Training Guide On

Learn How To Catch Crawfish Successfully!

Learn How To Make Money Catching Crawfish!

Anyone, Any Where, can make decent money either Part Time or Full Time, trapping and selling crawfish!
Learn beginner to advanced levels in trapping and marketing crawfish.
Learn from one of the oldest and up to date commercial crawfish trappers in the Nation!

This Training Guide goes into great detail on how to do just that at a beginners level with a low startup cost. The Training Guide covers the many differences in;

Trapping,
Marketing,
Processing,
Procedures,
Trap Building.
Much More.

The Training Guide is for both beginner and experienced crawfish trappers.

Currently, 200,000,000 pounds of commercial crawfish are harvested annually and consumed in the USA. This amount seems large but demand seriously out weighs the supply. Helping fill this demand is something you can be part of either Part Time or Full Time. In 2011 commercial trappers sold crawfish from $2.50 a pound to $8.00 a pound depending where and how the crawfish were marketed. A very large percentage of this amount of production are produced by crawfish farms and very few people have ventured into wild trapping of crawfish. 

Wild crawfish populations in all states are huge and nearly in all states crawfish are grossly overpopulated. I have personally found a few areas where entire lakes have such huge populations of crawfish that are becoming stunted. This is a untapped resource waiting for someone to take advantage of it. The crawfish market is HUGE and growing every year!

Why are there not many Wild Crawfish Trappers? That is an easy question to answer. The three main reasons. How to trap crawfish commercially. How to market crawfish. How to afford the startup cost of commercially trapping crawfish. All the answers and many more are addressed in detail in the Training Guide. Anyone can make money trapping crawfish!

I started trapping crawfish in the PNW in 1970. I was 20 years old with 2 kids, plus another kid would show up soon. Most young families don't have much at that age even during the good times. I was in the group of not having much. In the early 70s things were worse then they are today well, or so it seemed at the time.   
1970 was the pivot point in my life and little did I dream that it would be at the time. 1970 was the start of the newly established Swedish market for crawfish in the PNW and basically no one knew about crawfish including myself. The only thing I had going for me was a night job as a janitor cleaning up bars and restaurants after hours, such fun but real jobs were hard to come by and with a hungry family one does what one has to. I remember I was getting around $1.80 an hour which was good money then and I was grateful for the job, of course not to many people wanted to clean up bars, grin.

Another advantage I had was I knew about commercially trapping crab but, in reality starting out catching crawfish is a whole new ballgame then catching crab! Still, I figured that if I could make a few extra bucks during the day catching crawfish it would help put a little extra into the budget at home which was greatly needed.

Thankfully there was a already established buying station for crawfish set up on Lake Whatcom in Bellingham WA. I went there and saw dozens of live tanks, many with crawfish in them, and talked to the buyers. Several people were already selling to them and they would buy all the crawfish I could catch live for $.50 a pound but, basically they were of no help on how to catch them other then to talk to some of the other trappers. I'm grinning to myself as I type this because that advice went so nowhere that it is still funny that I actually thought I might get help from other trappers on how to catch crawfish! The buyers were of no use because it was to new of a market plus their trappers wouldn't tell them anything either. All the buyers did is make sure the crawfish were alive, weighed them up, wrote out the check, and were delighted when someone brought them in 400-500 pounds of crawfish. 

To be honest, I can't remember why I decided to go ahead and try and catch crawfish. I didn't have a boat or traps nor did I know what a crawfish trap looked like. I don't believe that I had the attitude that, 'if they can do it so can I,' nor did I dream of making tons of $$$, I think I was probably just desperate. I did have a car and have the use of my Dad's old 1953 Ford Panel truck. It wasn't to much later I found an old wooden, very heavy, 12' row boat I could also use, all I needed now was traps.

Traps, if only I knew then what I know now! Of course that applies to everything I did during the first several years of crawfish trapping, LOL!  Elsewhere in my web site describes the journey I went through to finally develop the ultimate crawfish trap. At the time, I was able to start crawfish trapping with basically the cost of gas being the only expense. For traps, I salvaged old chicken wire and used old oak pallet boards to use as a square framework for the traps. It took quite a while to build them but once I was done they still looked like hell plus they were heavy! 

Thankfully, I was able to catch a few crawfish with them but I was losing traps by them getting hung up on the bottom plus there was the factor of getting the heavy traps into the boat. Crawfish trapping then was slow and tiring plus pretty discouraging. What got to me and probably what kept me going was one trapper came in every day to the buying station with 250-300 pounds of crawfish. Finally I found out from the buyer that the guy was using what was called then, a Swedish trap. It was a coil of heavy wire covered with black cotton netting and the netting also formed a tunnel at each end. As I remember right, the guy was using about 250 of these traps, pulling all of them by hand and he sure was making a decent daily wage at the time. The buyer now had access to these type of traps and was willing to extend me credit for 25 Swedish traps and I could pay them off with crawfish sales. Keep in mind this was a huge amount of money back then and I am pretty sure the cost was $10.00 per trap. Also, I had a family to be responsible for. Being young I guess, I took the risk and made the deal on the traps. Immediately my catch jumped up to 1.5 to 2 pounds of crawfish per trap per day but I still had lots of troubles. Dead loss, the netting on the traps had to be repaired almost daily, and big list of other troubles that slowed me down. Again, if I only knew then what I know now! A Training Guide or advice would have saved me big time because I made SO many mistakes along the way. A person learns by their mistakes but mistakes are costly and can break you quickly!

After several years of hard lessons learned I ended up with 2 custom winch boats, over 500 ultimate crawfish traps producing 5000 to 6000 pounds of crawfish a day. I was the top producer of wild crawfish on the entire West Coast. 

I am often asked why I am not trapping crawfish now instead of building traps and giving advice. As a Stroke victim it is pretty hard to keep one's balance in a boat plus other items. So, to keep involved in something I love, building traps and giving advice keeps me going now plus hopefully put a little food on the table and pay the med bills. Over the years I have received tons of requests to write a book on Crawfish Trapping but until now have put it off.

The Training Guide goes into great detail how to have a low startup cost and finding or creating a Market for your crawfish. The Training Guide contains information for people who want to make money trapping crawfish either full-time, part-time, or just make a few hundred/thousand bucks occasionally. Advanced trapping Tricks & Tips, trap building guidelines, and other topics not on the main web site are also in the Training Guide. The Training Guide is laced with secrets I have not passed on to anyone!

   The Training Guide is still under construction and the completion date is yet unknown. 

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