With doing water trapping I carry a towel as I’ll catch birds along the bank and throw the towel over them and it’s easier to keep the calm, and I’d like to beg to differ on you not having a mean streak for the way you were ready to kill the guy going down your alley.

Bob it was a full moon that night .

I made this light, extendable hook trap retrieval tool about 40 years ago when I ran more coon and rat water sets. It was probably one of my better homemade tools.
Old extendable fishing net square aluminum tube is the shaft. It has one of those spring buttons you push in to either extend or collapse the shaft to make it shorter or longer.
I bolted on a D handle for easy pulling and use. Other end is an old coon grapple inserted into end of the square stock shaft and a bolt runs through shaft and eye of the coon grapple.
This thing saved me a ton of effort retrieving traps especially beaver on slide wires.
Collapsing it fully down it’s just 4’ long and that fit in trunk of the old car I first trapped out of. It’s super light to carry, and fully extended it’s 6’ long end to end.
I don’t water trap very much these days but I still carry this thing in the truck bed. Real handy now for fishing something out of front of the truck bed. I also use it when dying traps to remove traps from the hot dye boil. Probably what has kept the coon grapple on end so well preserved all these years. Still one of my favorite things I made.

Here it is fully collapsed at 4’ long


Here is fully extended to 6’



Close up of D handle bolted on one end



Close up of coon grapple bolted into other end.



And here is close up of that little spring button for compressing and extending or collapsing the shaft length.

^^^That is very clever!

On coyotes I used 24'' stakes and many times cross staked. When its time to pull a pair of channel locks and/or vice grips and some water in a jug. Just pour a little water around stake while turning stake around and keep adding a little water while turning and lifting. They come right out.

Most of my buried anchors were home made and cheap, I would just dig down below level of importance and cut them off, leaving the rest for some archaeologists a 1000 yrs from now to wonder why in the world that pig castrator was there.