In my experience the tales of catfish loving rotten, festering, stinking stuff are nonsense. Sometimes stinkbaits work on channels, but IME if they’re biting great on it they’ll usually bite other stuff too. I do know that they don’t prefer sour or rotten or even day old cut bait.
Frozen shad and perch are almost as bad as no bait at all. I find the best bait to be cut shad caught in the body of water I’m fishing and cut while they’re still alive and used immediately. Some times of the year perch work as good as shad, even moreso when the shad aren’t on the bank and you can’t catch any. For flatheads perch will stay alive on the hook much longer than shad and are also tougher which makes them harder to tear the hook out of on the cast. I hear that skipjack are the ultimate catfish bait but we don’t have them here.
A 4’ throw net will more than pay for itself if you learn to use it, you’ll have a much better chance of getting fresh bait every time you hit the water. We begin every catfish trip by trying to catch bait, if we can’t get any bait we’ll go home. If the shad aren’t on the bank and I don’t want to mess with the boat we’ll go to one of our ponds and catch 8-10 little perch between 2”-5” long. Usually catch them on a jigging rod with a tiny piece of night crawler on a cricket hook, toss them in a 5gal bucket with a little battery aerator.
I guess that’s the long way of saying that you’ll catch more fish if you make the effort to use fresh bait.
