Fish Bait, Dad, and Memories

Back when I was just a nipper, during the late 1950’s, dad introduced me to fishing.

It was a simpler time, when a boy’s biggest worries were which flavor of soda pop to pull from the water of a now-antique soda machine or how many straws filled with flavored powder you could buy for a quarter. Candy bars came in king sizes then and bottle caps had to be opened, not twisted off.

Those old soda machines and most of the ma and pa neighborhood grocery stores that had them are gone now, but still with me is the memory of dad preparing his home-made catfish bait.

The making of this sticky concoction was a secret ritual and I felt privileged to be included in its creation. How the other kids must envy me, I thought!

This was almost as much a right-of-passage as being included in the secret neighborhood boys club, which met in the clubhouse that dad built for us in our backyard.

It was here, when kids still played outdoors and there were such things as clubhouses, that we boys could privately discuss the important issues of the day. I’m not sure that we ever resolved which super hero was the strongest and who would win a gunfight between The Lone Ranger and The Rifleman, but we had fun trying. But, back to the fishing story.

We always awoke early, long before dawn, to go fishing. Dad told me that early was the best time to fish. I suspected that making stink bait in mom’s kitchen while she slept, with her ingredients and bowls, figured in dad’s wise decision.

Before starting his delicate creation, always done on the kitchen counter, dad would make me some hot chocolate and toast, saying that I had to have “something to stick to your ribs” before a day of fishing.

I alternately sipped from the steaming cocoa and dunked my toast, loaded with butter, into it. This was before warning labels and when “cholesterol” was a word in a foreign language.

Sometimes I coaxed a third piece of toast out of dad if he spent extra time trying to perfect the mixture with just the right aroma that would be irresistible to any self-respecting catfish. I’m not sure that the bait didn’t catch as many carp as it did catfish, but I never had the nerve to mention it to him.

I watched in awe as dad mixed his ingredients together, but I never knew fully what made up the recipe, maybe because the mixture changed from one time to the next as dad was striving for catfish bait perfection.

I’m sure that flour was used and I will never forget the cinnamon aroma of his “dough balls.”

Armed with the memory of these early fishing adventures, I set out to make a catfish bait of my own, after a quick internet search for “catfish bait recipes.” There is no shortage of recipes available and there is an infinite list of potential ingredients.

In the interests of domestic tranquility, I waited until a day that my wife visited out-of-town to create my piscatorial masterpieces.

I decided to make three baits with different ingredients, hoping that one would be soft enough to use as a dip bait and one hard enough to mold around a treble hook without falling off when making a cast. The third bait could be either version or perhaps a marinade used to soak hot dogs.

The main criteria in selecting ingredients was my desire to be frugal. I would use whatever we had in the kitchen, selecting from dozens of spices, condiments, flavorings and the like.

I assembled a countertop-full of ingredients and received a glare of disbelief from my dog as he retreated to the basement. One item was chosen as a base for each bait. I would use cookie dough for one, corn flakes for a second, and a combination of flour and cracker meal for the third.

Having no knowledge or experience in such matters, I measured and poured with impunity into one of my wife’s prized mixing bowls, knowing that I had until the next day to air out the kitchen and clean up the mess.

Just as a precaution to avoid asphyxiating myself or the dog, I turned the oven vent and ceiling fans on high and began mixing away.

My first bait, with no basis in reason or logic, contained the following:

Recipe #1:
¾ cup of white flour
¾ cup of cracker meal
1 can of Sheba’s Premium Cut cat food- Chicken breast dinner with sauce (This was donated by a friend who realized that I would never waste perfectly good dog food on fish bait).
½ cup garlic salt
1 cup water

This bait was roughly the consistency of dad’s “dough balls,” but may need water added when I get to the lake.

Bait number two, originally intended to be a dip bait, was made from:

Recipe #2:
1 cup Kellogg’s Corn Flakes (I’m not sure what purpose these serve, but it may have helped if I had ground them first)
1 ½ cup brown sugar
4 tablespoons of shredded cheddar cheese (added as an afterthought because I forgot to get it out of the frig).
¾ fluid ounce of imitation almond extract
½ cup water

I probably added too much water because the mixture was soupy, so I decided to put hot dog pieces into it and use it as a marinade.

I had my hard bait and my marinade bait, so my last attempt was to make a dip bait using the cookie dough. It ended up as follows:

Recipe #3:
1 cup sugar cookie dough (leave this out of the frig for a while to soften)
1/3 cup ground cinnamon (this may have been overkill since I nearly passed out from mixing it)
4 tablespoons A1 Steak Sauce (if this works, I may go for a sponsor endorsement!)

This final try was harder than I prefer for a dip bait, but it may work fine with a little water added at the lake.

All three containers (make them disposable or you will be sorry) were then placed outdoors to “age” like a fine wine. With 90-degree days forecast for the entire week, it shouldn’t be long before they are “ripe” enough to use. Hopefully, that will be prior to any neighbors calling the police to complain about the smell.

To the lake for a field test

Mid-afternoon on July 31, I headed to a local lake with the intention of relieving it of a few catfish. It was 90 degrees and sunny.

I rigged three rods with separate recipes, determined to give each bait an equal chance to lead to the demise of as many catfish as possible.

I soon learned that I have no future in the bait manufacturing business.

Recipe #1 had the strongest smell due to the garlic, but did not stay on a hook or a dip bait worm as well as the other baits. I got three bites on the bait, but no fish.

Recipe #2 contained the marinated hot dogs. It didn’t smell as strong, but stayed on the hook well and got two bites.

The recipe with cinnamon had a strong odor and stayed on a treble hook well as a “dough ball,” but didn’t work as a dip bait. Dad’s cinnamon bait didn’t come through that day, but I thought about him a lot that evening while sitting on the shoreline.

My little experiment was fun and brought back memories that are worth more than all the catfish filets that I have ever enjoyed. My first attempts at bait-making didn’t catch fish, but that evening it didn’t seem to matter.

Oftentimes the satisfaction or joy in fishing is not in the results as much as in the process and the memories created.

Now, if I can only perfect the mixture before my infant grandson gets old enough to develop a hankering for some early-morning hot chocolate and toast.