A big part of every fishing trip in my younger days was getting bait. I lived on a farm - we had cows, hogs and 11,000 chickens. There was always plenty of worms to be found near the animals. Some of the best bait came from the area where the water troughs from the chicken houses drained. Always damp and rich, the ground was full of red wigglers.
I found out how effective these worms were when compared to bigger "swamp wigglers" when a cousin and I fished a hole in a local creek. When we got there, about 10 people were already lining the bank. Nobody was catching anything. They were all using worms found under leaves on the flats near the creek.
My cousin and I started fishing with our smaller, more active red wigglers. During the next three hours, we landed about 75 bream while the others watched. Although we were all fishing a hole you could cast across with a Zebco 33, we did not see anyone else catch a single fish while we were pulling them in. It had to be the bait!
I tried lots of other baits over the years. Grasshoppers and crickets were favorites to catch, but we had little luck catching fish on them. I never have understood why a brown bought cricket is so much better than a black caught cricket, but the fish will go for the expensive one every time. I caught a few fish on grasshoppers but don't remember any outstanding catches.
Frogs were always said to be great bait for bass. I never could figure out how to hook them. I tried tying them on, using a rubber band around them to hold them to the hook and other ways. I never caught a single fish on a frog. Probably because I was using toads rather then frogs.
Crawfish were another bait everyone said bass loved. I caught hundreds of them in the branch on our farm and carried them to ponds as bait. They never lasted more than a few minutes on the hook because they would crawl into stuff on the bottom and you could not pull them back. The fish never had a chance to see them long enough to eat them.
Mud puppies, or spring lizards, were something I heard a lot about but never found. For some reason, none of them turned up in my exploring of the branches, creeks and ponds where I wasted many enjoyable hours. When I started teaching, my students brought in lots of these amphibians and I would take them home and try them for bait. By then, I was using artificial lures most of the time and I never learned how to fish the real thing.
I will never forget one worm a student brought to class. We had all kinds of critters in my science classroom - I was still just a kid myself and liked to play with them. Come to think of it, I still am! Anyway, a worm that was at least 12 inches long was brought in. These monster worms would show up after a heavy rain. I had never seen any of them where I grew up but they were more common around here.
The first one I got went on a hook on a jug put out at Clark's Hill that weekend. I got my biggest cat ever, a 12 pound blue cat, on that jug the next morning. I used as many of those mega- worms as I could get for the next couple of months, but never caught such a catfish again. I guess the first one was just a lucky worm.
Grub worms were another bait that was supposed to be good for catfish, but I never caught anything on one. They stayed on the hook real good, I don't think I ever lost my bait while using a grubworm. I know nothing ever ate one off the hook!
School's out. Make some memories. Get some bait and go fishing!
