I am finally back to trapping after what seemed like eternity. Work and kid’s sports took more time that I anticipated, so I only ran short lines for the first few weeks of the season. But, I am now in full swing and not doing to bad.
I started the dryland season off with more possums than I care to see. The first weekend alone I had 6 of the stinky little critters. I moved off that property and moved to another one where I finally caught a real nice boar coon that went 30# along with a few more possums.
I then had to take a break due to being real busy with work which left me very little time to do anything but work, eat, and sleep.
But, now the Refuge opened up and I am officially done with work and I was finally able to get a decent water line out. Monday was the first day we were able to set traps and I was a little late getting to the area I wanted to set in. As I pulled the boat into the backwater area, there was already an airboat setting traps 
But, he left me some room so I went ahead and threw a few rat sets as well as some coon traps in. Then I went to another area and lo and behold, another airboat as well as a flatbottom boat were in the general area. Once again, I threw a handful of sets in and then it was time to do some more searching. By the end of the day, I had 36 of the allowed 40 sets in the water.
On Tuesday was my first check and there are 2 parts to this story. I posted the other part titled “River trapline nightmare”. In this post I am going to post the good part of the check.
I got my second ever “double” on coon, my first double I got the first weekend of the water trapping season. Both of Tuesdays coon were average boars. I thought I had a pic of them, but I guess the camera didn’t take it as the batteries were dead, of course 
As far as rats go, I ended up with 17 on the first day. Not too bad for what I had to work with.
There are some real issues this year as far as trapping rats on the river. The first is the water level and the huts. Many, and I mean many huts are actually high and dry. It appears the rats were building like mad while the water was high and then the level dropped out from under them. But, there are rats actually still using some of them and I have caught a few so far. The other issue is the size of the rats. For me, there were more kits than I would like to see. I don’t know if that is a result of the extreme pressure from last year, or if it is just luck of the draw. Here are a few pics of a few coon and some grinners. I did not gt any pics from yesterday’s total catch due to the events that took place getting to and from the trapline yesterday. I will be doing a much better job on that from here on out.
November 15, 2007 at 12:46 am
#210387
My coon sets are not producing right now so tomorrow I plan on doing a little more scouting to get them moved and set the ones I still have sitting in the boat. I sure can’t catch them when the traps are not set.
