Crawfish

I have a friend that was wondering if he had to have a fishing license to fish for crawfish?

not in Oregon 
 should be in the Wa. synopsis though.

Right in the first few pages of the WDFW regs book: "You do not need a license if you are fishing for common carp, crawfish, bullfrogs, smelt, or unclassified marine invertebrates."

There are regs for them and seasons though (Page 133 in the regs book). Make sure to check them before getting out.

Z

thanks Zee

Good eating!!!

Good eating!!!

Pete,
I take it from that post and your moniker that your originally from somewhere south south east of up here? (Southeast Louisiana?) Then you should be able to appreciate this beasty from from the great Pacific Northwest!



Oregon's (and I hear WA's) rivers are brimming with these bad boyz and almost nobody eats them! Oregon also boasts the oldest Crawfish festival in the United States. But they don't really know what they are doing as they let me win the Crawfish eating contest in 2002 and I know I could not even make it through the qualifiers in Breaux Bridge. Throw in the fishing and I knew I'd died and gone to heaven!

They are a bit different than Louisiana crawfish and not all of them are that friggin big, but on the whole they are bigger and meatier than ours (especially the claws <paws>)

If anybody's interested I'll post the details of a simple trap that I got from a commercial crawfisherman in OR that's made of two 5 gal buckets. A couple of those will fill a sack in relatively short order.

Aight I've been crawdading since I could walk in the valley and coast range but I've never snagged one that big!  Where in the heck did you grab that monster?? Or do you just have really small hands ;-)

Where in the heck did you grab that monster?? Or do you just have really small hands ;-)

That is my wife's hand, but she's not that small (5'11")



This is Elvis and friends before cooking. He is the biggest, but he's not that much bigger than most of his kin. That tiniest one is what I'm more accustomed to from LA.

If anybody's interested I'll post the details of a simple trap that I got from a commercial crawfisherman in OR that's made of two 5 gal buckets. A couple of those will fill a sack in relatively short order.
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I'm interested in in any details of the hows, where and when of catchin those little bugs. My kids used to catch them by hand in the creek we lived on in Trinity co. Ca. Yum! What's the Oregon regs on them?

If anybody's interested I'll post the details of a simple trap that I got from a commercial crawfisherman in OR that's made of two 5 gal buckets. A couple of those will fill a sack in relatively short order.
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I'm not sure I'll survive another day without those plans. Do your best to keep a fellow 'yakker alive and post those details soon.

Limit in oregon is 100 per day no more than 200 in your possession.  Most places are open but you'll still wanna check the regs.

During the summer of 01 and 02 (I'm a teacher so I had to do something ) I gave commercial crawdad fishing a go.  It was a lot of fun but also a lot of work.  Learned a bunch.. Never made much money if you figured my time into it.  Had 3 strings of 100 traps that I moved around. Commies have a minimum size and it was not uncommon to see nice big ones like FFTW had, it mostly depended on location. My go to bait was chunks of carp, shot with bowfishing gear.