Crayfish, Part 1: catching 'em

Ever since I can remember my family have spent our Summer holidays (and any spare time in between) at the glorious little seaside town of Robe, South Australia. When I was younger we would stay in the caravan park or similar, then when I was a teenager my parents sold a chunk of the family farm and bought a lovely little beach house. It's right in the centre of town, two minutes walk to the bakery and the newsagent, three minutes walk to have you actually on the beach, wet toes and everything; it's just lovely. 
At the same time as buying the house my Dad also bought a boat: classic farmer hits retirement age behaviour. Let me be clear, it's nothing fancy - a step or two above a "tinny" - but he does seem to love messing about in that boat (any other Wind in the Willows fans out there?) But the boat's main virtue, in my opinion, is that it allows us to also buy crayfish pots, crayfish pot licenses, and therefore... to CATCH CRAYFISH!!! 

Setting the pots 

Unfortunately,  crayfish catching seems to be a bit of an art. In the early years of our boating endeavours we very often went a whole season without catching one measly crayfish. Correction - we caught many measly crays but none that were of legal size and all the ones we caught had to be released and thrown back. In recent years, however, something has changed... Suddenly we are good at this! Hooray! 

Displaying the harvest

We catch lots of delicious crayfish and even the occasional delectable crab and delightful octopus. Double, triple hooray!!! The only dilemma we face now is, having caught them, how are we going to eat them?!!