Fishing
Channel catfish are omnivores and can be caught using a variety of natural and prepared baits, including crickets, nightcrawlers, minnows, shad, crawfish, frogs, bullheads, sunfish, and suckers. Catfish have even been known to take Ivory Soap as bait . Another method of catching catfish is using stinkbaits, which are prepared with dead fish, crawfish, garlic, blood, liver, meat, cheese, dough, and even Kool-Aid powder. Sometimes these stinkbaits are prepared into a doughball and mashed onto a hook; other times they are smeared in special tubes meant to hold these baits, and fished slowly on the bottom. Grocery store baits such as chicken livers, shrimp, dog food, squid, and bubble gum will also catch plenty of channel cats.
Juglines, trotlines, limb lines and bank lines are popular methods of fishing for channel catfish in addition to traditional rod and reel fishing. Another method uses traps, either "slat traps" — long wooden traps with an angled entrance — and wire hoop traps. Typical bait for these traps include rotten cheese and dog food. Catches of as many as 100+ fish a day are common in catfish traps.
When removing the hook from a catfish, anglers should be mindful of the sharp spines on the pectoral and dorsal fin.
Read more about this topic: Channel Catfish
Famous quotes containing the word fishing:
“I confess I was surprised to find that so many men spent their whole day, ay, their whole lives almost, a-fishing. It is remarkable what a serious business men make of getting their dinners, and how universally shiftlessness and a groveling taste take refuge in a merely ant-like industry. Better go without your dinner, I thought, than be thus everlastingly fishing for it like a cormorant. Of course, viewed from the shore, our pursuits in the country appear not a whit less frivolous.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we are sure, is quite tame: we have nothing to write, nothing to infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recollections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some wonderful article out of that pond; until, by and by, we begin to suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hundred volumes of the Universal History.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The wildness and adventure that are in fishing still recommended it to me.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)