Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Best Bait for Catfish

Local 15 acre lake is suppose to have some big catfish in it. Whats your best bait??

Depends on what catfish specie. Flatheads? Live bream (sunfish). Some say a chunk of Ivory Soap works, I never tried it. Hot dogs, chicken livers are standards. A variety of commercial stink baits supposedly work. I doubt any of these work better than cutbait.

bait shrimp

Might try some Johnsonville Brats

Channel cats - chicken liver
Blue cats - cut bait
Flatheads - live bait

Cheese Whiz stuffed in a piece of hotdog works great around here for catfish.

catalpa worms if you can find em!

"Miss Mary" Ryan and other commercial catfishermen on the lower Alabama River used to use very stinky old cheese. Could smell it from a long way off. (Wouldn't attract me, and I love cheese.)

There's no accounting for taste � especially with catfish.

I have had luck with the mentioned baits as well as shad (live or dead), waterdogs, and nightcrawlers.

chicken liver /hearts ...or a wheate ball....or ground up "white house losers" (great stink bait).

cut bait??? sorry please be more specific

live for flatheads swimps for theothers

Always prefered cut shad or perch for channels an blues, rake the scales off and filet the whole side off with the skin on. Double it back and forth stitching it on a 6/0-8/0 circle hook on a 16" leader below a 6oz egg sinker, leave some ribs and whatnot poking out of the bait ball more natural presentation that way. If it's a really slow day and they're not biting the cut stuff put the head hooked through the eyes and the gizzard if you're using shad on your rig, seems that they'll be in the mood for one or the other kind of bait but rarely both, we used to always run a dozen rods between three of us and bait two or three with heads and gizzards until we figured out the bite.
Flatheads only eat live bait generally speaking and little panfish rule the day in this realm. Shad aren't very hardy and die pretty quick on the hook, little pumpkinseeds or bluegills, about twice the size of a silver dollar, are much tougher and will live a long time in the bait bucket and on the line. Crappie about the same size usually are the bees knees, but I've only heard this as it would be illegal with them being gamefish and all .

Make yourself a couple rod holders out of some tubing and rebar, get a reflector stand for your Coleman lantern and put a wrap of reflective tape on your rodtips. Be careful though, you might end up like I did and spend 4-5 nights a week all summer fishing until 3am.

Cats aren't native anywhere west of the Rockys but they've been introduced in a lot of waters. Idaho isn't known as a famous catfishery but we have quite a few in the middle Snake river. The state record channel is 38lb and the record flathead is 58lb. We also have blues but not too many are caught.

I prefer eating cats any day over trout. We're moving in a few weeks to an area with lots of big cats. We'll be less than 1/2 mile from the Snake River and 1 mile from a good boat dock. I'm sure looking forward to it.

think i might head up to the nueses river and catch some , haven't fished sweet water in yrs.

In a pond I like cut bait for blues and channels.....of course live perch for Ops. In a river I really like live crawfish. Partly because catfish love them but also because Gasper Gou eat crawfish almost exclusively and I like them to eat just as well as catfish.

When I used to fish a lot as a teenager, we always had the best luck with frozen bait shrimp.
If we could find live shiners or shad, they worked very well also. If not we caught perch and cut them up for bait.

And, if you don't have anything else, an Oscar Meyer weeny will work if your out of bait.

Freshly cut pieces of fish, the bloodier the better

Don't know what kind of cats we were catching but when we lived on a 35 acre lake in SE Kansas Stink Bait, that we bought at local bait shops in PB jars, blobbed onto one of those hooks with the little springy things to grab the "putty" worked like a charm. Worked on turtles too.

We have tons of channels and flatheads here. Son fishes for them religiously. He gets his best results with ivory soap or some soap he gets at Walmart that's from Mexico. It supposedly is 2/3'rds rendered beef fat. Starts with a "Z"....think it's "Zote" soap or something like that.

Goldfish work great for flatheads, but they are supposedly illegal and I know our son would never do anything like that.

Surprised someone has not mentioned deer liver for channels! Stays on the hook way way better than chicken liver and just as bloody. We keep the deer livers from a few deer each year, stick em in the freezer and use em when needed.