Crayfishing?

S7ewie · Oct 22, 2018

Does anyone here fish or trap crayfish?

I go camping a fair bit and I like the idea of setting up a trap or catching some crayfish on a line to cook for dinner. From what I can gather though it’s not as simple as throwing a trap in a river and leaving it. It seems to be quite highly regulate with tags and certification needed for traps and traps being certain dimensions to be legal.

What do I need and where can I go? What else do I need to know and are the collapsible traps as good as the solid plastic ones?

Thanks

rich66 · Oct 22, 2018

Looked into it myself, looks straightforward enough as long as you follow the Gov. guidelines. License is free from what I remember ?

Permission to trap crayfish, eels, elvers, salmon and sea trout - GOV.UK

S7ewie · Oct 22, 2018

Thanks, have you used one before? How do you ensure you don’t catch native ones? Also says you need to log what you catch. Does that mean you have to fill out a form every time you use it?

rich66 · Oct 22, 2018

I read about it all a couple of years ago never got round to doing it. There’s no way I’ve read of to not catch native crayfish you’d just log and return them, as for records I’m not sure but the way I read it you probably just return them once a year.

sam vimes · Oct 22, 2018

It's too much of a ball ache to bother with for most. You have to name the exact water and location and your licence to trap only covers the location you apply for. Nets must be of specific types and sizes. You are also obliged to complete catch returns.

Full details are available here. The necessary application form is here.

Even if you do things by the book, there's no guarantee that you'll get approval.

john step · Oct 22, 2018

You would think the powers to be would be glad to get rid of them from the water???

xenon · Oct 22, 2018

*******s to all that red tape-anything you can do to reduce the numbers of the little darlings is fine by me.

mikench · Oct 22, 2018

They are a nasty invasive species killing off our native crayfish, young fish ( eggs) and damaging the river bank and you have to go through this nonsense! You couldn't make it up! I know what I would do! They taste delicious!

S7ewie · Oct 22, 2018

john step said:
You would think the powers to be would be glad to get rid of them from the water???

That’s exactly what I was thinking! No wonder they’re overpopulating if they’re that hard to get rid of.

Sounds like this won’t work for me then as we don’t tend to camp in the same place all the time.

mikench · Oct 24, 2018

If they are in the water just freeline a bait ! A garden cane and string , will be enough. Traps are widely available. If they were in my waters I would lower in the trap with bait at the beginning of the day and see what was there at the end.

Philip · Oct 26, 2018

I keep seeing reports about rivers having so many Cray fish per square meter that literally nothig else lives there...they are just barren deserts heaving with 1000 crayfish under every pebble and breeding & spreading like wildfire ...Then I read that we are heading for a worldwide food shortage problem.

...Can you see where I am going with this ?

-Cray fish starter, Carp main course and Cane toad dessert-

TrickyD · Oct 27, 2018

A club I once belonged to had a guy offer his services to trap crayfish. Soon kicked him off when they found he was keeping the bigger ones & putting small ones back to grow on.

mikench · Oct 27, 2018

They are delicious and more expensive than prawns! We can almost wipe out cod stocks in entire oceans but cannot harvest signal crays from small rivers and lakes! I don't get it!

Declare open season on the little blighters I say! Smoked with hot pepper sauce creole style; delicious!

S7ewie · Oct 28, 2018

Yeah, with so much red tape around the subject it almost sounds like we’re protecting them!

I can understand registering, getting tags and applying to the specification so that they can keep track and save otters but why everything else? Sounds like most people would be happy to get rid of a few here and there.

On that note though, anyone who does trap them, can you recommend a good trap?

bullet · Oct 28, 2018

I applied for a licence to trap them on a local river a few years back and was refused.
According to the EA, the research they have done suggests that removing the large male Crayfish i.e. the ones people want to eat, can actually make the problem worse, as they eat a lot of the little ones.
I replied and said I would be taking all of them( obviously not the white claws),
but they weren't having it.

S7ewie · Oct 28, 2018

By the sound of it, our native ones are pretty much screwed either way. So why not let us take out some of the american ones and reduce some of the other problems they cause?

mikench · Oct 28, 2018

The EA are run by idiots who lack plain old common sense! Nobody but nobody has a good word for signal crays unless they live in the USA where they are eaten in their millions!

I believe you are not allowed to return them to the water in any event as if anyone would! The current situation needs to be studied for many years yet until our native cray becomes extinct, fish stocks decline, river banks erode and the issue is utterly beyond hope! However by then we will have colonised Mars and space and can go polluting and messing about there!oOh we already are!

xenon · Oct 28, 2018

bullet said:
I applied for a licence to trap them on a local river a few years back and was refused.
According to the EA, the research they have done suggests that removing the large male Crayfish i.e. the ones people want to eat, can actually make the problem worse, as they eat a lot of the little ones.
I replied and said I would be taking all of them( obviously not the white claws),
but they weren't having it.

think this is another case of a law(s) being unenforceable-who the hell is going to know what you're up to?

mikench · Oct 28, 2018

.............and do something about it! Nobody!

Traps are widely available! Here is an example!

UK legal, Collapsible mesh crayfish trap: Amazon.co.uk: Sports & Outdoors

I would only use the trap whilst fishing for the day so if anything else inadvertently got stuck it could be released!

rich66 · Oct 28, 2018

Sadly it’d be one of us generally law abiding rod license holders they’d love to punish if they did catch you.

Size of the bloomin things walking over the weir near me you’d think they where a small lobster!

Crayfishing?

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