Ok you otter professionals, I have a friend with a dock on the lake that the otters have been using for several months and the surrounding docks as there playground. what is the best way to target them in the fall, when there is no creeks or land crossings. Strickly open water tactics. I can use there dock to set traps on or around if needed. Thanks

Look for there scat on the bank and look for there slides for in and out of the water. I usely use #3coil on them .

i know a few folks who catch them fairly regular in cage traps. you can use those....or yes you could look for the toilets along the bank.

there are other tricks folks use like baited buckets half submerged with a conni near the dock, or snares in certain circumstances.

the problem is most of the toilets are on the dock. what would you bait the gage with?

Fresh fish, especially if there's a fish-cleaning station on the dock. Filleted fish bodies, fish heads, stuff like that - that's the "natural" bait around a fish-cleaning station, and my partner and I have caught quite a few otters on docks using this type of bait.

One thing I think helps when using cage traps is to use the big ones, with plenty of width and height. Seems to make the otters a little less leery of going in.

Also - if you're ever lucky enough to see the otters working around the dock, watch where they go. Set snares in narrow places in the swimways you see them using. We've caught a couple by hanging snares in the narrow gaps between the flotation floats where we've seen them swim, hanging the snare loop half in and half out of the water.

Although I haven't tried it (yet,) I bet the big Superbear traps would work well, if you can figure out a way to hold them in position beside and perpendicular to the dock.

I've trapped a few otters in a place that sounds similar to yours. It was a marina that I trap rats with floats. The docks would have fresh otter droppings on every morning. The shore line was covered with large rocks where the long docks met up with the shore. I used a submerged 5 gallon pail baited with a large piece of salmon with the silver skin still on. The pail was guarded with a 220. The pail had a good sized flat rock in the bottom to help hold the pail stable. I also had holes in the bucket to let water into the pail as I set it into the water. when the pail would start to float I would give the pail a shove away from the dock and when it took on too much water it would sink. Hopefully with the mouth of the bucket looking up and with the trap still set. Also you would have a long cable that went through the bucket and then attached to the trap. That way you can pull the whole set up together. The 2 times I've tried this set it worked. Any question you can PM me.
Shawn

If the otter are really using the dock as a toilet you can build a step under the water for a foot hold. If the dock floats high they will use this easy place to get out of the water. If it floats low you may have to fence the edge of the dock to force them to where your step is.

Theeee toilet????????

I think my situation best fits the one jim is talking about its a floating dock and a marina two docks down. This dock is 12in. from the surface to the water. and the gap between the floats on the dock are about 12 inch wide. What size snare should I use? The other Ideas sound good too and I will probably use them when the situation is right? Thanks For the help everyone. Tommy

Live eels in a cage in the cage so that they can not get out. Otter will enter the cage to get at a live eel in the blink of an eye.


Find a place where you can entice a otter to go through a 330 to get at a mink carcass and you will have the otter if he is around the area at all. I have called in a lot of otter using a mink carcass as bait. The otter will go out of his way to kill a mink or spit at his carcass.

What my partner and I used was our standard 3/32 snare, with about a 6-inch loop half in and half out of water. We suspended it in place by using a small stape driven into the wood of the dock framework, but not so firmly that the otter couldn't pull it loose. Another thing you need to make allowances for is the tremendous potential for damage a snared otter represents. He can tear up a dock and all attachments if you don't drown him. The way we did it was with redneck engineering: before setting the snare, we ran the cable through one of the holes of a heavy railroad tie plate, which we laid on the edge of the dock above the gap between flotation units where the snare was set. When an otter gets in the snare, it will pull the tie plate off the dock and it slides down the cable to the otter, and holds the critter under and quickly drowns it. Worked like a charm on both otters we've caught this way. You could also use sash weights, a coffee can full of concrete, or other standard trapline drowning weight.