Dough ball recipes for carp and catfish


gila_dog

gila_dog

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I need a recipe for dough balls. Since I'm lazy it needs to be simple. I particularly want something that stays on a single hook well since I don't want to use a treble hook. Any ideas would be appreciated.
 
Whatever dough ball/bait you go with, put it in a 2"x2" square of panty hose material and mount to your hook. It's almost cheating it works so well!
 
Recipe is simple. Buy a box of Wheaties and a bottle of Big Red soda. Pour the soda into the box of Wheaties and mix it into mush with your bare hand. Form balls onto hook. You don't have to use Wheaties any bran cereal with molasses will do. This is fishing using the K.I.S.S. theory.
 
gila_dog said:
I need a recipe for dough balls. Since I'm lazy it needs to be simple. I particularly want something that stays on a single hook well since I don't want to use a treble hook. Any ideas would be appreciated.
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Pillsbury crescent roll dough ,put on hook and dip in water for 30 seconds to harden it before you cast , experiment with different cheap doughs
 
Why all the fancyness. All I ever do is lay a slice of fresh white sandwich bread in my hand, lay the hook tied to the line in the center of the bread, then close my hand and pack the bread into a ball over the hook. Works like a charm!!
 
I know it's not a dough ball recipe, but I always used raw bacon for catfish and a cigarette butt wrapped in biscuit dough for carp and virtually everything else. Worked well in the Florida lake I grew up on on at least. Pretty easy too.
 
I used to use hot dog chunks, marinated in green NyQuil. Easier to keep on the hook, for me, than a dough ball.
 
You can buy bulk bags of Koi pellets at your local feed store for cheap. Just pour enough boiling water over a cup of it and let it soak through until it softens then mix until you have a dough consistency. Form into balls and use as needed. Koi are carp so works great! Works for catfish too though the higher protein content pellets work better with catfish.
 
this works excellent for carp.

take a couple handfuls of crushed wheaties, 2 slices of white bread soaked and wring out the water, put in about a handfull of canned corn, mix in alittle bit of pancake syurp a mold into a ball and let it firm up. use a treble hook with a heavy sinker throw it into the lake and hold on.
 
I'm not a huge fan of what the English call paste baits but when I do use them I use the Pillsbury dough and frequently flavor it a bit with powdered drink mixes. Strawberry, cherry, pineapple are all sweet flavors carp seem to enjoy. They also like chocolate boilies but mixing powdered cocoa into the dough has not produced as well as I expected it would; so I stick with imported products. I also add a few drops of food coloring to the dough (red or yellow).

If you really want to guild the lily, mix up a small wide mouth jar of light corn syrup and the Kool-aid until it is a deep colored liquid. Then dip your dough ball into that just before casting it out. The sweet coating puts a lot of flavor in the water and carp frequently will take a dipped bait over an un-dipped one when they are presented side by side.
 
Haven't used dough balls since I was a kid in Indiana, but we just used corn flakes and a little molasses. Add water, mix up, squeeze into ball, done.
 
My "recipe" is a little different. Start with a 2" black Berkley PowerGrub. Add a 1/16 oz (more or less) lead head jig. Fasten to 4# or 6# line on an ultralite spinning outfit. Apply frequently from a 13' Mad River canoe floating on a slow moving stream. If clear enough and shallow enough, it is possible to "stalk" carp as they feed, casting a few feet in front of them. Work lure across their path. When they pick up, set hook and hang on! Carp over 2' can tow the canoe around for awhile. Keep paddle handy to steer around obstructions.
For channel cats work the deeper holes. The occasional bass, large- or smallmouth is an acceptable diversion to these activities.
(I never was patient enough to sit and watch a bobber or line.)
 
Several years back at a local reservoir watched this guy catching one catfish after another. He was releasing them though just fishing for fun. I asked him what he was using for bait and he showed me his "secret" bait. It was just a peanut butter sandwich on white bread. He just pinched pieces off for bait and occasionally took a bite himself. The bread helped keep the bait solid enough to stay on the hook, and the peanut butter with it's high oil content drew the catfish in. It was quite amazing, and it worked for me too on following fishing trips. I don't think adding jelly would hurt and may make it more appealing to a carp's sweet tooth.
peanut-butter-sandwich-horiz.jpg


Another great catfish bait is a Hawaiian classic: SPAM! Cubes of SPAM with it's high fat and salt content seems to be irresistible to catfish.
spam_can_open.jpg
 
If it is carp you are after canned sweet corn will do the trick as well as anything else I have ever tried and it is simple to boot.
 
Another paste bait that works is to take a wad of strong flavored chewing gum (Juicy fruit, or Bazooka Bubblegum work great). Chew on it a bit and press that to the hook roll it in some bird seeds and toss the whole mess out.

The problem with paste baits are the small fish they attract, especially bread based ones. I’ll frequently pre bait with bread crumbs, but my hook baits are big solid things-- hair rigged.
 
werewolf won said:
I’ll frequently pre bait with bread crumbs, but my hook baits are big solid things-- hair rigged.
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What does hair rigged mean?


So many good ideas! Thanks. Lots of things to try. Next time I go out I'm going to try the peanut butter sandwich bait. I've caught a lot of carp and some catfish using whole kernel corn, too. What I like about the corn is that I can toss some out as "chum" and attract them to my area. Sometimes I fish off my boat, tied up by its nose to a bush. The rest of the boat tends to drift around with the wind so it's hard to keep an eye on the line. That's where a slip bobber really pays for itself. I've found that carp tend to nibble at things a bit before they grab it and swim off with it. So I like to keep some slack in the line so they don't get suspicious, and when they start swimming off with the bait the bobber shows it. I really enjoy catching carp. I just turn them loose after the fight.
 
A hair rig is kind of hard to explain without seeing a picture. They are fairly easy to tie as well. I have hair rigged corn and the carp hit hard. The basic idea is that the fish hooks itself. As it picks the bait up and then goes to spit it out it hooks itself. It eliminates some of the playing with the bait that carp seem to do.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hair_rig
 
Thanks for the info about the hair rig. That looks like a great way to use a dough ball.
I think carp are really fun and challenging to fish for. And they are real bruisers when you hook one.
 
A carp has teeth at the back of it’s throat. They feed by sucking up their food, rolling it around their mouth deciding if it is something to eat or just a stone piece of wood etc. If the object is something to eat they pass it to the back of their mouth where they will crush it and swallow it. The hair rig allows the bait to be sucked up, evaluated, and passed to the throat with the hook either outside the mouth or inside but free of the bait. Carp frequently pick up bits of metal so the hook itself is not deemed a threat, but the carp cannot eject it as it normally would because it is part of the food it is trying to chew. The length of the hair is very critical. Rigged right you almost always end up with lip hooked fish that can easily be released, rigged too long or short and you just get frustrated with line bites and taps.

Hair rigging can be done with paste but instead of a loop the English tie a small spring like device to the hair and mold the paste around it. Hairs can be used with nuts if you drill a hole through the nut, hard seed corn, sweet corn, chick peas, boilies, meat (like Spam) and other solid or semi solid baits. You can also weight the line a few inches behind the hook and add a piece of foam or cork to the bait on the hair and the hook and bait will float just off the bottom (called fishing a pop-up) it is a deadly method.

I rigged a dead frog with it’s mouth stuffed full of foam and stitched shut on a hair rig popped up about six inches off the bottom and set just outside a weed bed and took a PB eel, so hair rigs work for more than Carp too.


Those Carp lips are delicate too and if the fish feels the line passing over them it often rejects what ever is in it’s mouth. There are ways to make this work for you. A stiff rig is tied with stiff mono in such a way that the carp will aggressively try to eject the bait and hook itself, or you can tie your bait and hair with soft braid and again they will self hook but when they feel the weight. A soft rig is very difficult to eject, but very prone to tangling on the cast without doing some fancy rigging and having a very smooth cast. I usually use stiff rigs at distance and braid rigs for close in work, but not always. The bottom type, the depth, the flow all determine what rig is best.

springs.jpg
These are paste springs for hair rigging paste baits.


Another obscure bait that Carp seem to delight in are Gummy Bears. They leach sweet flavors and some color into the water so you need to refresh them every half hour or so. They are soft so the Carp suck them up with reckless abandon.
 
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Take some of your cats leftover wet cat food toss in a bit of his dry food add some plain oatmeal and a bit of flower. mix in 1 egg.slowly add water until you get a nice dough and then stick it in the microwave 4-5 minutes (regular oven will work also).my brother caught a 20lb channel cat with this bait last week.stays on the hook well as long as you lob the bait and not try to swing for the fence!!
 
gila_dog said:
Thanks for the info about the hair rig. That looks like a great way to use a dough ball.
I think carp are really fun and challenging to fish for. And they are real bruisers when you hook one.
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I forgot to mention that you may need a bait needle depending on what you may bait the hair with. The needle kind of looks like a small crochet hook. You thread your bait onto the needle, then you hook the hook end onto your hair rig loop and pull the loop tight and slide the bait off the hook onto the hair. At this point you need some kind of bait stop to put through the hair so your bait doesn't fall off. I usually just use a small twig or I use nippers to cut a little piece of tooth pick. Thread the stop through the hair and slide your bait down against it. This method is much easier than I have made it sound here. Also, watch your rods, because a carp will pull them right in to the lake...Don't ask me how I know this:11:
 
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