One day we were late afternoon perch fishing in lake erie and we stumbled upon some monster catfish. We notice that they are alot more likely to bite at night like all catfish, but they seem not to like alot of our shiners that we put out there. My brother cut up a perch one day and used that and it worked great but i would like something that i can use when we just focus on catfish and dont have perch to cut up.

Any suggestions?

Well, like you and your brother discovered, fresh cut bait is an excellent cat bait. The next best thing is frozen cut bait. just cut up some perch or blue gill and freeze it for future use. I have to say though...I much prefer fresh!
                                                                                                                                

Posted By mo65 on 06 Jan 2012 05:25 PM
Well, like you and your brother discovered, fresh cut bait is an excellent cat bait. The next best thing is frozen cut bait. just cut up some perch or blue gill and freeze it for future use. I have to say though...I much prefer fresh!
                                                                                                                                

Yeah i can see why that would work the best, I just don't know of any bigger live bait you can buy around here. XD

Maybe next time we go perch fishing i can keep a couple alive for when we go cat fishing.

I appreciate the help!

I figured you would have gotten more replies than you have. You said you came across MONSTER CATS in LE. I have never seen A monster cat come out of LE but have seen many monster cats come from there. You did not say what part of LE (don't blame you good spots are hard to come by) but if you ran into BIG cats my first guess would be the Sadusky Bay/Muddy Creek area. There are some monster cats in thoes areas. The largest I seen was in 2010 a 25# chan came out of there. As others have said fresh bait works quite well. My suggestion to you is to go out and buy yourself a cast net. Find a local area close to you that has SHAD and throw your cast net for these little buggers. In my own personal opinion SHAD ( better known as CAT FISH CANDY) is the very best bait for cats. We use shad almost exclusively for cats, this is our go to bait when fishing cat tourny's. Second on my list is either live gll 3"-4" or fresh cut gills, kept live untill ready to go onto the hook then cut them in half and chuck them out. We ( Team Catastrophic ) have pulled out over 150# of fish on many occasions in a single day. If by chance, it is the Bay area or Muddy Creek you found these fish, let me know and I will shoot you a PM of a bait that has killer results in this area but yet this same bait doesn't produce much in other areas. It may sound weird but it will work and we have caught 3# to 15# cats on it. Good luck to ya.

Bent rods, tight lines, and big fish to ya.

I and my fishing buddy have caught a few 8 to 11 pounders on fresh tiger shrimp bought a Dave's supermarket.also leech's and crawdads

I would watched using a cast net. Go to fish and boat comm.. website to make sure its legal.
If anything u can do what mo said, catch some perch or bluegills a couple weeks in advance and just freeze them. Ive seen people using bacon, chicken livers, creek chubs, pretty much something good and smelly. Usually by accident I pick up some on worms during the day.
Good luck and tight lines

For channel cat bait I only use frozen squid anymore. It is tough and stays on the hook till you remove it, the fish have a difficult time stealing it. I outfish others around me using other baits, and I caught my pb channel cat on squid. Buy it at any Asian supermarket. It's about $2.50 a pound.

The trouble for most of us is finding a place which has squid, my nearest asian market is about 60 miles away. Now if I was in San Diego, it would be easy to find.

Posted By AZAllen on 30 Jan 2012 11:08 AM
The trouble for most of us is finding a place which has squid, my nearest asian market is about 60 miles away. Now if I was in San Diego, it would be easy to find.

I suppose that's a problem for many others too. Living in Phoenix I have 2 Asian supermarkets within 5 miles and one of them is 1 1/2 mile from my house. My second choice for channels would be cut bluegill or other fish taken from the waters you plan to fish. Head and body cavity parts are best, toss in the tail sections as chum.

No squid here in Wisconsin, alive or dead, unless you go to some high flying restaurant and pay 50-60 bucks for a forkful. Crawlers still #1 bait around here for channels.