Self-baiting Crab Traps!

Every day, I head to the pier to bait up my crab traps.  More oft than not, I have to catch a few catfish to use as bait.  These are the Hardhead Catfish that hang around the pier.  They are not desirable as a food fish and have a tendency to  make a nuisance of themselves so I have no qualms about making bait out of them.  Most of the old-timers around here (me, included) will tell you that they are a "dime a dozen" since they are so plentiful.  Lately, however, I have been so busy that fishing was out of the question.  Yesterday, I planned on just grabbing a bag of bait from the freezer.  When Mark is home, he will catch mullet by the hundreds and bags some for me to use as crab bait.  As I rummaged through the freezer, I came across some ham.  Ugh!  That stuff seemed terrible!  It was so freezer burned and..well..nasty!  I really must clean that freezer!  Into the bucket went the ham!  That and a bag of mullet remnants would become crab bait for the day!  I headed to the pier and filled the traps..three of them received a helping of ham, while three had mullet.

Today when I went to check the traps,  I found that I had eighteen nice, fat crabs!  Every trap had crabs in it but three had extra surprises in them! As I pulled on the outer three traps, I was sure that they were filled with crabs!  Those traps were extremely heavy and something had them flopping around like crazy!  When I finally got the contraptions up on the pier I was amazed to see that there were five nice-sized catfish in with the crabs! The three ham-baited traps had caught catfish! Well, that was a happy incident!  Self-baiting crab traps are always nice!  I made a mental note of the fact that catfish seem to like to eat ham!  This could come in handy if I ever run short of fish bait.  The catfish are not too good to eat but make the best crab bait and I really like crabs!  I suppose this is a story of "trading  up".  Something that would have normally wound up as trash was turned into something useful.  Freezer burned ham turned into fish bait for non-edible fish which turned into crab bait for delicious Blue Crabs!  I do believe that was a happy turn of events!