Fish Bait

When my family used bait for our fishing trips, we generally secured it ourselves. This story discusses how we got some of the baits we used.

Fish Bait

 

My Granddad Frank had a two gallon jar with a handle on the side, a lid, and a funnel molded into the bottom. The morning we were going to go fishing, we would take that jar to one of many small creeks in the vicinity with one saltine cracker. When we got to the creek, we would crumble that cracker and drop it into the jar through the funnel on the bottom.
We would pick a spot about 1 1/2 feet deep and set that jar on the bottom of the creek.

 

The Glass Jar minnow trap we used to catch those minnows on those trips to Sulphur Springs, Arkansas. I recently saw one of these sell at an auction for $300.

 

 

In about an hour, we would go back and the jar would be full of shiner minnows. The minnows would go into the jar through the funnel to eat the cracker, but they weren’t smart enough to find their way back out. So we had our bait for the day and we headed for the fishing hole.

 

A more recent plastic version of the funnel minnow trap with a load of shiners just trapped.

 

 

 

My granddad knew which of the small creeks we needed to go to for small crappie fishing minnows, for larger bass fishing minnows, and for very large catfish fishing minnows. I had almost as much fun trapping the minnows as I did fishing.

 

My granddad also on occasion would make us some dough balls for catching catfish and carp. I helped him make the bait. He would add a cup of flour, a cup of crushed wheaties cereal, 1/2 cup of grated cheddar cheese, two tablespoons of powdered Parmesan cheese, and add water to give it the right consistency. We would roll the mix into 3/4 to 1 inch balls and put them in a small fruit jar. When fishing, we would mold one of the balls onto a treble hook, they actually stayed on the hook quite well.

 

 

We caught some some real whopper catfish on Granddads dough balls . I once saw him catch a 25 pound carp on one of them.

 

 

.
When we were living at 13 stark street in Phillips, Texas, in 1955, my Dad brought  some electric wire, a transformer and two 1/4 inch copper grounding probes home from his shop and built a gadget to drive worms out of the ground. He stuck the probes into the ground in my moms flower garden. He then plugged in his home made device and we stood back and watched. Within a few seconds, earthworms started popping out of the ground everywhere between the probes. He unplugged his device and we picked up a couple of dozen fishing worms. The earth had to be moist between the probes for the gadget to work. The electrical current between the probes really agitated the worms and they made a beeline for the surface. After we all got shocked a few times my Dad decided it was too dangerous and trashed it. We went back to digging our fish bait worms with a spade fork.

 

When old Dad plugged in the device he made, the worms just came shooting out of the ground. I guess the electricity gave them a little tail tingle.

 

 

.
There was a small creek down behind our house on Stark Street that was fed by seepage and yard runoff. There were a few deep pools on the creek. My dad, my brother Craig and I would take a small seine and go down to one of those holes. My Dad would have me or Craig run through the hole kicking up rocks and generally stirring things up. We then pulled the seine through the pool and we would pick up 3 or 4 dozen crawdads. We would take the crawdads out to the upper end of Lake Meredith and run a trot line using the crawdads for bait. We would come back on Saturday morning and run the trot line. We generally caught four to six nice channel cat between 3 and 5 pounds. We took them home and hung them up cleaned them, peeled them, then filleted them. Some fine eating.

 

Live crawdads made fine catfish bait for our trot line at Lake Meredith. They were easy to gather close to home.

 

Thanks fro reading Fish Bait,
Bill