Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Catfish Bait

They are certainly the hot ticket now on central Texas lakes and I've caught a few on chicken livers but none on Lil Smokies.

We mostly used chicken guts for rod and reel. Usually chicken or beef liver chunks, nightcrawlers or crawdads for throw lines.

Grampa always said if it floats, sinks, stinks or swims, catfish will eat it.

I mainly go for flatheads here. I've got a pasture loaded w chubs so that's what I mainly use but small bullheads work really well. Channels, well they'll bite on about anything but I'm wanting their daddy. I'll catch around 40 and put them in a 5 gal bucket lined w a contractor bag. Put creek water in. Add oxygen from my torch. Tie bag and put in shop fridge. They'll last a couple days that way so you can get bait the day before you fish.

My father-in-law used to use beef liver - had pretty good luck.

What happened to the OP?

Another, I ain’t been fishing in 40 years, made a thread for “old man attention” and abandoned the thread

Relative in NC just took the kids to a fishing day.

Bait that worked the best on those cats was......................hot dog pieces soaked in red jello.

Chunks of chicken....strawberry koolaid

Creek chubs in a pinch for flats

Around the Louisville area, they're getting $10 apiece for skipjack. It's crazy!

Ever tried cawtaba worms

Shad caught killed and cut up immediately before casting out. The fresher the bait the better and generally the bigger the chunks the bigger the fish you’ll catch, I’m partial to the heads and gizzards off big shad.

For flatheads live perch anywhere from silver dollar to hand sized are best if you can’t get a small live crappie. Really fresh cut shad will catch one occasionally as well.

Frankfurters, worms, dogfood, dough bait, chicken innards and all that other crap are fine if you want to fool with little channels and small blues. But the big blues and flatheads didn’t get big eating monkey dicks, they got big hunting and eating shad, perch, crappie, and other forage fish. Feed them what they eat and you’ll catch more of them.

Yep. I catch bigger blues often on jug lines with 4-7 inch sunfish when fishing for flathead.

"Gone Fishing".

My son caught a pretty good sized channel cat many years ago in the fall. When I cleaned him he was full of persimmon seeds. There was a loaded persimmon tree there leaning over the bayou.

We throw back all the blue cat over 10 to 12 pounds and under 1 pound. The big flatheads we keep up to about 35 or 40 pounds. The big blues have too much red meat and fat. A couple of years ago in one big hoop net we had a blue I estimated at around 90 pounds and another probably 70 pounds. My fishing partner and I made the executive decision to put them right back in the bayou where they belonged.

If in season, squirrel livers work great. They don't fall apart like a chicken liver.

This bayou produces a lot of dinks on earthworms. I have never fished it hard for big ones.