Blood Baits for Blue Catfish

By Fish & Tackle Editor Vic Attardo

 

Bonnie McCoy opened what looked like a big tray of wiggling Jell-O desserts. But it didn’t smell so sweet, and the color was deeper than the deepest black cherry.

“This is beef blood bait,” she explained as she handed the tray to her husband, Keith, who then cut the coagulated patties into pieces about the size of a man’s fist. He threaded each squishy bait onto a 3/0-4X treble hook and dropped it over the side into the deep water of South Carolina’s Santee Cooper waterway.

The McCoys had hauled their boat a long way from their farm in Valentine, Nebraska, to fish for the big blues and giant channel cats of Santee Cooper. According to Kevin Davis, who guides out of Black’s Camp, Santee Cooper has produced the state record blue at 109 pounds and the world record channel cat at 58 pounds.

We started the day idling across Lake Moultrie in a cool morning fog, keeping the speed down as we made our way safely towards the outlet of the river that connects Lake Moultrie with Lake Marion, the other half of the vast two-lake Santee Cooper waterway. The connection is near the town of Santee Cooper, hence the waterway’s popular name.

Moultrie is the smaller of the two lakes but has the deeper water and is known for the bigger cats. While a big channel cat would be more than welcome this day, the real target was the lake’s monstrous blues. The McCoys’ personal best in the twin-lake system has been an 80-pound blue followed by a 63-pounder.

As we pushed through the fog, Keith kept checking the depth finder looking for a 50-foot bottom near a channel. “The bigger fish are out deep, the smaller fish are shallow,” he explained.

As the fog lifted, we saw the break in the shoreline where the river poured through. Then the sonar screen revealed a network of channels at the requisite depth, and we set the boat and lines to drift fish.
As the McCoys prepared more baits and more rods, I noted that the big guns were coming out today. The rods were 7-foot-6-inch poles rated for 20-pound-plus line. The reels were broad-faced Penn 320 and 209 bait-casters.

On that big tackle, 20-pound line actually seemed a little thin, especially for the task at hand. But Keith assured me it would be sufficient and also served a purpose. “We don’t choose the line to fight the fish but for its drifting diameter,” Keith noted. “It’s all about the drift. You don’t want heavier line because it won’t drift quite right.”

The manner in which the line curves and presents the bait along the bottom is important to the McCoys’ drift tactics. With little wind that morning, the drift was slow and the lines stayed broadside to the boat and far to the upwind side,exactly the way they wanted them.

Though the running line seemed a little thin, the terminal rig itself consisted of 18 inches of 80-pound-test braided leader connected to an 80-pound snap swivel.

”If you go any lighter with the swivel, they’ll blow the connection wide open,” Keith said. “Blues are like freshwater sharks. They’re very aggressive. You can even tell when a blue strikes. A blue will inhale the bait and explode with it; channels just nibble.”

As for the bait, the McCoys revealed a secret recipe to end all secret recipes. The bait is 100-percent pure beef blood, easily obtained in the farmland of Nebraska, their home state.

The blood coagulates naturally in 5-gallon buckets that are refrigerated at 36 to 38 degrees for one to three days. (The McCoys use a lot of blood bait and have enjoyed much success with it on the Cabala’s King Kat Tournament Trail.)

As the blood coagulates, a thick topping of foam forms on top. The foam is worthless for bait, so it is cut off and discarded. Then the whole bucket is frozen.

After freezing, the content is dumped onto a cutting board and a corn knife, also easily obtained in Nebraska, is used to fashion “pancakes” from the coagulated blood. These pancakes are returned to the freezer, where they remain until needed.

The night before a catfish outing, the pancakes are taken out of the freezer to thaw. By morning, they appear fresh and pliable. On the water, each pancake is cut into big cubes, and each cube is slipped onto a treble hook and then doused in the cool lake water to stiffen it up.

The bait is first run through with an old turkey skewer to make a thin hole. Then the braided leader is threaded through and the bait is pushed down to the hook. The braided leader has a short loop at the upper end, and this is connected to the snap swivel on the mail line.

The no-stretch leader aids with the hook-set and fight, and the McCoys have another reason for using this “string” leader. If you°ve ever cut your finger on wet monofilament, you know how quickly and cleanly it slices. Mono would slice through the coagulated blood bait the same way.

After the bait is pulled down the leader, Keith works the hook shaft through. Then he grasps the bait lightly but firmly in his palm and molds it down around the big treble hook points.

The blood bait slowly dissolves in the water, yet a sizeable portion stays on the hook. A number of times, we were able to retrieve blood baits back up from the bottom and use them again. If you bring it up carefully, you may get two or three placements from a single bait.

Though we were drifting over 50-foot depths, we did not add weight to get the baits down to the bottom. The blood has enough weight to keep it down. Each rod had some 100 to 150 yards of line stretched out behind, and the weight of the long lines also helped keep the baits down where they needed to be. On a windy day when the drift is faster, the McCoys may slip a 1/4- or 1/2-ounce egg sinker onto the main line above the snap swivel. When the sinker is added, the leader is lengthened to keep the weight as far as possible from the line-sensitive blue cats.

Though blues are aggressive feeders, waiting for a strike can require some patience. “He may smell the bait from a long ways, and it may take him a long time to reach it,” Keith explained. In the water, the blood bait slowly breaks up into pinhead-size pieces at first then larger the longer is it left in the water. These are what call the big blue cats from a distance.

On this foggy morning, the McCoys were waiting on the blues to climb out of the network of channels and swim across the broad flat. The flat was covered with freshwater mussels, one of the Santee Cooper blue cats’ favorite foods. Big Santee Cooper catfish frequently regurgitate mussels after being brought on board. The blue’s rock-hard mouth is ideal for crunching the tough-shelled crustaceans. Holding a blue’s jaw, it feels as dense as stone.

“You want to set the hook hard to get penetration,” Keith said. “Most of the time, they’ll set the hook themselves because they’re running so hard. But you still have to drive it home.”

Santee Cooper’s blue cats all came from a single stocking of just 800 blue cats that were brought in from Arkansas. And not surprisingly, blood bait gets fair usage in that other Southern state, too.

For 25 years, Elvin Jackson has been fishing blood baits in the Arkansas River near Fort Smith. He takes advantage of the current on this Mississippi tributary to carry the scent far downstream and call up monster cats. Man-made structures divide the Arkansas River into pools and raceways. Inside the long pools, some of which stretch for many miles, angled wing dams further funnel the current into the channels. Eddies form in front of and behind the submerged wing dams.

The best eddies to fish, said Jackson, are the curling currents on the downstream side. These flows carve out pockets, and the cats hold and feed in this relatively calm water even when the rest of the flow is coming through fast.

Like the McCoys, Jackson makes his baits with coagulated beef blood. But the Arkansas angler adds a sprinkling of fingernail-size chunks of calf’s liver to the stew. The blood and chunks are then frozen together in large margarine tubs.

Also like the McCoys, Jackson begins thawing bait the day before use, and he then cuts each gelled tub into two to four curved cubes and threads it down a braided line onto a treble hook. Like the blood droplets from the McCoys’ baits, the small liver chunks eventually break off and drift downstream.

“I like those days when you drop the bait and bang, you get a bite,” Jackson said. “That happens in the pre-spawn when they’re hungry. But most of the time, it’s a waiting game.”

Which brings us to the final beauty of these dissolving blood baits. Even when you’re not working so hard, they are.

* * *
For a guided trip on Santee Cooper, contact Kevin Davis (843) 753-2231.