Thread: Whats you favorit catfish bait?

Cut bait 100%..... Bluegill, Shad, Suckers or carp!

Chicken Liver is my Go To for a Guaranteed Catch. (Elastic String/Cut Panty Hoes).
Also Beef Liver has been a Close 2nd for me. Stays on hook much easier. Cut to small cubes.

channel cats love danny kings blood bait.

for flatheads i use live or fresh cut gills.

I use night crawlers nearly all the time with good success.

I'll get the medium raw shrimp and let them soak in vanilla extract, usually the day before I go. I break them in half before putting the on the hook. Can get about 100 pieces of bait this way and have caught blues and channels up to 10# on this.

We usually catch our best skillet-sized channels when we're crappie fishing! But one thing I like to do is tie up egg sacks for channels after I've cleaned crappie. Any fine mesh will do. We save the crappie heads for big flatheads if we're heading over to the local paylake for a bit of night fishing.

In some ways I envy you guys who can legally use sunfish and crappies whole or in part for catfish bait. They are certainly effective. Not just for cats either, but bluegills and sunnies fished live will take muskies faster than anything else, too. That's illegal here in Minnesota, but it gets done both on the sly and out of ignorance and it works very well. It will also cost one big time to get caught at it, since using all or any part of any game fish, including yellow perch or any sunfish, for bait is completely illegal here except for some sizes of bullheads.

Here in Minnesota, we sit over the headwaters of parts of four drainage systems, all flowing in different directions; so cross introductions of potentially invasive species, including diseases, is a very real concern not just for the fish, but what ever else may be riding along with them. Case in point are zebra mussels which are now scattered all over about the southern 2/3 of the state at least, totally by accident. Or VHS carried deep into Wisconsin by a quite legal stocking of Canadian muskies, and far too close for comfort to our Minnesota fisheries and to the possibility of spreading it in all directions from here. So I guess I really don't mind an ounce of prevention against tons of cure.

Hot dogs

They're cheap, available year-round, aren't messy or smelly, and they work.