What was your worst bait experience ??
 

OK. This topic can be both far too good and too nasty not to have its own thread :P....



I had to follow with one of my own bad experiences (not the only)...


John R

And Slip...

It would have been 2 experiences that I can think of. Both on MV, 1st was a bucket of squid, butterfish and scup that sat in the sun for about a week by the front door to the house, thanks to a couple of old dodgers that come and stay with us every year. I told them that they had to get rid of that shi# or else, so we took it to Wasque beach and they dumped it, but neither one of them wanted to get rid of the bucket, so they put it in the back of there pickup, when we returned to the house, one of the other guys that was staying with us got the bucket out of the truck and put it in the old dodgers bedroom, and then closed the door. Nasty, nasty, worst smell every, when they open the door, I thought we were all going to loose our cookies.

2nd event, we were out on a friend of ours boat looking for Albies, and every time I got down wind to the bow of the boat there was this gawd aweful smell, so I ask him what it was coming from, he forgot that he had a flat of butterfish on the boat and it had been there for 2 weeks in the sun, then as we are done fishing he decides to dump it, I have never come so close to yaking in my life as when he opened the lid to that cooler!!!!!!

That does remind me of my second worst bad bait experience.. We were fishing the WICC tournament and it was hot all weekend. We picked up serveral flats of mack and bunker as well as 20 and 30 pound tins of "Bunker Chum". Most pre-packaged "Bunker Chum" is probably the already mushy, rotted stuff that the bait shops can't give away for free. I think our modern, resourceful, recycling oriented baitshops figure they can still move it if the stick it in a can with a pretty picture on it. :P

Well, we had something like 3 or 4 cans and were chumming frequently for big blues but one can had for one reason or another, spent the entire daylight hours of the weekend in direct sunlight. Heading out early on the last day, the pounding of the boat in the waves must have caused the natural forces of rotting fish in action as we saw the tin gradually building up with pressure and expanding!!! It would be a living hell if that thing exploded!!! Jeff, the owner of the boat volunteered to chum/ventilate/asphixiate the chum. It very nearly exploded on him!! It did give off the worst smell I think any of us had ever dealt with... Still not as nasty as the herring tank but the smell was certainly worse :o

Well, I got one for you. Back when I was a freshman in college I worked at a bait shop a couple of days a week after class (more for the free bait and discounts on equipment than for the $$) and being part of group of guys who understood the importance of fishing we decided to go for an all night bullhead / catfish trip at Candlewood Lake in Danbury CT. Needless to say I was in charge of the bait which we decided by much debate was going to consist of a couple flats of crawlers and as much dead bait as I could accumulate from all the bait tanks over the course of a week which I diligently placed in a covered bucket in the back of the shop. This mixture consisted of all types of minnows, old worms, eels, crayfish etc that I scooped out of the tanks or when dispensing bait from the fridge and by the end of the week I had most of a 5 gallon bucket filled with this brew which we thought would surely catch some monster catfish because the stench would attract them from all over. Come Friday night we can be found tooling down the road to our chosen spot in a van belonging to one of the guys parents. Everything was fine, we were all having a good time telling lies and knocking back a few when one of the guys thinks that it would be a great idea to sit on the bucket instead of on the floor with the rest of us. Needless to say the bucket split and 3 of us are in the back of this van wallowing in the most vile smelling mixture I have ever had the displeasure of smelling!!! All of us got sick and added that stench to the mix. I am gagging again and it happened close to 20 years ago that's how bad it was. We ended up at a car wash cleaning out the van and spraying our clothes until we could tolerate each other but it was awful. The trip was not a total loss, we caught close to 100 bullheads and maybe 20 catfish but it was pretty nasty there for a while. The things that you do when you are young and foolish. And from what I have read catfish would rather take a fresh bait than an old bait

Well my dad used to drive a big old utility van. You know the kinds that painters use. The back end is unfinished. It's great for rods but bad for passengers.

So, as many of you know, I was a freshwater fisherman before I switched to the Saltwater thing. One of my favorite fish are trout. They fight pretty well on light tackle. Well the tackle shop worms weren't doing well. The trout wouldn't touch them. I started collecting my own nightcrawlers at night. I could get about 3 dozen a night. I had them in the back of the van in a coffee can. I keep some dirt in there too. Well I had used just about all the crawlers and I threw the tin in the back. When I went to get my gear that night, the tin had fallen on it's side and rolled up underneath the passenger's seat.

Dad drove the van to work the next day. That afternoon he came home cursing and telling me to get rid of them. I opened the tin and liquid worms. It got to about 90 degrees that day and in the unfinished van, it had to be at least 110 in there. NASTY....

Patrick

Patrick,

You say nasty, the smell or the spanking?? Seriously, how long have you been fishing saltwater?

My worst experience pales compared to the rest of you, but one day on the beach I was running out of bait, so I called my wife to bring a few macs on her way down. I didn't have a good knife so I asked her to defrost them a little (maybe 30 seconds in the microwave). She somehow screwed up with the zeroes and went about her business. Fortunately, the smell of the cooking macs caught her attention. It only took a week to air out the house and get rid of the flies.

This leaves me with my biggest fear. I worry about closing up the house on Sunday night to head home and have a power failure (which I wouldn't know about until the following weekend). What will happen to my macs in the freezer? I gave a neighbor a key in case of a widespread outage, but if it's something just in my house that the neighbor doesn't know about, I could be in a lot of trouble (not to mention not having any bait).

I've been fishing saltwater for I dunno, quite a few years. I've been fishing for about 16 years. You know it started out with little stuff. Mostly worms under the red over white floats. Trout, bluegill, bass, anything would bite. It was mostly a weekend thing then.
Soon I was riding my bike down to the local pond or up to the lake. By then I was mostly for trout. Sometimes big bluegill. I'm talking the kind you want to pull out the fillet knife. I got the usual by-catch. Carp, chainpickeral, catfish, yellow perch, white bass, largemouths, smallmouths, and eels. Big eels, like 2 and half feet.
Then I got my break through to saltwater fishing. My Great Uncle and Aunt made a trip up to Maine. They came back with two books. "Saltwaterfisherman's Bible" by Erwin A. Bauer and some guide to fishing. I begged my mom to bring me saltwater fishing. I was maybe 8 or 10 at the time. I didn't know much about it. I was trying to use freshwater tactics.
Anyways, I got into snapper fishing. That friendly couple showed me what to do. They eventually turned me on to Striper fishing. I did the "catch anything" thing for a while but now I'm primarily a striper fisherman. A couple days out of the year I'll go after fluke for the table. And when shad and herring are around, those are my targets.

So around 8 to 10 years I've been fishing saltwater now. I go back to the sweetwater every so often. It's good just to lay back on a spring day and watch your bobber float down with the current and disappear.

In short, 8 to 10 years.

Patrick