Made 125 6' cable anchors, 50 10' anchor cables, 50 4' anchors, 15 10' drowning cables. Two of my lines are in the wetlands of South Louisiana, you can't stake anything, so cables are your money maker.

Finished dipping over 200 traps in rusty metal primer and acetone.

Night-latched new traps.

Checked each trap and made necessary repairs.

Made phone calls making sure I have access to my trapping areas for the next season and arranged for a face to face with a fish farm owner. The fish farm owner says he will arrange meetings with surrounding land owners so I can get more trapping areas, which will help him in the long run. My traplines for next season are full of beavers, otters, coons and mink. I'm only trapping yotes if a landowner ask, no money in them dogs.

Heading out this week to a new state and area, 10,000 ranch, to hunt turkeys, hogs and yotes. Owner wants to talk to me running a trapline next season. The ranch is over ran with yotes, cats, foxes, coons, and skunks. If after turkey hunting it seems like a target rich environment and we can agree on a good price, it will be a welcome break from trapping out of pirogue.

I got a call from a friend who I duck hunt with. The land we hunt belongs to his family and is over 1,000 acres. It is full of nutria, mink, coons and otters. He wants me to trap it. This is going to be a dream trapline. Its miles from the boat launch and I will have the entire area to myself. Hunt ducks in the morning, run traps, eat lunch, nap, hunt ducks in the evening, and hang with my partners at night.

I can't even sleep at night thinking about next season!

Sounds like a great opportunity for a die hard trappeur.

Made a few also. Save cable off the damaged snares the past couple of years. If I can get a long enough piece it goes into cable stakes.

My cousin runs snares on his farm. I get all of his old snares. I do the same thing and make cable anchors out of them. I also keep a 500' spool of 3/32" at my work bench. It comes in handy when I need to make a specific length if I run across a unique situation on the trapline.

Trappeur Gunny, you are way ahead of me! Good for you.
I'm still sorta cleaning up fur shed & only some traps dyed & waxed for next season.

I had a guy call me once From Austin Texas looking to establish a meat market on nutria. I tried to help him but at the time couldn’t locate anyone. Wish I’d of saved his contact info. That would sweeten the pot

A couple of years ago I helped a friend who got the paperwork for the $6 a tail program on his land. We killed just over 4,000 of them. We had to use a backhoe and dispose of the carcasses burying them. We got zero for the hides and meat. If we could have sold the meat and got at least a $1 for a hide we would have done much better than we did. I'm trapping his land this year as the nutrias are destroying our duck hunting areas and the otters are out of control.

Sounds like pretty exotic trapping country. You haven’t mentioned Muskrat at all… Have the nutria totally displaced them? Does Louisiana still have some good rat areas? I remember a great article in the Trapper magazine -1980s .. Louisiana Muskrats. I took a lot back then; and still important now, but trap areas similar to Dakotas

We have pockets of muskrats in the areas where I trap. The nutria have basically have started back in some areas due to the lack of trapping and the regulations concerning the tail bounty. There are a few places the rats are making a comeback but it is far and in between. I generally don't plan on trapping them, as there are so few in the areas I trap. I wished they would make a comeback as I have a 55 gallon drum of my grandfather's muskrat traps. That barrel is full of #1 longsprings and the old stop loss single coil spring Victors. I would love to get them back out on a trapline again.

Exotic? This morning on our walk my wife and I found mink tracks by our mail box, a couple of sticks a beaver moved into our ditch with the run that goes into the swamp, a new otter run heading to the neighbor's pond and coon tracks galore. I live next to 3 game management areas, a total of approx. 127,000 acres, most of it is swamp and marsh. The only way into them is by boat. No one traps it, so we have quite the array of critters around here.

Got skeeters? Lol. Sounds like your on bit of paradise.

I just want to know how you get so much vacation time, lol. Unless you’re a professional trapper. If you are I missed that portion.

Prep and planning for the upcoming season is always a busy time me for... I create a 'to do' list and print it out so I don't forget anything, then I also create a list of places by animal species of places that I'm going to trap, or places that I need to scout. I try and rotate areas (as long as they aren't nuisance jobs) as to try and get in front of the most target animals year after year. All of that off season stuff is probably much the same as many of you guys.