Who's your "daddy" crawdads that is

[cassidyta]

Over the past couple of weeks I have been noticing more and more parts of crawdads in my local ponds. A couple of my recent fish also had them in their mouths, so this helped with bait selection.
I usually throw paca-craws on an owner shakey head, but it hadn't worked this week so I started trying to get creative.

The technique that worked best for me was using storm crawdads with a nail weight in the tail. I nose hooked them with a small drop shot size hook. They took forever to fall, but once on the bottom I was able to trigger a bite by simply raising and lowering my rod tip about 8 inches. When I tested this in the shallows, the dad pretty much stayed in place, but his claws would raise up like he was defending himself.

I don't know that it will work everywhere, but I figured I would pass it on.