Catchin' Crawdads

This was definitely one of the funniest things I've had for a while. When the little man and I went fishing recently, we ran into a bit of an issue.. I set his pole up with a lure, a lure we just bought a few hours before mind you.. lol and unfortunately I gave it a test cast.. and boom. The line on the push button reel was apparently at the end of the length of it and boom.. away goes the lure! I was pretty annoyed but the good thing is the place, I guess good in this regard, that we were fishing at is a lake that they drain for the winter and where the lure was is a place that's accessible when the lake is drained. It's going to take a little bit to get out there since we have to let the mud dry out a bit otherwise it's just an insane infestation of flies and gnats which isn't very fun.

To the point of the post though! Since the fishing plans didn't go as we wanted them to and I felt bad letting the little man use my fishing pole but he kept telling me that he wants me to fish as well, I figured let's do something different. I went to get some waders on and see if I could go out there and get the lure that we lost and it turned out that the area was mostly mud and I wasn't planning on sinking in the mud lol so I opted to not do that. With the waders on though, decided to look around.

One of the areas we were looking around at ended up being this giant fucking spiders lair! Holy shit this thing was massive lol obviously it was a mama with her babies underneath her. Was wild to see for sure! I don't think I've ever seen a spider that big in my life and the damn thing was in New Hampshire! Lol not in Texas or Florida or some shit! Wild.

When we were walking around looking for lures that people lost, the little man wandered off for a while and was doing his own thing. All of a sudden he gives me a shout to come over and see what he found. I thought it was a nice lure or something but sure enough, nope! The little man definitely has a way with catching things wherever he goes hahaha. This is my first ever crawdad that we've caught! It was super cool!

I've always thought of crawdads or crawfish as something that only lived in the southern part of the United States but apparently they are much more widespread than that and are all over the place. Pretty awesome!

We ended up catching 6 crawdads but the funny part about it was that some of the little shits escaped! Granted I know this bucket wasn't the biggest or best way to store them but somehow we lost a couple along the way. They weren't very big and I was tempted to turn one or more of them into bait to see if I could catch something good, we saw a recent video on YouTube on how to do that. I opted against it though and we were having fun catching them and showing the other people that were there fishing. They were all amazed that we caught crawdads lol. I guess it was better to catch crawdads than nothing! We didn't catch squat for fish in the few minutes that we were actually fishing.

I was also surprised at how relatively easy it was to catch them. We didn't have to bend over backwards to snag them and although they did have the ability to skirt away and one did, most of them weren't fast enough like crabs and shot away when we flipped over a rock. I guess that's why I don't see more of them perhaps lol they are a little easy to get ahold of!

What was cool too was that just like lobsters in the ocean, these things had a blue tint to them! I will eventually look up why that is but I felt that it was very interesting and pointed that out to the little man who was pretty excited to learn about it. This fella here had gotten into some beef of course and he was sans 1 claw. He made sure to clamp on ya with the one he did have though! The little man was toying with the crawdads to see if they would pinch him and for a while they didn't but if you provoke them enough you're going to get the business end of the claw! This one didn't hurt a whole lot which was good but it was still pretty funny to see.