We all look forward to vacations. They are so anticipated and often come when you feel you couldn't go another week without one. While the goal, once the vacation has begun, is to unwind, planning for the week of relaxation and preparing to leave can be ridiculously stress-inducing. In my case, that does not make the time off that much sweeter - just makes me more wound up.
So for our vacation with the kids this summer we decided to take the pressure off and spend a week at our family cabin in California's San Bernardino Mountains. Minimal planning. Minimal prep. This was what I actually needed this year to make the week off truly a time to exhale. Other than family time, I blissfully had no real agenda at all. But, while I envisioned a week of reading by the fire and hikes with the children, my husband had a somewhat different vacation idea. He had a master plan. It was all about the holy grail of catching crawdads.
Did he mean crawfish? The things I ate during a college Mardi Gras road trip? Now, my family has been going up to Big Bear Lake since I was eight years old. We bought this cabin in 1976. Please don't do the math. And I have never once, in all my years of fishing alongside my father, walking along the lake, or hanging out by the Marina seen a single crawdad. But my husband, armed with childhood visions of himself and his friends catching crawdads by creeks in Colorado, was unswayed. And he passed the bug onto the very excited children.
Would one call it obsessed or prepared? I'm not sure. After hours of web searches, Dave ordered a crawdad trap off the Internet. It looked like mesh cornucopia horns that locked together. We bought organic nitrate-free bacon ends from Trader Joe's as bait. Only the best for our little crawdads. And we purchased enough corn, potatoes, onions, garlic and andouille sausage for the biggest crawdad bake this side of Mississippi. Not to mention the online search for the country's number one crawdad gumbo seasoning, "Slap Your Mama". Offense taken to the name, but it had no MSG so I let it go... Yes, we received that via Amazon prime as well. We armed ourselves with two huge pots for cooking all those crawdads we were going to catch. Ready! We packed up our car and our dreams and headed for the mountains. Big Bear Lake was an oasis of vanilla scented pines and 70 buck "good for a whole year" fishing permits. In other words, Heaven.
The plan was to drop the trap in the cool of the evening. By the morning we'd have about a dozen critters in the trap and then we'd fish with sticks, string, and bacon pulling in another dozen or so. The rest of the day would be spent preparing for the feast of the crawfish bake.
Not so much.
We dropped the trap each night in water not too shallow or deep, where those crawfish would be sure to smell the bacon and raw chicken. We found areas around the lakes with big rocks, perfect for those crawfish to hide under. We thought we saw baby crawfish at one fishing spot- turns out they were baby catfish. How could those crawfish resist homemade poles of sticks, fishing line, and weights?
My son was sure at one spot a crawdad had taken the bacon off his line then escaped when he went to pull him up. The kids never lost their optimism. Dave, Gotta love him, kept wanting to try just one more place. Slowly, trying not to be too obvious, I began to use the ingredients we'd brought up for the bake.
On our second to last evening in Big Bear, on our way to a night hike in Fawnskin, we decided to drop the trap one last time at the same location where the boy saw the "one that got away". The next morning at the crack of dawn Dave and the boy drove half way around the lake again to pull out their trap. They were holding onto the dream and the stakes were high. A crawfish! One beautiful real actual crawfish!!
They brought that guy home full of pride. He lived in the bucket with some lake water and rocks and Dave gave us lessons on how to pick him up without getting ourselves pinched. When it was finally time to bring him back to his spot in the lake, my little boy moaned "I'm so sad to put him back. We had such good times."
It was a wonderful vacation week, which was indeed filled with fireside Rummy Q games, reading marathons, hikes in the mountains, kayaking in the lake, and s'mores galore. But the highlight? Definitely catching that single crawdad.
Bravo, Dave!