How to Catch Crawfish (UNDERWATER GoPro View!)

what is up guys welcome to the channel my name is matt and in today's video i'm going to show you how to catch crawfish just like this one whenever i decide on where to start trapping crawfish i never look at what's above or the size of the body of the water or anything like that whether it's a stream a river a pond a lake it really doesn't matter what's above the water so much as what's below the water let's take a closer look alright as you can see here there are like hundreds and hundreds of these rocks and this is exactly what you want to look for when trying to locate crawfish if you know a body of water has crawfish this is definitely where you want to set your traps is on top of these rocks what you don't want to do is set your traps on a place like this look at this a little bit of vegetation a couple pebbles very small rocks nothing big nothing for the crawfish to hide under or to make homes under really lacking crawfish habitat and the ratio of what you catch and all those big rocks and everything compared to this would be drastically different all right guys we're gonna start off by talking about the gear that i use to trap these crawfish these are the g's g40 style minnow traps these are pretty popular and the only modification that i make to them is that i open up the holes from the inch wide diameter that they come from the factory to an about an inch and a half okay now that we've located where we want to be on this body of water as you can see there's a bunch of rocks down there we're gonna start setting up our equipment you can see the bag that i'm carrying it's just a big waterproof bag like duffel bag style it's a good place to keep all the trash throw it on your back they stack together nicely and it's a really efficient way of carrying your equipment out there you can see the bait that i'm using here these are river herring these are from the ocean and i know that a lot of people don't have access to them however all that you need to trap crawfish for bait is something oily there are baits that work better than others but i've seen people use cat food dog food pretty much anything that gets a lot of scent into the water fast is what you're going to want to use i'm throwing about three or four herring into each trap at a time that's just because of the amount that i had they probably won't eat all these in one night just because it's a little bit cold right now and they don't really develop a huge appetite until the water gets really warm it's about 15 to 20 feet of line i'd say and the trap's landing in about seven to 12 feet of water i dragged back the trap and re-through it just to get a little bit of extra scent out in the water i'm not sure if it makes a big difference or not but that's what i decided to do today all i do now is i just try and camouflage it a little bit i understand it's a white rope and if people want to find it they'll be able to see it quite easily but i just tie it off kind of low on a tree it's nice because the water's high in this particular spot right now so i can kind of get it down towards the base of the tree there but anyways the goal is just tied off so that nothing like turtles or anything in the water could pull it away potentially and there you have it trap number one is set i'm gonna repeat this process about five more times and then all that's left to do is wait okay guys it is now the next day and we are back at that first trap the one with the white rope all that i'm doing here is just rinsing out the five gallon bucket that i brought so as i said before we did set six traps there and i saved you the process just because it is repetitive it's the same thing over and over again however what we don't know is how many crawfish we're going to get out of each trap when we go and pull them and that's why i'm going to show you each one just to show you the amount of crawfish that came into each trap it's kind of cool to compare and everything like that i'm gonna guess at this location but some days traps do perform better than others it looks to me like we got about 20 to 30 out of this first trap they definitely didn't eat all the bait in there which is kind of expected because it's a little bit cold still when the weather warms up they really have an appetite and you'll come back and all that will be left is just a couple of pin bones and that's pretty much it from these bait fish all i'm doing now is just adding the crawfish to the bucket and discarding the extra bait that's pretty good for one trap especially for this time of the year as you can tell they didn't eat all the bait but you can see what they do to the bait and they pretty much strip it right down to the bones it's actually pretty incredible what these crawfish can do overnight i'm just pulling in the next trap here guys this is actually a homemade trap there's nothing too special about it though it's just a cylinder with two hole entrances uh pretty much just like the g's as you can see here in this trap we got about 15 to 20 crawfish out of it that's not great but every little bit helps here we are pulling trap number three i hope you guys can appreciate my camouflaging there this trap did fairly well i'd guess like another 15 to 20. these crawfish are super spunky coming out of that water this next trap it was actually quite a bummer it was really light while i was pulling it in and i realized that uh half the trap was lost into the water and i'm not sure if the clip came undone or a turtle maybe got to it but it does happen sometimes so it's not a big deal i'll just pick up another one when i'm at the store next time you can see this next trap here also did pretty well i'd guess like maybe 20 to 30 of them they crawl really fast to get out of the trap uh i'm not sure exactly why they're so spunky coming out of this water today but they're on a mission just dumping them into the bucket there i'll pull the unused bait out here after coil up this trap and get it back into the bag as you can see in the bucket they're pretty good amount in there we're going to count them when we get back to the house okay back at the house now and i'm just giving them a quick rinse off it's kind of important that you do this if you're going to eat any for food if you're going to use them for bass bait you don't really have to worry so much about rinsing them off obviously but you'll be able to see just how much stuff comes off of these guys just from the outside of their shells see look at how cloudy that water is there's a lot of stuff that comes off them just from the outside of their shells i definitely suggest giving them a good rinse off and also putting them inside a tank or a cooler or something with some water and aeration for at least 24 hours if you're gonna eat any of them it gives them a chance to really clean out and purge their bodies all right guys so what we're gonna do is we're gonna take the crayfish out of that five gallon bucket and put them into this cooler and then we're gonna get some aeration on them i also wanna count how many there are i think there's probably gonna be over a hundred but uh we'll find out here in a second [Music] i counted uh 191 and i could have got it a little bit off but i'm pretty sure that i was pretty accurate with my counting and that's only in one night and it's still early in the season too we would have done a lot better if we would have had some warmer weather lately you can see there's a couple dead down there at least they looked at i'll check to see if they're alive or dead i'll probably just throw them out if they are dead because i really don't have a used form it's part of the process you know you lose a few it's no different than trapping shiners or something like that they definitely got some nice colors on them though those are good looking crayfish and they're also nice and clean i only noticed a few that had some mud on them so i had to include this in the video guys this is what these crayfish have cleaned off of their bodies and out of their bodies in just 24 hours there is a ton of stuff that came off of them that's why it's so important that if you're gonna eat these things you have to give them the chance to clean themselves and clean out their bodies in a tank or a cooler with some aeration and clean water otherwise you're going to be eating all of that the nice thing is if you're just using them for bass bait or for fishing bait you can use them right away straight out of the pond that water is now clean again i'm gonna give them like one more day i'm gonna eat the big ones and use the small ones for bait if you're actually curious if the crawfish that we trapped today could escape the traps that we use please feel free to click the video right here i hope that you guys enjoyed this video if you did please hit the subscribe button and also hit the like button on this video i'll see you guys in the next one [Music]

Channel: Live Free Fish More

Views: 658,069

Keywords: crawfish, crawfish trap, crayfish trap, crayfish trapping, crawfish trapping, how to catch crawfish, how to catch crayfish, crawfish in trap, crayfish in trap, gopro in fish trap, gopro in trap, how to trap crawfish, how to trap crayfish, how to trap, trap, live free fish more

Id: uNbGJrWC0e0

Length: 7min 52sec (472 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 29 2019