Wooden Crab Pots

[maa. melee]

I've been using steel mesh crab pots for a few years and now I'm curious to know if there are any wooden alternatives. Metal pots are doing a number on my boat's finish and are getting expensive to buy and maintain.

Crab pots differ from their wooden lobster pots cousins but maybe there is a way to tack some thin battens onto a slat frame in such a way that crabs won't slip out? I'd still need some wire mesh for the entrances.

Does anyone have any wooden crab pot plans or pictures?

[S B]

All the crab pots here are steel frames covered with polyethelene'?' mesh.

[pipefitter]

I used to build my blue crab and stone crab traps from pressure treated pine battens like they now use for lattice. What was great about the wood ones is I could size the spaces just big enough to keep legal size blue crabs. They were weighted with sash weights or rocks. The funnel in the top was made from galv hardware cloth fit to a square opening in the top and they worked very well, many times with crabs still clinging to the outside when bringing it aboard. The whole lid was hinged and easy to empty and bait up.

[StevenBauer]

Have you seen the collapsible ones?

Check out the demo video:

www.flexfoldtraps.com (http://www.flexfoldtraps.com)


Steven

[maa. melee]

Pipefitter, since I was planning to go traditional with my new traps, do you have any rough sketches or designs for these wooden traps? Are the battens weaved or just laid vertically with a 1" or so spacing? Why is the funnel on top and not on the sides?

[willmarsh3]

I've seen some wooden crab pots a while back when I was in Maryland. They looked similar to the lobster traps seen here: http://www.traditionalmarine.com/

Also some wooden traps are here:
http://www.cudjoesales.com/catalog/traps.html

Hope this helps.

[cats..paw]

In Vieux Forte, St. Lucia the fishermen weave the traps from heavy palm flonds, weight them with rocks and bait them with cactus.


A couple of links to woven fish traps in the East, just ideas really:

http://www.bruneiresources.com/bubu.html

http://www.bruneiresources.com/bubu.html

[pipefitter]

Pipefitter, since I was planning to go traditional with my new traps, do you have any rough sketches or designs for these wooden traps? Are the battens weaved or just laid vertically with a 1" or so spacing? Why is the funnel on top and not on the sides?

Funnel was on top because that's how I was shown to make them. Plus there was no protrusions into the box for the crabs to hold onto when you went to dump them. I suppose there was less chance of escape that way as well. The boxes were kind of small. 18" square or 24"x16" roughly IIRC. We were kids basically living off the land for the most part so whatever wood we could snag from the dump pile on residential construction sites basically designated the size for the most part. The battens were horizontal with some uprights wired in here and there for supports or as a stop for the lid. The smallie exclusion size spacing was discovered by accident of course as the traps evolved. Really great fun and we managed to make a few bucks here and there as well. We made the wire fasteners/hinges/latches from drops of 12-2 romex also from the scrap piles. The exterior frames were made from 1x2 firring strip cut offs so whatever didn't have to be cut was the size.

We used to catch mullet, shrimp, oysters, clams as well and whenever anyone was planning a get together, we were easy to bribe being that quite a few folks knew we were busy about the water and candy was cheap. :)

Edited to add: the cudjoe link above http://www.cudjoesales.com/catalog/traps.html is about as close as it gets to what we had.

[Tuck' Sailin]

They are a little complicated to make since one measurement off and all your hard work is gone to waste. Also wood tends to get funky and absorb the stuff that floats around like mud and stuff. Have you tried putting small corner protectors on each corner of the pot? It would protect the pot and your boat.