The first time I went trout fishing this spring I was intent on catching breakfast, so I went with the tried and true – I used bait. I purchased those worms, contained in a lidded plastic cup, at Walmart, but I could have found them at just about any convenience store in my area. That’s how convenient it is to find bait these days. You can just buy the worms or night crawlers.
It wasn’t always like that. It used to be that finding the bait was a bit of a chore and its own kind of small adventure. As a kid I had my own secret spot for digging garden worms, it was the site of a former chicken pen next to an old apple tree. I had to share this spot with my two younger brothers and my fishing buddy down the lane had his own secret spot all to himself. Every now and them, one of us would turn over a clump of soil containing the mother of all worms, a giant night crawler.
It was my grandfather, the Reverend Ralph Rowse, who taught me how to hunt night crawlers. One rainy evening after it was good and dark he used rubber bands to secure red cellophane over the lenses of a couple flashlights and took me out on the lawn of the parsonage. There we found those big worms just lying on top of the ground, waiting to be snatched up. For a nine-year-old, getting those night crawlers was almost as much fun as catching the fish.
Not every lawn offers great night crawler hunting. When I was old enough to drive we’d go off to the good spots, like the town common and the local golf course. There we found new adventures with elements like skunks and patrol cars.
Since those days, the commercial bait industry has made it much easier to just stop at the store on the way to the stream or pond and plunk down a couple bucks for the bait. It’s convenient, but lacks the adventure. Those folks, and the ones that manufacture “PowerBait,” have taken a lot of the fun out of getting bait.
You won’t find all the different kinds of bait at the local store, though. As a young man I used to use what I called “naturals’ to catch trout. These were aquatic insects I plucked from the very waters I fished. My favorite was the one we called “stick bait.” These were caddis fly nymphs, little worm-like creatures that encase themselves in little bits and pieces of material like twig bark until they resembled a piece of twig. I would find them lying in the shallows and sometimes attached to shore side branches I pulled from the water.
There is no better trout bait – except possibly hellgrammites. Hellgrammites are the nymph stage of the Dobson Fly. The Dobson Fly has what appear to be huge mandibles, but don’t be fooled, the ones with the biggest pinchers are males and don’t bite, the ones with small pinchers are females and they can. Hellgrammites, on the other hand, do, indeed, bite no matter their sex. So I handled them carefully.
Hellgrammites live under rocks in the fast water of the streambed. The easiest way to catch them is to wade out there, face upstream with a screen propped against your legs, and rake the bottom. They catch up against the screen along with other interesting critters, some of which also make good bait.
There are some terrestrial insects that do well as bait, too. Grasshoppers and crickets are two that come to mind.
Catching those big bass requires a meatier bait than bugs. Two of my favorites are minnows and crayfish, both of which can be purchased at some of the sporting goods stores – or caught in shiner or crayfish traps. I’ve also caught those little lobster-like crayfish by hand. The secret is to search under rocks in shallow water and use both hands, remembering they swim by scooting backwards. And, yes, they pinch.
One of my favorite bass fishing memories was visiting my cousin in Florida as a teen. We would anchor the boat on the edge of the waterlilies and use worms to catch big golden shiners on one side of the boat. Then we’d use the shiners for bait to catch bass on the other, deeper, side of the boat.
That’s way more fun than buying bait at the store.
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