My father has a farm pond that backs up to his property. I fished it all through high school, and always had success imitating crawfish. The bass in that pond usually had a gullet with 2 shad and one crawfish in there. So, I know the pond is loaded with them.

The prices of mud bugs is outrageous nowdays.

Does anyone have any experience catching your own? I have considered buying a trap and filling it full of dead stuff and collecting it every day for a weekend or so to see how I do.

Any tips/feedback/pointers on methods and/or resources to read before I start my little adventure would be appriciated.

You can make funnel traps out of chicken wire or buy one online and bait it with bacon or fish heads

I thought you did this with nothing but a piece of twine and a piece of bacon.

I doubt a small farm pond can sustain enough crawfish to get a meal out of

I have seen it done with a cast net but only for catching bait for fishing. I was definitely not enough for a meal.

The little WalMart minnow traps do a good job of catching crawdads. I'm unclear whether you're trying to get a meal or catch bait...

If you want bigger crawfish you'll have to build your own, but they are very effective. Just bait it with some stinky stuff. A dead fish works great.

I'm assuming you meant for bait. I'd buy one of the Frabill Crawfish Traps. Fish or chicken is probably your best bet for bait.

The pond is about 4 acres. I'm hoping to get 20lbs or so to cook.

Just be careful picking up the traps. I was picking one up out of the water one morning, and heard a loud clicking noise by my hand. It turns out the cottonmouth inside the trap was in a really bad mood and trying to bite me through the trap. Luckily the wire was too thin. I decided that trap had seen it's better days anyway.

Don't think you have a chance at 20 lbs buster.

Even if you could get 20#s out of the pond, it would need to be all in the same day to prevent die off and you would need a lot of traps. I'm thinking a sack of crawfish is cheaper.

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Just be careful picking up the traps. I was picking one up out of the water one morning, and heard a loud clicking noise by my hand. It turns out the cottonmouth inside the trap was in a really bad mood and trying to bite me through the trap. Luckily the wire was too thin. I decided that trap had seen it's better days anyway.

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I've got a dollar says your pants had probably seen better days at that point too.

Yeah after seeing LA crawfish farms and how many traps it takes for them to get 20 pounds I would have to say good luck.

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Just be careful picking up the traps. I was picking one up out of the water one morning, and heard a loud clicking noise by my hand. It turns out the cottonmouth inside the trap was in a really bad mood and trying to bite me through the trap. Luckily the wire was too thin. I decided that trap had seen it's better days anyway.

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I've caught many a snake in those traps too. Just a matter of moving them briefly to deeper water.

We used to run traps when I was in HS and juco. We made our traps and used whole shad as bait. Had enough after 2-3 days for a big boil.



A haul of about 30ish





Transported some to the deer lease bass pond

Dang that's pretty cool. How do they taste compared to Louisiana swamp crawdads?

We went to Texas Crawdaddys in Winnie Saturday morning and bought 3 sacks. They were great--a little on the small side but it's still a tad early. Will be back there in a month for 3 more sacks. $2.85/lb

I grew up with Shane who owns TX Crawdaddy's. He's good people, and they just opened a restaurant in Baytown

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I grew up with Shane who owns TX Crawdaddy's. He's good people, and they just opened a restaurant in Baytown

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Yeah, he said it's going well. Looks like they bought a new fridge truck and there were 4 vehicles there before they opened waiting on crawfish. Times must be good.

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I grew up with Shane who owns TX Crawdaddy's. He's good people, and they just opened a restaurant in Baytown

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Where is the restaurant in Baytown? I know there's a new crawfish place at Garth & Rollingbrook, not sure if it's the same though.

I was wondering the same thing about the taste.

It's called Heads or Tails 3517 Garth Rd.

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Holy carp, Professor Barnes chimed in on this thread and didn't claim to be the one that invented said trap where he got 40 lbs out of his pond when he was a yungin back in '73, '69, or aught6, whenever his time machine spit him out?

Slacker!!!