Since we enjoy fishing in our pond I thought that I would make a couple of crayfish traps so we could have some larger bait. We use worms most of the time when we fish and we catch lots of perch with them. This year I am going after bigger fish since the perch are a pain to filet. For one of my new baits I will be using some of my crawfish. I also enjoy catching crawfish by hand but that can take a lot of time so I am going to try something new.
The material I am using for the traps is 1/4x1/4 hardware cloth. This has worked out well for minnow traps in the past so I am hoping that it will also work for the crayfish.
I am using a 2'x2 1/2' piece of the hardware cloth.
I then bent it into a roughly shaped cube with no ends. It is 4" high and 11" wide. This is my first time making a square trap. usually when I would make minnow traps they would be a cylinder.
I then cut one of the ends 4" so that way I could get and end cap. I only used one side for this and I ended up cutting off the other three sides
Another thing is that I left the ends pointed so that way I could bend them over and have a stronger seam.
I also bent over the extra hardware cloth on the long end. Here is what the trap looked like after I got all of the edges seamed together.
I then installed the ramp for them to go up so that they get trapped. Since I cut off the extra on the back side I was able to use that for the ramp. To install the ramp I bent the extra hardware cloth around the outside to get a good bond. Once the ramp was installed it is amazing how much the trap stiffened up.
Just to make it a little bit harder for the crayfish if they try to escape I used the rest of my leftover hardware cloth and made two little walls pointing diagonally towards the back of the trap. This is so if they try to climb up the walls and get out they wont have anything to climb on too to get back out the ramp. I hope that that made sense:).
Here is the finished crayfish trap.
I will do another post when I set the trap and catch the first crayfish.
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