Runnin' The Traps

Late the other afternoon Tricia and I got on our bicycles and rode a couple of miles west down our road.  It was a nice afternoon.  We stopped at the edge of a pasture and watched a cow in labor give birth to a little calf.  Cottontail rabbits were hopping this way and that across the road.  We came upon a crawfish boat at the edge of a pond.  It made a nice photo against the sunset and brought back some old memories.

In the early 80's my grandfather bought an aluminum pull boat and some traps for me and I crawfished and sold the catch to people in Oberlin for their crawfish boils.  There were very few people crawfishing back then.  Today, it's a bigger cash crop than rice for lots and lots of farmers.

Fast forward a couple of decades and I was back on the farm in Oberlin and crawfishing a little better than 120 acres of crawfish.  The boat was powered by a Honda engine.  You steer it with your feet with pedals on the floor.  A hydraulic pump turned a wheel in the back that pushed you through the water.  The reason that you steered with your feet is that you needed both hands for picking up the trap, emptying it out in the tray, and rebaiting it.  

All this was done on the run.  You never stopped the boat.  It seemed like a lot to do, but once you got in the rhythm, it was easy.  When the water was cold, you used fish bait.  That required you to chop up the fish into pieces in the morning.  The blood attracted the crawfish into the trap.  Fish bait was a stinky deal.  Blood and guts would get all over you.  Once the water temperature hit about 70 degrees, you switched to cubed bait.  No more chopping up fish and it didn't stink as bad.

Crawfishing was fun because you could see the money coming into the boat.  You knew what the price per pound was and could calculate your revenue and expenses as you caught.  Sometimes you caught more than crawfish.  Snakes liked to get in the traps.  You'd pick up a trap and dump it in the tray and come face to face with a big snake looking at you!  I kept a shovel in the boat and I'd chop up the snake and use it for bait.  (It's a dog eat dog world)

There were competitors out there trying to catch the crawfish, too.  Raccoons learned to nocturnally run my traps.  They'd swim out and reach their arms into the trap and eat the crawfish, leaving just the heads in the trap for me to find the next morning.  Oftentimes, they'd turn the traps over sideways.  I couldn't see the traps and I'd run over them with the boat, ruining an $8 trap for each one I'd hit.  I would set some traps and try to catch and kill the coons and would hunt for them, shooting them out of trees where they would be napping all full of crawfish.

The season ran from December until June, give or take.  In winter it would be SO cold, with ice on the water sometimes.  In summer it would be SO hot!  As it warmed up, it became hard to keep water in the ponds.  Crawfish like to burrow in the levees and that caused leaks.  Nutria and muskrats would cut the levees, too.  You'd arrive the next morning to fish and the levee would be dry.

I'd sell my catch to boil & go restaurants in Kinder, Hathaway, and Jennings.  Prices were high early in the season, but you weren't catching much.  As the weather warmed, the catch got better, but the prices dropped.  You learned everything you wanted to know about supply and demand.  Good Friday was the high point of the season and then prices dropped off a cliff.  I kept meticulous records, documenting the thousands and thousands of pounds we'd catch.

As summer approached, we began catching crawfish not to sell, but to restock.  We would 'seed' other ponds with crawfish for next year.  After seeding them, you'd slowly let the water out.  As the water level went down, the crawfish would burrow into the ground, down to the water table.  In October, when you would re-flood the pond, the crawfish would come out of their burrows with their young and the whole process would start again.

Crawfishing was a lot of fun!