The most obvious and easiest bait to obtain is chicken parts, which are cheap and plentiful.īut carcasses of fish you cleaned, pogies and turkey necks all work.Īnd you don’t even have to launch a boat and go out to Marsh Island to enjoy a day of catching crabs. In the years since my introduction to blue crabs, I’ve learned you can bait traps and nets for the crustaceans with just about anything.
Two-ring nets like the ones Lake uses cost no more than $3 dollars each at your local hardware store or bait shop - probably a few dollars more at a marina.īut, you don’t have to get fancy: A sturdy string with bait tied to it and a dip net, works well too. The nice part about recreational crabbing is there is very little cost to get in on the fun. Log onto /tagged-crabs to read more about this Nicholls State University program. “You can only catch a 12-dozen limit, so that’s plenty to eat.”Īn added incentive for crabbers this year is the possibility of catching crab with $5 or $50 reward tags attached. Typically we’re finished crabbing by 8 or 9 o’clock if we start right at daylight. “We’ll then go back and make another pass. “Sometimes on one pass we’ll catch as many as 60 crabs,” the fishing guide said.
#CATCH BLUE CRAB FULL#
“All you do is bait the nets up, pick them up, dump them in a tub and grade them, throw the skinny ones back and keep the full ones.” “It’s just like raising up a crawfish net. “We’ll let them sit approximately 20 to 30 minutes, and then go run them,” Lake said. Then it’s just a matter of giving the crabs time to find the bait. We have cork floats on them and put out about 40 nets 20 to 30 yards apart.” You just put your bait in the center and drop them in the water. “And what we do is put out small crab nets - not crab traps, but the round two-ring crab nets. So when we go, we catch some real monsters. “What we do is go out on the reserve itself it’s illegal to crab commercially there. “Let me tell you, these crabs are so plentiful it’s unreal,” Lake said. Bill Lake takes a break from fishing to go crabbing, he prefers Point-aux-Chene WMA southeast of Houma. Guillot, talking about the crabbing pier where he and his family were catching their crabs said the island is perfect.Ĭrowded or not, there is plenty of room on Marsh Island and many of the other recreational areas the department has set up for crabbing or throwing a cast net for shrimp. Moise Guillot, who has a camp on Cypremort Point, was also out on Marsh Island with his family the day I spoke with Scully. But on the other hand, their daring inquisitiveness and emotional brush with something they deemed dangerous made them more confident with each afternoon encounter. On one hand, they would have this sort of apprehension that comes with getting pinched by a blue crab. The one thing that made our afternoon trips to the bayou in back of the trailer park so special all those years ago was the daily excitement of the kids. “But, once you get into the warmer summer months of June, July and August it’s usually pretty good.” Sometimes it depends on if they’re running. “Sometimes you have freshwater that has saltwater influence. “Crabbing depends on where you’re at recreationally,” Marx said. In fact, all across Louisiana’s coastline there are so much public crabbing opportunities you just might need an increase in your budget for a new wardrobe.Īnd the mid-summer months tend to be the best when it comes to recreational crabbing, according to LDWF Crustacean Biologist Jeff Marx. The island has several weirs and water-control structures the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries has set up for recreational crabbing and shrimping. And all of us caught our 12 dozen limits that day.” “I came out here with my brother and godchild,” Scully said. While dumping some pretty crabs he just caught into a basket, Scully said he’d had trips like the one that family was enjoying. Someone I happened to strike up a conversation with while out on the island was Howard Scully, a native of Morgan City who resides in Baton Rouge.
There we were, with not one piece of chicken or crab bait in the boat to switch to a plan B.Īnd that family was catching the tasty crustaceans like nobody’s business. With nothing more than a few pieces of string, plenty of chicken and dip nets, they were catching crabs - the pretty blue-clawed kind. With the intent of catching a few fish, we arrived at one of the island’s many weirs, where several families were having a blast. Last summer, I made a trip to Marsh Island with a couple of buddies in search of some clear water.
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