one of the guys he knows has been catching crawfish in some of the farm ditches using eel pots as if they were crawfish traps.
Upon hering this it occurs to me that there is no reason that Louann and I can not set a few eel pots in the ditches out where we are hog hunting.
Now you've got to realize that this is NE FLorida and while we have crawfish hardly anyone catches them except to use as bait.
So I borrowed a few eel pots from one of the other fishermen and baited them with catfish heads and after we finished looking for hogs the other night we tossed them in the ditches.
When we went back we had ( Only 5 traps ) about 5 pounds of good sized crawfish. Not a stellar performance but interesting.
Not having any more catfish heads to bait them with we rebaited them with some croaker and snapper heads. When we went back tonight, not so much to check the traps as to listen for turkeys, we had about 3 crawfish. Seems that the crawfish have a decided preference for catfish heads. Fortuinately we had more catfish heads to rebait with tonight.
And no, we did not hear any turkeys. Even though we did have two of them going off on Sunday morning.
We'll keep messing with the crawfish as we turkey hunt.....which is probably a good idea, because if we are as good at it as last year the crawfish are about all we will leave the woods with!!!!!
