How did Crayster come to be?

Crayster Story 2

Common questions

A common questions that we get is, “How did Crayster start”? “What made you decide to do Crayster”? and “Where does the name Crayster come from?” All great questions answered by a little history lesson.

It all started when Mike, an avid fisherman, took his family to the coast for a family reunion. Mike took his 5 year old son Jake out on a family excursion to catch crabs off of a dock. This was the first time Jake had fished on the ocean or caught crabs. They had an amazing day of catching many legal-sized crabs. Jake and Mike went back to the reunion and enjoyed a great crab feast. Jake talked well into the evening about the day’s experience. Two weeks later, Mike’s family was back home in Idaho, twelve hours inland from the ocean. Jake could not stop talking about how cool crabs were and how he wanted to go crabbing again. Mike wanted to go as well, however the coast is far away. Mike thought, what could we do at home that would be like crabbing. He remembered growing up in Oregon. His dad took him crawfishing, it was a lot of fun and much like crabbing! Mike called Idaho Fish and Game and asked if there was anywhere around the local area to catch crawfish. A nice man at Fish & Game said there are a lot of crawfish in our area, but few people fish for them. Mike told Jake about the crawfish in our area. That were like little lobsters or much like crabs. After he told Jake the details of crawfishing, Jake became excited to go on this new adventure.

Gearing up

Going to a local sporting goods store, they bought four cylinder crawfishing traps and rope. Then got some chicken for bait and headed towards a reservoir recommended by Fish and Game. That day they felt they had great success, catching about a dozen medium sized crawfish in about an hours soak. Afterwards, they went home and cooked them up, the crawfish were delicious, tasting like little lobsters! Jake and Mike were thrilled. Many trips later, on a night trip, they put their traps out in about five feet of water. Shining a flashlight in the water, both saw a huge lobster-sized crawfish walking on top of the trap. Mike and Jake were amazed! It was trying to get into the trap but it couldn’t even get its claws through the opening! Jake jumped up and down yelling, “Dad, I want to catch that one”. The gear was not adequate to catch the large crawfish. Disappointed, Jake left wishing they could have caught the big one. The very next day Jake was adamant they needed to get different gear so they could catch that huge crawfish. They ordered a few different type of traps off of the internet. Some were quite expensive. When they arrived they didn’t look like they would do much better. But wait, maybe they could modify them! To make a long story short, none of them worked the way they wanted them to… Other crawfishermen at the lake would tell stories of huge crawfish. They would spot them, but rarely caught them because they could not fit into the traps.

Frustration

Fustrated, Jake said, “Dad, you know what we have to do, we need to make our own traps.” That sounded like a lot of work but Mike said, “Ok, we will make our own traps.” The 1st thing was making a trap to catch huge crawfish other traps couldn’t catch. Our traps need to be easy to use. Have bait holder. Be easier to get crawfish out. And the color should be like mud so we can catch more in the day. We will make them stronger, tougher, and able to sink straight. This path was amazing and inventive. Starting from scratch, building a few traps, trying them out, and had a lot more success. It was like they were making the fastest pinewood derby car, but they were the only ones racing. No one seemed to care about better crawfish traps. Finally, one day they had perfected an amazing trap. It was easy to use, the crawfish were trapped fast, catching more, and catching HUGE crawfish easily.

A family trip

On a family trip to Montana , Mike and Jake took one of their newly built traps to show Grandpa. He was amazed when he saw the trap. Mike’s dad (Grandpa) who had caught a fair number of crawfish in his life was amazed. “This is amazing where did you buy it”. Mike and Jake told him that they had made it. He did not believe them at first, it looked so professional. After convincing grandpa they had made it, he said, “It’s so unique you should patent it!”. And they did just that. Based on its new design, being much more effective than other traps on the market, and overall originality, the United States government rewarded them with a patent. While in the patent pending stage, Mike’s hunting buddy Ash had a great idea. “Let’s do a crawfishing trip and put it up on Youtube.” So they did.

YouTube and the name CRAYSTER

The channel was called Crayster (a name Grandpa came up with combining crayfish and lobster). People enjoyed watching the Crayster channel and it grew in popularity. To this day Mike, Jake, and their friends still love crawfishing and being outdoors. Mike and Jake still have fishing innovation in their blood coming up with many improvements in crawfishing. This is a story of a father and son solving issues and having a great time living the dream outdoors. Jake and Mike truly love fishing and appreciate all of the time they spend together. Their invention has allowed them to meet a lot of people and make many new friends. With perseverance and effort they have become leaders and forerunners in crawfish trapping and techniques. They still have amazing father son adventures and rest assured there will be more to come!

To see more about our Crayster team, check out our information on the Team Crayster page. Catch ya later!