Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Catfishing Time

Always take a week to go to the Snake River in May to catfish. Last year for the first time we used stink bait. Sonny's blood bait and cheese bait worked pretty well. Had a heck of a time keeping it on though. Used those little plates woven baskets. What bait works best for ya'll and how do you keep stink bait on if you use it. Shrimp worked pretty good too. Used circle hooks. What size hooks do ya'll use?

Flatheads?

Up around Ontario on the Snake and the Payette, Guys have been having great luck with raw beef liver for big blues, since the sixties.

We usually catch channel cats out of Brownlee on worms or cut crappie.

This blue is listed at 37 pounds. Caught in CJ Strike in 2022.

Beef Heart cut in small size chunks then soaked in Minced Garlic ( big jar from Wal-mart $8.00) at least over night but I do it a week in advance, then freeze your left overs for next time, I keep a heart in the freezer at the camp. I keep extra garlic powder too.

thank me later and big Circle hooks I think I use #7 big game catfish hooks they at the camp too, I am at home

Chicken or turkey hearts on a small treble hook they stay on better than livers

Growing up in south Louisiana in the early 60's we used a couple different baits. We would go boating on the weekends and my dad would barbeque chicken. We would pull the skin and fat off the cooked ckicken, put it on a treble hook with some lead weights. Cast out into the river and it sat on the bottom. We also used several nightcrawlers wrapped around a hook with weights. Chicken skin seemed to work the best. Always came home with plenty of fish.

Duck Hearts - if you duck hunt, keep the hearts for bait, works really well. when we cleaned ducks the year the young boys used the bait for jug lines.

Makes perfect sense. I'll remember that next time I get down to the Tickfaw river.Thanks. 😁

Hotdogs

Do you get any yellow cat on that with the garlic?

Best bait for blues and channels is No1. Chicken, turkey or duck guts.

Also great is chicken liver, beef liver, carp chunks, worms, dimocommie dicks, Little Smokey breakfast sausages, shad, Bar S weenies soaked in black cherry lemonade or Jell-O,

Big sunfish for yellow cat and blue cat.

Deer trimming soaked in garlic,

yes I get them all on beef heart / garlic yellow, blues, channels. opelousas

we in a brackish marsh in St. Mary Parish and it's on right now, gets going in early Jan, plan to go soon

And I cut my pipes and the camp before the freeze, I bought what I need to put Faucets where I cut the lines, praying for not too much damage, drained well pump too, so need to go soon

good luck gents!

Moose liver if you can get it. I saw a guy using whole chicken legs like you get at walmart 10 lbs for 5.89.

Too bad lamprey eels aren't legal any longer. You could use one eel all weekend, using a homemade threader. Looked like a crochet hook, run it through the spinal column, then thread your leader through it.

The channel cats (Palouse River and Snake River) loved them. After getting hooked they would spit the eel and it would ride up the mainline. Slide the eel back down and you were ready to fish again. Rinse and repeat.

I dunno if there are any legal alternatives to the lamprey or not.

Recent years I've just used worms in the Palouse, they seemed to work just fine.

Thanks. I'm going to have to try that.

Cut eel if you can find it. Stays on the hook well and works great

I've caught catfish on dried-up bird chit.

Sonny’s dip bait is good but don’t stick on well.

I just bought some Premo Blood Super Sticky……

It stays on a long long time. Just didn’t have any bite it.

I like the rubber dip worms, or tubes with treble hooks.

Fresh trout minnows are an awesome bait.

Awesomeness on the Blue Cat on CJ……how deep were you when you caught it?

Weird, I generally do pretty well on Premo Blood. It's not as good as Docs imo, but I catch a lot of channels on it. I mostly just use Premo because it's available locally.

Catfish Dynamite Catalpa dip was the fuggin bomb, but they quit making that quite a few years ago.

I use the Junnie's dip worms with a 1/0 Gama Big River Bait hook... fits the worms like a glove.

I bang a fair number of cats on about 1/3 of a nightcrawler when I'm fishing redhorse, but they're typically smaller.

Half a cheapazz hotdog on a 1/0 or 2/0 works too, but stupid softshell turtles pick the damn things off the hook too much for them to be a regular bait option for me

Some good ones there, Doc.

When I was a kid, we preferred Jack rabbit guts over chicken guts, as they were the easiest to obtain. 🤠

When I was in HS, we mostly used either Red Horse minnows / Red Shiners we seined from the local creeks, or perch obtained the same way.
The crappie LOVED those red horse minnows too.


Also had a lot of success back then with that cheap packaged frozen shrimp they sold in the local grocery stores and bait shops.

Nowadays, it’s hard to beat cheap store bought weinners, like Roger mentioned. They just do not stay on the hook very well.
Or store bought chicken livers. Used with treble hooks, of course.