Oregon Outdoors: Chasin' crayfish

When Glenn Goodwin gets a hankering for some cajun cooking, he heads across the Oregon border to spend a busy afternoon doing next to nothing.

Along a slow bend in Northern California’s Klamath River, he fastens together five wire-mesh traps, fills them with either chicken livers or dog food, then tosses them into the water to let the bait’s chum-slick do it’s work.

“Toss it out there as far as you can, and there you go,” Goodwin says. “Sit back and relax. You’re crayfishing.”

Whether you call them crayfish, crawfish, crawdads or just plain ’dads, catching and eating a mess of crayfish is an endeavor that should be on every Pacific Northwest outdoorsman’s bucket list — even if it means just one day chasing ’dads before you die.

From lazy spots in the Klamath River to the warm waters of Klamath Lake to any of a slew of summer creeks in the Rogue River basin, the feisty little crustaceans with their well-endowed pinchers aren’t hard to find.

A $12 trap and a 40-cent can of cat food can turn anyone into a crayfisher. The only other requirements are a bucket for the quarry, quick reflexes during some hand-to-pincher combat, and a suspension of maturity to crayfish the day away.

There is no limit to the number of crayfish one can catch on either side of the Oregon/California line, and there are barely any limits on how you can take them.

In Oregon, legal methods include hands, baited lines, nets, rings and traps. Only fishing hooks are banned, because some doofusses once used the ruse of crayfish fishing to angle illegally in some tributaries closed to fishing.

A string of small crayfish traps dropped into warm, slow waters where crayfish are known to fester on lazy summer days is about the only instruction left to pass along.

Toss them out, leave them sit for 20 minutes, “or 30 minutes, if you’re lazy,” Goodwin says.

Pull them in quickly, so as not to snare them on rocks. Pop them open and there you go.

Small ones and females get an aerial return to the Klamath. The targets are the males with one large, dangerous-to-the-digits claw.

“You can actually get a little meat out of it, if you’re persistent,” Goodwin says. “Every little bit helps.”

With some quick hands, Goodwin sorts the males into a 5-gallon bucket, where one feisty crustacean gets Goodwin’s thumb.

“You little bugger,” he says. “Oh, it hurts when they get you. You can count on that.”

About two dozen are enough for a meal, and even cooking them requires no heavy lifting: The requisite 12 minutes in boiling water to burn off all that’s unedible about the Klamath, then pop off the heads, peel off the shell, pull out the dark intestine-like membrane and you’ve got a meal revered in some American haunts.

In Oregon and California, the large ringed crayfish that dominate the waterways are non-native, and were first discovered in the Rogue River in the 1960s. They’ve since pushed native signal crayfish only to higher in watersheds.

Known among crustacean scholars as Oronectes neglectus, ringed crayfish are found throughout the Klamath. In the Rogue Basin, they are common in Elk Creek near Shady Cove and most of the Applegate River, as well as Evans Creek near Rogue River.

Howard Prairie Lake was once a crawdadders’ heaven, but illegally introduced smallmouth bass have chewed the crayfish population to the nub.

The only real difference is that crawdadding in California requires an angling license, whereas Oregon doesn’t consider crawdadding fishing, so no license — not even a shellfish license — is required.

On either side of the Agricultural Inspection Station, slow and deep stretches of water are the best places to toss traps that can be left out overnight and retrieved the following day.

Regardless, never skimp on the amount of smelly fish or catfood cans because the allure of smelly meat is what does the crayfish in.

“Crayfish are carnivores, so I use chopped up liver and dog food,” Goodwin says. “I put it in a mesh bag to keep it from all washing out.”

On a lazy Tuesday, Goodwin baits and chucks four crayfish traps into a scum-topped eddy of the Klamath upstream of Copco Reservoir.

He’s been crayfishing this particular river eddy for more than 20 years as a change of pace from ocean fishing or catching Dungeness.

“It’s always been a good producer,” he says. “I don’t intend to work up much of a sweat doing this.”

About the only difference between his early crayfish days and recent ones is his choice of seat.

“Now, it’s a camp chair,” he says. “It helps keep me coming back.”

Reach Mail Tribune reporter Mark Freeman at 541-776-4470 or mfreeman@rosebudmedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/MTwriterFreeman.