Free Bait! It's Bass and shellcracker season!
This time of year, crawdads (crayfish) are the bait of choice for the fisherman who knows what he's after. The water is warming up, the wet season has filled all the usual swampy ditches up, and the crawdads abound! Now, they might be a meal in themselves, but these guys came from a roadside ditch not too far from a field. I worry about the chemical runoff, so I wouldn't suggest eating these from the ditch, but the technique for getting them is pretty much the same.
I use a regular dip-net, look for grassy, wet ditches, and have a few goes. Basically you use an overhand drag, bouncing off the bottom. The crawdads will try to run, so you gotta be quick to scoop them out. It's pretty straightforward and you can get a LOT of bait with just a few scoops. This hole is only 100 yards or so from my house and we got well over 100 crawdads in about 5 minutes.
The overhand scoop. make a good swath of about 8 to 10 feet before pulling the net up out of the water. you can also make a couple short scoops, pulling toward you (from deep to shallow edge) and get a lot of crawdaddies.
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This is my buddy havin' a go. This is the second time he's ever harvested any crawdads and after fishing with them, he's hooked! (pun intended!)
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check to see if you got any, remove some but not all of the grass and such, and dump the whole thing in your bucket. Add a little water to the bucket, they are aquatic creatures!
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Nothing beats free bait to catch good eatin fish with. This time of year it seems to be the food of choice for feeding fish. We caught white, striped, and hybrid bass, largemouth bass, and bream and shellcracker, and speckled perch.. all of them on a sandy bottom at the mouth of a slough. Good times and good eats!
