Especially on the second part, thanks for making me feel normal. Seriously, when my kids come fishing with me, they assume we'll catch. When they used to come hunting, they assumed we would kill. When it comes to crabbing, in their eyes I have to suck. We've only really had one good trip in the last few years of going once per summer. Just hadn't hit it right. I need to haul my boat next time but there hasn't been room the last few years, due to boyfriend, in-laws, etc.
I really want to bring the boat down there and try it. I've been down there three times this summer and this weekend was the slowest by far but we still caught plenty to make it worth the trip. I grew up with my family having a camp at holly beach and spent about a month there every summer. Seems like it was pretty easy to catch an ice chest of crabs on the side of the highway between there and Hackberry back then. For the last five or six years I have been going a couple times every summer with spotty luck at best. Had a family friend tell me about Rockefeller this May and we've had three great trips since then. I hear the shrimping is great in the fall when we get the first few cool fronts.
We've gone to Rockefeller too. This is the boat launch, I'm sure you saw it. From here it's less than a mile to the Gulf and a lot of canals on the way. I'll pm you a specific location that some friends have had very much success. We only went once, got there late, and didn't do that well..
I wish I could catch or afford enough crabs to need one of those devices. Here is something you might want to try some time: I went fishing with a friend who had a friend who lived in Lockport We picked him up on our way to Grand Isle and we caught our limits of specs and redfish when we started catching some sheepsheads. Sheepsheads are good to eat but I was ready to go because they are very hard to fillet even with an electric knife but the Lockport guy said "Lets catch a few and keep them." We stopped at his house on the way back for a good fish fry. His wife took the meat from the sheepsheads and put it in some kind of cheesecloth bag and boiled it with crabboil. Then she used it like imitation crabmeat to make crabcakes. Very delicious. I did the same thing another time with redfish and that worked great too. In the early 80's my brother was working for a survey company and they sent him to somewhere around Hackberry for a few months. He was staying in a trailer park below Hackberry that had a place for him to tie up his boat. I went there for a week and in the early morning there was a place on the side of the road with a concrete weir and every morning you could murder the redfish and also some decent specs for a couple of hours before they quit biting. The limit back then was 50 reds and specs together. After that I would take his boat and shrimp in Calcasieu River and the canals. In the late afternoons there was a wooden pier a little down the road from the weir and it was easy to catch a few dozen crabs with just some string and a few chicken necks. I haven't been back to that area since.
