Home Made Crawdad Trap.

Esquired asked about a crawdad trap so ... An easy,fast and cheap way to make a trap is to take a two liter bottle cut the top off where the bottle gets to the size of the main part. So now you have a funnel and bottle without the top. Take the funnel flip it around so the spout faces the bottom of the bottle (make sure the cap is off) put it in the rest of the bottle and duct tape or glue the two pieces together. Then punch a hole for a line so you don't loose it. Put some chicken liver or hot dogs or dog food in the bottle along with a few rocks and toss it out for an hour or so and you should get allot of crawdads. It doesn't work that great if your trying to catch a ton of the to eat but it works great if you just need a couple dozen for bait. I have had a couple that have been jam packed full. Or you can string two or three together and get more. All you have to do to get them out is take the tape off. Here is a pic. I painted the top so you can see it easier. I made this one in about ten min.

That's pretty cool, but I wanna see a bottle of critters

Thanks so much for the info. The streams and lakes here are packed with crayfish and I usually catch them by making the nephews wade around with scoop nets. (I end up wading as well, good time in the summer).

I read an article last year where the guy took bacon and some line and just threw that out. He said he would then wait about 1/2 and hour and pull it in slowly and the crayfish would be hanging on.

I tried it and got one. I will make a few traps and see how they work.

Thank you

I am going to try it myself! I just need to find a good stream to try this out on!

I have done the bacon thing. Toss out a line but you have to reel it slow. They wont let go even after you pull them out of the water.

Made two crayfish traps and put them out yesterday. Checked this morning and one was empty, the other was loaded with 4-5" tadpoles, perfect Bass Bait!

esquired said:

Made two crayfish traps and put them out yesterday. Checked this morning and one was empty, the other was loaded with 4-5" tadpoles, perfect Bass Bait!

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Esquired,
You made the traps that Bryce made above? If so.....AWESOME!

You can make a million of these and who cares if someone steals them.

Im going to post this on another forum.....I know horrible, but so what LOL!

sometimes I will cut the top of the bottle off a little more so bigger stuff can get in. I have cought minnows in them before too.

I made traps using the Bryce concept but had to make a few modifications.

1st, since I do not drink soda, I did not have any 2 liter soda bottles handy. I took a similar sized plastic jug (formerly used to hold dog treats) and cut the end off.

I then took some aluminum window screen and formed a funnel with that cutting a small hole in the end.

Finally, I screwed on the lid and used an old soldering iron to make a number of tiny holes so that my trap would sink without holding an air bubble. A few rocks and a scoop of dog food for bait and I "set" my traps.

One more thing, because the area where i set the traps might have a visitor or two, I used 80 lb mono line as the "pot line" so that it is almost invisible. I also placed the traps in the murky part of the water so they are not clearly visible. The best part is that they look like old trash that was washed in the stream.


I have to run now, Discovery Channel is here and they are filming me setting the pots for a new, "Mini Deadliest Catch" series!

Bumping up a good thread


Who else "pots" crawdads?

Captain Ahab said:

Bumping up a good thread


Who else "pots" crawdads?

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I just use a $10 minnow trap with some dry dog food. Not worried about someone stealing it around here.

When we were kids we would use a cricket bucket, make funnel shape with window screen and wire it to the bucket. We would put a piece on baloney in it and toss it in a ditch, then come back later and empty all the crawdads out.

When I was a kid, we could catch them with kite string, a safety pin and red worms. Our moms wouldn't let us take the bacon. :LOL2:

When we were kids, we would make the rounds to all the ditches in the area and use a crawdad rake. I'm not sure if that's something that's common in other areas but a home made rake was very common around here. Now, with all the chemicals that the farmers are using and the runoff into the ditches, it seems like the only place to get any crawdads now is to buy them from the people that raise them to sell for eating and those cost anywhere from 3-4 dollars a lb. And those are really too big to use for bait IMO. Bullfrogs are another animal that seem to be scarce now days compared to what they were back in the early 70's.