The Best Kind of Bait for Catfishing

Channel catfish (Ictalurus punctatus) may be f...Image via Wikipedia
Here is another good article for you to read.  I have always considered catfish a panfish because the larger ones don't taste as good to me.  A 10 to 12 inch channel cat is good eating anytime.  Here is some good advice on what to use to catch a  mess of them.

By John Garrett

There are many types of catfish bait that works well for many from homemade bait recipes to the mass produced products. Catfish are typical scavengers who eat a wide variety of food including animals and plants. They have poor eyesight and rely heavily on their sense of smell for hunting food. Because these species are so diverse in what they eat, finding the best kind of bait for catfishing often poses a challenge. For the bigger and hardest catfishes, it is often best to stick with their natural food sources.

Here are the five most popular baits used for catfishing:

Worms
Catfish don't distinguish between night crawlers, garden worms, and small wrigglers. With their poor eyesight, it's the smell that matters. Pair them with the appropriate gear and a good location and you're good to go.

Worms are good starter baits since they are readily available in just about any garden or soil. They are more easily found during winter and early spring, when drainage ditches are emptied.

Minnows
Minnows are a favorite of blue and channel catfish, whether dead or alive. However, live ones are preferred by the bigger flathead catfish. When fishing in shallow waters during the summer, the minnow is usually used with bobbers. They are sold in bait shops alive and transported to the fishing site in bait buckets.

Chicken liver
A common bait for nearly all types of fishers, the chicken liver nonetheless presents two problems: 1. how to keep it on the hook, and 2. how to attract bigger fish which usually ignore it. Both problems can be solved by using a pantyhose to hold the liver. Not only does it allow a stable "platform" to dangle the bait; it allows more liver to be used on a single hook, to entice larger species of catfish.

Freshly caught baits
Oftentimes, the best kind of bait for catfishing is the one you see in the pond. Baits that are caught near or in any body of water are natural forage for the catfishes. These can include frogs, crawfish, grasshoppers, catalpa worms and the small fishes in the pond. Fresh cut and live baits are favored by catching the flathead, blue, and channel catfishes. Take your local chub, shad, carp, bluegill or baitfish with you. Cut off its tail and put the rest of it on the hook. With fresh cut baits, you may experience a significant increase in the size of catfishes you are catching

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