Where the crawfish swim
You may have been fishing, but have you ever been crawfishing? It’s an experience like no other and I had a chance to “get my feet wet” in this activity just this past week. Spoiler alert: It was awesome!
This event happened through the benevolence of my number one brother-in-law who has connections in South Louisiana to a field of active crawfish ponds. Three of my good friends and I made the journey from Navasota to Rayne, Louisiana the day before and the next morning we met my brother-in-law at a designated location to begin our unique experience.
We made a stop at the Egan Food Store in Egan, Louisiana to get a few supplies, but mostly to look around the store. It’s a true country store where you can get anything from hardware items to plumbing supplies to fishing gear. They even have food there, but mostly it’s a hang-out for the locals and a few lucky travelers.
When we got to the crawfish ponds, the seascape was a scene of murky water with pond lilies as far as the eye could see with a tree line off in the distance meeting the sky to form the horizon. We were in a true swampy area complete with the oddly smelling mud and the air was just steamy enough to make you sweat. Every now and then a dragonfly would pay us a visit to see what we were up to, but aside from that it was as if we were a thousand miles from nowhere.
The five of us climbed aboard a small aluminum boat that had been mod ified for this particular type of fishing. Instead of a traditional outboard motor, it had a paddle wheel that was used to push the craft through the ponds. My brother-in-law was the captain of the vessel, and he very skillfully steered the boat with foot controls through the vegetation where the crawfish traps were posted. Amazingly, he was also able to snag a crawfish trap on the fly, bring it onboard, dump it out on the sorting table, have it rebaited, and drop it back into the pond without even slowing down. The four of us amateur fishermen took turns sorting out the crawfish and rebaiting the traps while we made our way through the interconnected ponds and in a couple of hours, we had more sacks of crawfish than we had expected to get that day.
After we had caught our designated amount, (about 240 pounds) we loaded up our “catch of the day” in the truck and started our journey back home. If you put a pencil to it and factor in the cost of fuel, food, hotel rooms, and time away from work this endeavor would not look good on paper. Could we have saved money by simply purchasing crawfish locally? Maybe, but where’s the fun in that? It’s in these situations where I look at not only the cost, but the value. There definitely was a cost for this trip, but the value of hanging out and doing something extraordinary with my good friends – priceless.
The column represents the thoughts and opinions of Alan Shoalmire. Opinion columns are NOT the opinion of the Navasota Examiner.
Alan Shoalmire is a resident in Grimes County and the owner of Grill Sergeant Hotdogs and submits a column to the Navasota Examiner every other week.