need catfish bait ideas

[osage outlaw]

Thanks for all the ideas guys.  I don't have any catalpa worms and squid are pretty scarce here in Indiana Mullet    I tried the shrimp a few years ago and I don't remember doing to well with them.  I'm going to try the velveeta cotton balls and some cut fish.  I never thought of using frogs.  I could catch some and freeze them for next week.  Last night I started making a minnow trap.  The creek next to my work is full of big chub minnows.  I've never made a trap before.  Does anyone know how big to make the holes on the inverted cones?

[skyarrow]

For soft baits like soap and the stink bait I cut small peices of panti hose put the bait in it tie it closed and stick it on the hook. the fish can't suck it off the hook and if they try to suck the bait out of the hose there hooked

[Pappy]

Never made one,bought a couple from wally world,the hole is about 3/4 inch across if I remember right. I don't think it is that critical,they ant smart enough to find their way out anyway.
   Pappy

[PEARL DRUMS]

A glass jug will work too Clint.

[PepeLep]

I spent a lifetime chasing those things around up here. They are my fav-o-right fish to catch. I have my best luck using bite size chunks of whole frozen shrimp.

Cats are my favorite, too!! I'm usually a nightcrawler guy, but one of the biggest channel cats I ever caught was on a shrimp. I had a bag of them left over from a day of dock fishing on the Gulf. I kept them in the freezer for a couple years then decided to try them on channel cats.

I caught that one in the middle of the day under a bridge up on Lake of the Ozarks. It was probably twenty-five pounds...fought like a freight train.

My biggest flathead was on a nightcrawler. That was on a creek off the Missouri River. It probably weighed thirty-five or forty. I almost always use nightcrawlers. I keep a worm farm full of them in a little refrigerator in my work shop. I've had good luck with big grasshoppers on my pond, too. I've had channel cats hit them on the surface before!

[cracker]

I've cought big catfish on bass baits, chicken guts just anything gross seems to work.

[mullet]

Clint;  look for squid in the Frozen food section, think Calamari.

[osage outlaw]

Thanks Mullet, I'll check it out.  I caught my biggest catfish ever last year on freezer burnt deer scraps.  I'm going to try them at the lake too.  I'm excited about trying some different ideas and see what works best.  I'll let everyone know how I do.

I finished the minnow trap.  I'm going to try it out tomorrow evening and see if it works.  I've never used one before.  I had to google it to see what they looked like.  It is 36" long and 9" wide.  The openings in the cones are about the size of a golfball.

[PEARL DRUMS]

Perfect

[cracker]

yep that should work.Ron

[gunny]

This Is Guaranteed To Work...Period!

Get about a pound of cheap ground beef  & 1/2 lb of limburger cheese.
Wearing surgical gloves, mix it really good with a bag of cotton balls to keep it together.
Take a pair of old panty hose, stick one leg inside the other, add a few handfulls of gravel and about 1/2 of the mixture.
Tie a rope around it and toss it into the area you are going to fish at about 3 to 4 hours (overnight is better) before you do
start fishing with the other 1/2 of the mixture. This stuff stinks something god-awfull so make sure you wear those gloves.
When you bait the hook try to cast around the area where the chum bag was dropped earlier...and I promise it will work!

An old South Carolina Black Man showed me this trick when I was about 8 years old and it works everytime for me.
Good Luck.

Gunny

[Rick Wallace]

Perfect minner trap!  looks alot like mine!   

[H Rhodes]

I don't know about the lake that you will be fishing.... but lakes lend themselves to chumming an area.  What we do is sink a square bale of hay with six cans of dogfood wired to it.  Punch a bunch of holes in the dogfood cans.  Tie a floating marker to mark your hay bale....  Something around woody cover in 12 feet or more of water....  Then your bait won't matter much.  I favor minnows,  seined locally,  or shad for the channels and blues - live bluegills or big shiners for the flatheads.  Let me know when the fish fry kicks off.

[gstoneberg]

I think my minnow trap has mesh about half the size of that one.  Of course, if all you want to catch is the larger minnows the larger mesh lets the little ones swim out so you don't have to mess with them.  Good luck.

George

[osage outlaw]

The lake is mostly used for recreation.  It is full of ski boats on the weekends.  I'm not sure if we will be able to chum any where.

George, the chub minnows are so big in the creek that I was catching them on a small hook the other day.  The mesh is 1/2" squares. 

Man I'm getting excited to try some of these ideas out.  Thanks guys