This story, “The Dazzling Marshmallow and Other Crazy Baits,” appeared in the October 1976 issue of Outdoor Life.
With thousands of artificial lures on the market, it’s easy to forget that bait came first, and is still hard to beat. Most bait fishermen, however, are extremely conservative. Artificials addicts will try the most offbeat gadgets. But most bait users stick to tried-and-true oldies — minnows and worms, crawdads and crickets. Seldom does the bait fisherman let his imagination carry him into new experiments.
Yet here and there one finds a true innovator. I’ve long taken joy in discovering these occasional pioneers, in observing the excited glint in their eyes as they explain the mysteries of what they’re up to.
There was, for example, the fellow who sat hunched forward in a folding camp chair on the shore of a Wyoming lake where my family and I paused with our camper one summer. He was tensely holding a fishing rod. I’d seen him stringing a trout of substantial proportions and noted several others of like dimension on his stringer. His wife lounged near their tent, sunning and reading. Two youngsters hunkered by a small beach fire, holding slender sticks over it.
I parked close by, pretending to fix lunch while I listened and watched for clues.
Suddenly the man hauled back. He was fast to another trout. The kids paid no attention. They were blowing on something on the ends of their sticks, then popping it into their mouths.
“Ethel,” the man called as he wrestled with the trout. “Make the kids quit that. They’re eatin’ all my darned bait!”
She looked around without concern. “Oh, Harry. There’s lots left. Let them have fun.”
“Sure. Let ’em. I don’t care about the white and green ones, but I wish they’d lay off the pink ones.”
It hit me. Marshmallows! I didn’t know whether to feel embarrassment for the man, or for myself at witnessing this degradation of a great gamefish. Worse yet, I was astonished by the effectiveness of his unusual offering, and wondered if maybe we had some marshmallows squirreled away in our own camper.
Later I talked to the man. Everybody around here, he told me, had latched onto catching big trout with small marshmallows. The marshmallow had come into its glory that summer — no one knew how or why — as a prime trout bait. But it was the glint in the gentleman’s eye that intrigued me most.
“You don’t need to tell all the campers up and down the lake,” he confided. Then he leaned close, whispering. “Forget the green and white ones.” He held his secret up between thumb and forefinger. “Stay with the pink. It’s the killer!”
It’s difficult to buy them separately. My kids, small then, roasted more green and white marshmallows the rest of that summer than they ever want to see again.
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A few years ago I became intrigued by the idea of using scents and tastes to attract fish. Presumably those are the appeals of marshmallows. One gentleman from the Midwest, whom I interviewed extensively, has done long research on the subject, trying numerous scents as attractants and repellents. He then manufactured a line of pastes and oils that he sold for fish bait. They were quite good. He told me that of all scents and tastes, those that appealed most to gamefish were sweets, salts — and tobacco.
Everybody knows the old saying about spitting on your bait for good luck. But a scattering of anglers is convinced that flavoring bait with tobacco is a sure-enough killer. Fishing one time for shellcrackers in Louisiana when the big spring “run” was on, I watched two overalled duffers in a flat-bottom skiff. They were using cane poles and dropping red worms down onto a large bedding area. And they were literally sackirig the fish. Several boats had crowded in on them close, as eager fishermen do when someone is successful. But none was catching more than the occasional fish.
Every time one of the old boys baited up, he’d lean forward, his jaws working furiously. Then he would pucker and squirt a long copious stream of tobacco juice onto his worm. One of them called to the boat pushing nearest, “Y’all goin’ to git some on yuh if you keep crowdin’ us.”
At the dock I met them and asked about the tobacco. There it was again — that same wild glow in the eyes — as they heaved two tow sacks of fish out of their boat.
“Mister,” one said, “it plumb works. Now that’s a fact. Ernest here,” he jerked a thumb at his companion, “he favors plug. I stick to leaf — Redman.” Who’s to argue with that kind of success, and faith?
I’ve talked to numerous others who swear by tobacco to “sweeten up” a bait. One even dotes on snuff. Says it’s more concentrated. Makes him sick, he says, but plenty well worth the suffering if you want fish sure0fire.
I remember an Arkansas gentleman who made high claims for sweets, salts, and tobacco. As I lunched on a gravel bar during a stream float, I saw him in a camouflage suit near a big tree on a slough beside the river. The slough was wallowing with carp. Though often despised, carp are exceedingly shy and difficult, and great fighters. The man moved carefully, kept in the shade. Now and then something dropped from the tree and plopped into the water. Instantly there’d come a slurp and a roil of water at the spot.
“Mulberries,” he told me, motioning to the overhanging tree. “Carp love them.”
He used fine monofilament, a light spinning rod. The core of a mulberry, before it gets mushy ripe, is firm. He baited a small, fine-wire hook by slipping it into the mulberry core, tossed out a few berries as chum, and finally slipped the Judas berry to the feeding fish. Before I left, I watched two long, dramatic battles.
I’m sure most fishermen have heard of using canned corn for trout. Some anglers even stain the kernels red, supposedly simulating salmon eggs. When we lived in northern Michigan I did a lot of ice-fishing. Neighbors swore by canned peas and corn for weak-biting winter bluegills. They claimed salts from the liquid leached out into the water and helped draw the fish.
That memory recalls an incident during a spring black-bear hunt in Ontario. Several of us were camped with a guide and his helper. Somehow the grub department had got fouled up in packing, and we were mighty short. It was agreed that the first bear killed — if indeed one was — would be dressed out for eating. No one looked forward to that. All of us had eaten bear meat, and all of us could get along real easily without doing so again.
We arose one predawn when the food store had nearly run out, smelling the last of our bacon cooking. There were biscuits hard enough to brain a bear with. We all had the same thought: at least the bacon would make them passable. The cook passed the biscuits. We already had coffee. The bacon was not proffered.
Somebody made a reach for it. The guide said, “Leave the bacon be.”
The startled hunter said, “But I’m hungry — I’m going to eat some.”
“Like hell. That’s bait.”
The guide had found a fishing line and hooks in his duffel. He had cooked the bacon to toughen it. And guess what? He fixed up a handline, baited with a piece of bacon, used a small bolt for a sinker, heaved it out, and had a sizable brook trout in seconds. Within an hour he had piled up a stack of them, plus a lake trout of perhaps five pounds. Salt again.
A friend and I, later on, tried bacon successfully on walleyes. But bacon is not in the same league with cheese. A substantial fraternity of fishermen, scorned by purists, fishes with cheese for every kind of trout. There are even special cheese hooks available, trebles with a coiled wire down the shank into which a gob of cheese can be firmly pressed.
I first saw the startling results of cheese for trout in a Utah campground. A stream running along it was so badly roiled from a rain the previous night that it looked as if fish would leave tracks in it. Nonetheless, a man and wife were cleaning a bundle of good rainbows when we arrived. Cheese, they explained. The trout couldn’t see a lure, but they sure could home in to that scent oozing downcurrent. My next cheese experience was a variation both comical and convincing. We’d stopped at a small tourist-type grocery store in Colorado during a summer trip to stock up our camper. The place seemed inordinately busy. A customer rushed to the counter, slapped down a roll of cheese, paid, and hurried out. Garlic cheese. Behind him came another, same purchase, and a third.
At my turn, I said to the lady, kidding but curious, “Must be either an Italian or a Polish community.”
She didn’t even look up from sacking our groceries. “Trout fishermen,” she sniffed.
It seemed the word was out. Not just cheese, but garlic cheese, was driving the trout crazy in near-by lakes. But that’s not quite the climax. We were so fascinated that we stayed to watch a few minutes. Sure enough, still another guy came in with a roll. But his buy was different. It was bacon-flavored cheese.
Punching the register, the lady looked up again. “You know something I don’t?”
There was that wild glint in his eye that I had come to recognize. He whispered, “I surely do, ma’am.” He was gone in a rush.
There are also interesting variations on the cheese theme. One is macaroni. Ridiculous as it may sound, cooked macaroni threaded on a hook fools a variety of fish into believing they’re seeing a fat white grub. Except for carp and catfish, macaroni has to be moved — cast and retrieved in a lake or tumbled in stream current. But the super macaroni bait is-you guessed it — the packaged macaroni-and-cheese combo.
Although the list of edible foods that double as fish bait could be lengthened, there are as many natural baits little known or used by the average fisherman. Salamanders are a classic example. Bass fishermen on a few of the large desert impoundments of the West, such as those along the Colorado River, have popularized the so-called “waterdog.” This is an aquatic larval stage of the tiger salamander.
Just how the fad got started no one seems to know. But each season nowadays truckloads of live waterdogs are brought to the Arizona-California border area and sold in bait shops. They are gathered for the most part in shallow high-mountain ponds in the Rockies. On pack-in fishing trips, especially in Colorado, I have seen ponds swarming with waterdogs. They have blobs of external gills at the sides of the head, exhibit four small feet and legs, and swim with a wiggling movement of the tail. Hooked through both lips, cast, and slowly retrieved, they are pure murder for big bass.
Years ago I learned the value of watching kids fishing. They’ll try baits adults would never consider.
Curiously, another salamander, the snakelike siren, is a hush-hush bait in a few locations in the South, especially in Florida. It is a lethal secret weapon for outsize bass. Several years ago, while I was producing a bass-fishing film in Florida, a gentleman from a “fur piece back in the swamp” showed me a string of five bass he’d caught that weighed a total of 56 pounds. After I assured him I was heading back to Texas the next day, he divulged his secret.
The sirens he showed me were perhaps eight inches long, dark, slender, with small external gills and one pair of vestigial legs just behind the head. They live in mud and roots of aquatic vegetation, he explained. He gathered them by shaking them out of water-hyacinth roots over a screen with a boxlike frame around it. My mentor, eyes aglow, described how he tail-hooked them and let them swim free among maiden cane and hyacinths, always working the bait to keep it from burrowing into mud or roots to hide from big bass. “Purely unbelievable,” he murmured.
Various salamanders and newts, both aquatic and terrestrial forms, can be found all over the nation. Old-timers in Tennessee call the small terrestrial varieties “spring lizards”. These are irresistible to smallmouth bass, big crappies, largemouths, and trout. I first learned about using them, in fact, far back in the hills in Tennessee, and I carried the idea back to northern Michigan.
A small lake near where we lived was fine brook-trout water, but the big ones of a pound or more were tough to catch. I scratched around, tearing rotted logs apart and digging in moist leaves. It was no trick to uncover red-backed salamanders and several other species. Hooked very carefully through a front leg and dropped gently into the water, they were instantly rushed by trout. These later became a secret weapon of mine in beaver ponds where brook trout lurked. Gathered on the spot, they were sensational producers of big trout.
Years ago I learned the value of watching kids fishing. They’ll try baits adults would never consider. Take the group I observed one summer at a lake in Ohio. Four were fishing with cane poles from a rickety dock. A fifth, the smallest, was off to one side, wading in muck and weeds.
One called to him excitedly, “They’re workin’ great, Roy. Stay right there. We’re gonna need more.”
“But they’re hurtin’ me,” Roy hollered. “I may bleed to death.” “Naw. Stay there until you got enough to go around.”
The four were hauling out various sunfish and yellow perch as fast as they could operate. Roy splashed ashore and ran along the old dock. Trickles of blood streaked his legs. The other kids swarmed around him. With deft fingers they started jerking fresh baits off him. Blood suckers. Leeches.
I had used leeches long before that, having learned from another fisherman that they were excellent, especially for yellow perch.
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“They’re tough enough,” he told me, “so you’ll catch a dozen or more perch. That saves time re-baiting, and it helps you hold the school in place. They wriggle constantly and draw attention.” The fact is that leeches are relished by everything from walleyes and bass to trout and all the panfish.
Endless varieties of insect larvae also make astonishingly effective baits, but few fishermen — except ice-fishermen who buy mealworms and waxworms in bait shops — even use them. A very few fishermen use tent caterpillars and bag worms for bait. In areas where catalpa trees grow, bluegill fishermen years ago discovered that “catalpa worms,” fat green larvae of a species of butterfly that relish catalpa leaves, were supreme big bluegill bait. The trick is to first cut the worm in two and turn the halves inside out. The innards dribble out into the water and act as chum.
I can also attest that wasp larvae are a killer panfish bait, but gathering them is as hazardous to the fisherman as eating them is to the fish. Under the projecting eaves o our house out in the country, black wasps build “paper” nests stuck to the decking above. The nests are honeycombed, each cell containing an egg and eventually a larva My boys, when younger, got the idea that maybe these little “worms” would work wonders.
“You’re taller than us, Dad,” Mike said. “You get the nest down, and we’ll pick out the worms.” Mike was tops at selling his father on such projects.
So I whacked down a big nest with a mop handle. Wasps clinging to it swarmed. The boys both ran I ran. It is scientifically accurate to say that a black wasp in flight is faster than a middle-aged man afoot. While the black demon pursued me, the boys dodged back and grabbed the nest.
Eventually most of the wasp gave up the chase. But not until two had stuck me, both on my casting hand. With a fist like a club, filled with pain and antihistamine, I glumly watched Mike and Terry happily hauling sunfish out of one of our home ponds.
I discovered long ago that once you become a hobbyist at finding new baits and their addicts, you also hear stories that leave you skeptical. Many fishermen have heard the tale of the crafty old timer who hooked a mouse through a leg as bait, placed it on a shingle and drifted it out to the lair of a big pike he’d long been after. Then he pulled on the line, easing the mouse off the shingle. As the mouse started to swim, of course, Mr. Brute seized it.
I never have believed that tale. Yet I have wondered secretly if maybe it might work. While fishing for muskies one spring in Wisconsin, I spent several days with an old man, as droll a guide as ever I’ve known. We saw the unusual occurrence of a muskie seizing a baby black duck.
“If you watch close,” the guide said slyly, “you’ll see him surface after a while and blow the feathers out of his mouth.”
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This gentleman swore he had successfully used young muskrats and full-grown house rats for bait. It is well known that muskies will grab young muskrats. In fact, one quite successful muskie artificial lure is fashioned of fur in the shape of a small muskrat, and has a black soft-plastic tail. But I just didn’t believe the old guide’s story.
We hadn’t caught a muskie in four days, and so I challenged him to trap some rats and we’d try them. He became judge-sober, shook his head, held up his left hand, and showed me a scar at the base of the thumb.
“Never again,” he said. “I quit that after one bit me something terrible.”
What is so frustrating about such experiences is that you may not believe a word, but you wonder just the same — and think that maybe someday, when nobody’s looking….
I’m convinced any living creature sharing domain with game-fish is a possible bait. Out of necessity one time some years ago I opened freshwater mussels and used the tougher portions as sunfish and perch bait. Later I discovered that whole mussels can be held on a hook fairly well even though soft. The stunt here is to thread the line through the hook eye and tie it well down the hook shank. A bait-holder hook is excellent for this. The lower prong holds the knot. A loop is thus left in the line between shank and eye. The gob of mussel meat is slipped through it and snugged gently. Some also is pushed over the hook point. Several of the largest yellow-breast sunfish I’ve ever caught were taken thus. Bass, catfish, and freshwater drum eagerly gobble mussel bait. Hundreds of lakes and slow streams harbor varied mussels, commonly called freshwater clams.
Recently friends and I were trying to recall the kookiest bait we’d ever heard of. Immediately I visualized a fisherman I’d seen one summer in Montana. He was prowling the bank of the Flathead River, stout rod under his arm, a .22 rifle in his hands.
He recognized my curiosity and grinned. “Huntin’ bait.” And off he went.
Presently I heard a rifle crack. Then here he came, carrying a ground squirrel. He hunkered inthe shade and skinned out the legs.
He looked up at me, that wild glint in his eye. “Nothing like a gopher leg for a bull-trout bait.”
Glint or none, this gent had to be cracked. A “bull” trout, to a Montana fisherman, is a mounting-size Dolly Varden. A “gopher” is a ground squirrel. This was enough. I left.
Down the road a bit I stopped at a country store, bought a soft drink. The rheumatic proprietor said, “Neighbor of mine just left here with as pretty a bull as you ever did see. We weighed it. Twelve pounds.”
Casually, I asked, “What’d he catch it on?”
The old man walked to the door, opened it, squirted a stream of tobacco juice into the dust. He wiped his chin. “They ketch most all the big ones on gopher legs.”
I drove back down the river. The bait hunter was fishing. “Any luck?” I asked.
He jerked his chin upstream. A stout cord tied to a bush ran down to the water. “One.”
I looked. He had a twelve-pounder.
“Gopher leg?” I inquired.
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He nodded. Then he laid back on his rod with a grunt. “Jeez!” he blurted, “This one’s by God bigger yet!”
I made a mental note. Never doubt when a fisherman gives you that bright-eyed look. Chances are he’s got some crazy bait on the end of his line.
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