Does anybody have any experience with their CC getting hook shy? If baits were varied would this minimize the effect?

In my experience channel cats get very people shy once they have been caught. Especially in clear water! If your water is clear, you will have to be very quiet to not let the fish know you are there. They will come up to eat fish food with commotion going on, but will be vary keen to what they eat!

I would try fishing in a new location before trying a new bait.

Just dont let them see the line or the hook and they can be caught on conventional stink baits, worms, chicken liver, and especially pellet flies.

We had a really good discussion on catching hard-to-catch big CC, which Catmandoo was a chief contributor to. Couldn't find it just now, but I did find this 3-pager on catfish baits.

I also decided we need an Archive thread on catching catfish; you PMs help me find the links and I'll put it together.

Here are a couple of old threads about catching catfish -- and even some posts about catfish reciting the Gettysburg address!

Too Many Big Catfish

Sadistic Fish

I think that if we took a survey, we'd find that shrimp seem to be the best method of catching hard-to-catch big catfish. It doesn't seem to matter whether you are in Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, West Virginia, or even Louisiana. For me, it was chumming several times with pieces of shrimp around sundown. Then, plunking a shrimp on a circle hook into the middle of where the shrimp sunk to the bottom.

mnfish, good luck trying to catch those catfish. Make sure and post pictures of them when you bring them in. And, let us know how you caught them.

Ken

We started feeding AQ Largemouth pellets for our feed trained Bass this summer. Well we found out that the big catfish love it too. When the cats move in we "twist" a big pellet on a small but strong hook....no weight. It will float just like a regular pellet. We have caught numerous big cats (8 pounds +) on that rig. We usually give them a few days rest just to get them used to eating pellets again and it works great.

Thanks for the info guys

I (used to, anyway, before they all died ) catch cats in my pond over and over. I just set a 3-5" BG, alive and kicking, under a big Thill slip bobber, maybe 3' deep. Cast it out towards the island and let it drift around.

They really have no choice when they swim by a struggling gill...they are programmed to strike. It's just nature...catch away.

A 20 oz DMD bottle (not sure if the brand had much to do with success ) with 2 feet of 30lb Trilene, a 3/8 oz egg sinker and a gill on a circle hook floating across the pond during the night will catch them every time, too. Lots of fun to go out in the morning and chase the bottles around the pond in the boat or snag them with a treble hook and reel them in. Kids had a blast doing that.

They simply never get "hook shy" when it comes to natural/live bait. If they did, they'd starve...

I thought mine were getting hook shy too,and last Saterday I had a 5lb floater.I was shocked.Told the wife Id be in late cause I wanted to retrive the fish and figure out what killed it.

It drowned in my pond.

Well,maybe choked is a better word,it had a 7" bg stuck in its throat.So sad,I lost 2 good meals to one fishes greed


Oh well,theres more where they came from

Wow...a 5 lber tried (and failed, miserably) to eat a 7" BG? I thought MY mouth was bigger than my stomach...