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I have caught them in the traps but never dove for them.
They are very good. Strawberry has the largest population I have ever seen. Ririe does have a pretty good sized population also. I do not know much about the crayfish in other lakes.
Windriver
P.S. Please resize your pics under 300kb
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We caught a bucket full at Flaming Gorge one year. We decided not to eat them so the next morning we tipped the bucket over on shore and video taped them marching back in the water....the coolest thing I have seen[laugh]
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Wolcott has a lot of them. we filled a 5 gal bucket while camping there just by walking along the shore at night with a flashlight and long handled net.
The water clarity may not be the best for snorkling but if you prebaited with some chicken backs and then dove those spots that would work good. Or just bait and pull the string in slowly and scoop them up with a net.
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I seen a huge one at the North boat launch at Island Park res.
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Ok, I've decided to try it. I'm going out tomorow. Are there any tricks to finding them? I assume to look in the rocks, but anything else?
Also how do you cook them. When I go crabbing, we always boil them for 15 minutes, is it the same for crawdads? Any advice would be appreciated, if not I'll just jump in to it and tell you how it went.
Thanks
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1st, get yourself a net, a small mesh net that the buggers cannot crawl through. If you want to stay on the cheap, put a piece of nylon screen inside an existing net.
2nd, get a few pieces of string about 15' long, light string will work, even fishing line.
3rd, Go to the grocery store and ask the butcher if he has a package of chicken "Backs", if not, but the cheapest thing he has, if he has breast bones from making boneles breasts, they wil work good too.
4th, go to an area that is suspected of having a good population of dads. Tie the chicken parts to the string and throw them out. Hold on to the end. Stake it out so it can't be draggged into the water. When you have thrown all your lines out, about 15' apart on the bank...
Slowly lift the string, gently pulling it to you, as it nears shore, keep it of the bottom and scoop it up along with any clinging dads.
Throw them into a bucket and toss the string out again. Repeat with each string till you have enough.
I like to clean them out with a salt bath while still alive. I dip a bucket in the lake, about 6" of water. I add 1 cup of salt and fill with dads till they are just covered. In a minute or two they will start to puke up all the black stuff in their stomach. After about 5 minutes, take them out and rinse briefly with cold water and return to a clean bucket. repeat with all crawdads.
To cook, boil enough water to cover the dads. Add, 2 halved and squeezed lemons, 1/2 package of Zatarians crab boil, and the crawdads. Slow boil for 15 minutes and drain.
Eat them up.
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Hey Thanks for the recipe!
I made it out today for about a half hour (work, who needs it[mad]) But I managed to get probably about 15 or so snorkeling. I had a blast. Probably the best part was when I had caught a smaller one, and I noticed a few decent sized smallies tagging allong behind me, so I let it go and watched the flurry of action that followed!
Now I just hope that they taste good!
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Snorkling for them sounds like fun. I would still seed the water with some chicken backs. I would make a trot line of 5 or so chicken backs or necks and just swim back and forth along it snatching the crawdads up as I saw them.
You should have an inner tube along with you to keep your crawdads at and to rest if you get tired. If you inflate a tire tube around a 5 gal bucket it works pretty good.
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That sounds awesome. You need to remove the blood line by wiggling the middle tail fin back and forth until it pulls off with the blood line intack.
Windriver
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Grab all three of the middle fins of the tail and with a twisting pulling motion the whole vein comes right out.
This is the spinal cord of the crawdad and removing it will instantly kill the crawdad, it must be iced as soon as you do this or they will start to spoil.
I do this as I'm filling the mesh boiler pot. Then I just lower the basket into the boiling water.
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When we go I usually get some bricks and tie some chicken pieces to the bricks, then tie a plastic pop bottle to the bricks and set these out about every 30 feet in about 15 feet of water. Then wait about an hour or so. We usualy bring along an onion sack or something with a drawstring to put them in. Then I like to wear some gloves because the bigger ones can hurt if they get ahold of you. If there are two or more of you dive down to the bricks at the same time because most of the time there will be more crawdads on there than one guy can grab. Also if you hesitate they will scurry off, you got to be quick and grab them fast. Also if you hesitate they are more likely to pinch yah. Once we've caught enough I sort through our catch and throw the small ones back for another time. We usualy boil them with crab boil and some lemmons and onions. Although we only boil them for about 6 or 7 minutes any longer than this and the meat seems to shrivel up. Also right before we boil, we devein them. All we do is grab the middle tail fan and twist it 180 degrees then pull it off with the vein attached. This really makes them mad so make sure the claws can't get yah. And they die right away after this so get them in the pot before they spoil. Also if you plan on going make sure you are going to eat them fairly soon afterwards so they don't go to waste. They will stay alive for quite a while if you keep them in fresh cool water and if any do die you need to remove them quickly or they will poisen the rest of them and they will all start to die. Its a fun way to beat the heat and a really good work out to.
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es this spring and didn't catch any. Anyways its alot of fun and we usually average between 100 and 150 between the two of us in about two hours of diving. It takes about 30 of them to make a meal for one person.