HOW TO CRAWFISH.

The year was 1972.  It was only a year after finishing my tour of duty with the United States Marine Corps where I had spent some time sloshing through the rice paddies of Vietnam and was thoroughly glad to have those times behind me.

My girlfriend, "Candy", was a Cajun girl by the name of Ethel Ann Brulte and she was very close to her sister Geneva and brother-in-law Shelby Laborde, both of them, Cajuns as well.  At that time I didn't really know much about my future wife's family but I was learning that Shel-ba-dy (as Shelby was often called,) was quite the hunter and fisherman.  Shelby came from a long line of Cajun men, his parents both of Cajun heritage.  I had no idea just how much he knew about fishing and hunting as this was my first experience in hunting or fishing with him and his family.

I was still trying to impress my girlfriend "Candy"at the time and when Shelby offered to take me on crawfishing trip with her, I didn't hesitate to say yes, although I had not been around him or even knew very much about him at all.  It was going to be a family outing with Shelby, Geneva (his wife) and his sons Steve and Chris who was just a baby at the time.  The girls would stay with the boys and Shelby and I would catch the crawfish.

Now if you don't know about boiled crawfish, you must know that here in Louisiana, especially in South Louisiana, boiled crawfish is considered a delicacy.  They are boiled in highly seasoned water, sometimes using the same water to boil corn or potatoes, making them taste very peppery, since Cayenne pepper or Chinese red pepper is one of the key ingredients.  You can Google the recipes for boiling crawfish if it is something you'd like to try.  Down here in the New Orleans area, seafood boils are extremely common with most families owning and using their own boiling pots to fix up a batch of boiled seafood whether it be crawfish, crabs or shrimp.

Now one of the funny parts about this story is that I had never been crawfishing before.  Being the Marine that I am, I decided to take my medicine and tell Shelby that I didn't know anything about crawfishing.  I remember that he didn't laugh or belittle me for not knowing and that endeared him to me right away.  He quickly explained that he already had all of the gear and all that I would have to do is to show up at 6:30 AM on a Saturday morning.  He also said that I should bring a change of clothes and explained that we might "get a little dirty".  I didn't think much about that because I had seen people crawfishing from the sides of the highways all over South Louisiana for years and they didn't seem to be getting all that dirty from what I could see.  Anyway, I brought a change of clothes like he suggested and met the family at 6:30 AM at their home in New Orleans, Louisiana.

I placed my small bag of extra clothing in a paper bag into the back of the large SUV and off we went.  My smiling girl friend had a twinkle in her eye and I didn't know if it was her being happy that I decided to do the crawfish trip or if there something else to come.  There was a nice conversation shared by everyone in the SUV on the way to Laplace, Louisiana, probably about a 30 minute ride to the location Shelby had chosen to try his "luck".

Shelby had brought ten crawfish nets and about 20 chicken necks for bait.  Yes, the crawfish love chicken necks and they are a sturdy piece of meat that will last a long time as the crawfish try to gnaw the meat off of the bone.  The crawfish neck, is tied in the middle and at the bottom of the net, so that the chicken neck will help sink the net below the round metal ring which the net is tied to.   A string is tied to the top of the metal ring in a triangular fashion so that you can hoist the net using a long slender pole.  Most people crawfish in shallow waters, standing on the shoreline of bayous, swamps and use cane poles or other poles about 6-8 feet in length to place and retrieve the nets.  People also catch crawfish on crawfish farms where rice fields or other shallow places where water collects and crawfish thrive and those commercial operations almost always include using a boat and all metal "traps" that are rectangular-shaped and about 2 x 4 x 2 feet in size.

As we got off the Interstate 55 onto highway 51 which runs along side of the Interstate for a ways, I could see that the area we were driving toward was a very large swamp, filled with Cypress trees and the swamp had a thick, bright green algae covering the entire swamp's water.  Not many people know this, but crawfish eat the green algae or so I once read.  As the SUV approached the chosen area, I began to see vehicles parked along side the road.  The vehicles covered at least two city blocks and people were already lined up on the shoreline, with nets in the water.  We were a little late getting there and I was kind of worried because there were NO vacant spots available for us to place our nets.  All of the spots were taken.  I mentioned this to Shelby and he said, "You don't have to worry about that".  I didn't know what he meant by that but just accepted his words and didn't concern myself with how we were going to find a spot to put our nets in, when all the spots were taken.

Shelby parked the SUV and we all got out of the vehicle and that's when he told me, "Take your wallet, keys and anything else in your pockets and put them in the SUV.  I didn't know what that was all about but the Marines had trained me to obey orders from a senior officer and Shelby as definitely senior in this regard.  He handed me 5 nets and instructed me to tie on one chicken neck to the center of each net and he did likewise.  It didn't take long to do that and he handed me two nylon sacks which were what I think he called 30lb sacks, which would be to put the crawfish in.  These nylon sacks had thousands of holes in them so the crawfish could breathe and stay alive for a longer period of time.  Shelby had a ball of string in which to tie the nets but I still saw no long cane pole and was definitely wondering now about where we were going to place the nets and didn't think we could grab the nets with our hands and so I finally inquired.  He simply said, "Come on, follow me."  I was perplexed but this wasn't my area of expertise, so I remained silent and followed.  We were walking along side the road, next to the swamp and the ditch that everyone had lined up on.

There must have been over a hundred people crawfishing off the side of the road that day.  I had never seen that many people gathered in one spot just to crawfish and I saw no available spots for us.  Families were standing shoulder to shoulder, guarding their precious crawfishing spots and we walked along the long line, me looking ahead, seeing no available spots for us to occupy.  Finally after walking about a quarter of a block there was this tiny hole of about four feet that one family had left open.  Shelby gave me the nod and said, "C'm on" and he stepped between the people occupying the road, into the ditch and started walking out into this vast green swamp.  I was shocked but followed closely behind him, trying not to glance at the people who we walked past.  Now just so you get the picture, EVERYONE was fishing off the side of the road, standing on dry land, with their nets sitting in the shallow ditch that bordered the vast green swamp. Shelby walked further into the swamp, thoughts swirled through my head; "what about alligators, what about water moccasins (snakes) and what about quicksand?"  I had heard that you could walk into a swamp and the ground beneath the water might be so soft that it would suck you up in an instant and you would be unable to extricate yourself from the sucking mud and would drown in the water.  The water level as we crossed the ditch was knee high and it started rising very quickly, thigh deep then waist deep, then chest deep and as I soldiered on behind my apparently undisturbed crawfishing companion, something started hitting me on my legs and they were hitting my legs relatively hard and to be honest, I got really concerned.  I first thought that we had riled up a bunch of snakes and they were attempting to bite me through my blue jeans.  I thought to myself, thank God I have on long blue jeans, not contemplating that snakes could easily bite through the blue jeans, just holding on to whatever hope my racing mind could conjure up.  I was trying to keep Shelby from knowing how concerned I was and didn't say anything to him as I walked directly behind him out into this vast swamp.  The water was now just above my pectoral muscles and I would have to start swimming if it got any deeper, when I whined, "Shelby, SOMETHING IS HITTING MY LEGS!".  He just looked back at me, smiled and said, "Yea, we gettin' to the good spot now."  He didn't tell me what was hitting my legs and didn't seem concerned and so I had to believe that whatever it was it wasn't going to hurt either of us, although I didn't know for sure.  He stopped a few seconds later and I was relieved because I couldn't walk much further because of the depth of the water.

Shelby handed me his five nets and so now I had ten nets on my shoulders.  He took the ball of string and tied the string horizontally between two Cypress trees.  He secured the string with some fancy knot tying that I had not seen before and then he asked for one net.  I handed him the one net and he tied the net with a vertical string so that it would tie onto the horizontal string that he had just placed.  Each net would sink off of the horizontal string about 5 feet, nearly touching the swamp floor.  A minute later, he asked for another and in just a few minutes we had 5 nets sitting in the water.  I waited for him to ask for another net but he didn't.  He did tell me that maybe we should check the first net he put down and asked me to open one of the sacks which we were going to put the crawfish in.  I thought that was kind of foolish because even with what little information I did have about crawfishing, I knew that most people gave the crawfish at least 15 minutes to find the bait.  If you caught a dozen crawfish at a time, you would consider yourself fortunate.  Well, the nets had not been in the water more than 5 minutes and he pulled up on the first net we had put down and what I saw as he pulled the net above the water will be forever recorded in my mind.  I know my eyes had to be bulging because I couldn't believe what I was seeing.  The net was filled with crawfish.  The net was about 18" in diameter and it hung about 1 foot below the wire rim but the unbelievable sight was the net hung deep with the scores of crawfish fighting to get to that one chicken neck but there was a mound of crawfish above the metal round ring as well probably four inches tall and they were falling back into the water as Shelby poured most of them into the open sack that I held.  My heart raced as I realized we had hit the bonanza of all bonanzas.  I knew then that crawfish prefer chicken necks over green algae.  The second net produced almost as many crawfish and the third, fourth and fifth net all produced an abundance of crawfish, so many that the first sack was filled before we finished dumping the fifth net.  Shelby tied the first sack very tightly and handed me the sack.  I hoisted it onto my shoulders hoping that the crawfish would find my tender shoulder to gnaw on.  Each time we emptied a net, we looked to see if we had any of the chicken neck left as we had brought additional chicken nets.  Most of the chicken necks were still intact and we might have replaced a couple of them and put the nets back into the water.  What was amazing was the fact that so many crawfish would be fighting to get to that one single chicken neck in the net.  It was a sight I will never forget.  We repeated the cycle once more, waiting about 10 minutes this time and filled the second 30 lb sack almost as quickly as the first one.  I still had 5 more unused nets hanging from one shoulder but we had no more sacks to put the crawfish.  So now we had been in the swamp for about 20 minutes at most and we had 60 lbs of crawfish.  That was more than enough to feed the six of us.  We secured the crawfish sacks once more, took down the tied string from the Cypress trees and hoisted the nets back onto our shoulders.  Shelby led the way back out of the swamp, as while a lot of my fear has been cast aside by the bounty we had just scooped, I still didn't trust the swamp from swallowing me alive.  As we were walking out of the swamp, I remember looking at the long lines of people standing on the shoreline as they pointed toward us, making exclamations that I couldn't make out.  I know that we must have been quite a sight, not just with the 60lbs of crawfish that we caught in less than 20 minutes but swamps, green muck covered us from neck to toe.  Now, I know what the change of clothing was for.  Shelby had brought a large amount of fresh water in the SUV and we discreetly managed to remove all of the green muck, change our clothes and headed home to enjoy boiling and eating crawfish along with a commensurate amount of beer drinking as well.  As we were feasting on the crawfish and suds I brought up the subject of those things hitting my legs and giving me a stir and Shelby said it was just the crawfish.

I felt good about myself, knowing that I had passed the first test with my future in-laws and my girlfriend who would one day become my wife of over 40 years.  There were many other wonderful outdoor experiences that Shelby and I shared over the next couple of decades but none that left such an impression on my mind. Hope you enjoyed the story.  It was fun sharing it with you.

JoeyA