Cheese and Honey Sponge Bait, Awful-Smelling Mixture and Bad-Dip Bait

Catfishermen have used cheese-bait recipes for many years. You can purchase cheese trimmings from cheese companies in large barrels. Place a large, flat, disposable cake pan outside your house on a Coleman stove. Put the rancid cheese in the pan, light the Coleman stove, and let the cheese cook until thoroughly melted and hot. Next, stir four or five tablespoons of honey into the cheese, and continue to cook until you've blended the cheese and honey thoroughly.

Lay out sheets of tinfoil on the ground and cut pieces of 1/4-inch thick sponge into sections that will fit inside your flat cake pan. Use a fork or tongs to lay out the sponge, and spread the cheese-and-honey mixture. After the sponge has soaked the mixture up on one side, turn the sponge over, and let the other side soak it up. Once you've thoroughly soaked the sponge in the mixture, remove it from the pan, and lay it on the tinfoil. Repeat the same process with the rest of your sponge. After the sponge has cooled and dried, use scissors or a knife to cut the sponge into bait-size squares, usually 1/4- to 1/2-inch in diameter. Put the sponge baits into quart Ziploc freezer bags, and seal the bags.

Make sure you cook this kind of bait well away from the house in a pan you can throw away on an old Coleman stove that you probably won't use ever again except to cook bait. Try to keep the cheese-and-honey mixture off you because it really smells foul.

When you get ready to fish, simply open the bag and put the piece of sponge on your hook. This inexpensive, durable, long-lasting bait not only produces for the hook-and-line fisherman but also for anglers who fish with limb lines, trotlines, jugs and other multi-hook tactics.

Ralph Barbee enjoys fishing for huge catfish at night on the Georgia/South Carolina border. He puts mullet, a saltwater fish, commercial blood bait, chicken blood and entrails in a 1-gallon plastic mayonnaise jar. He then lets this concoction sit in the sun for a day. The chum smells so bad that he wears plastic gloves when dumping the bloody mixture into a burlap bag. After Barbee sinks the awful-smelling bag, he fishes with Louisiana pink worms around that area to catch very big catfish. He took 330 pounds of catfish in one night for his best catch ever while fishing his bloody mixture.

My friend Monte Burch of Missouri comes from a long line of really serious catfishermen. His ancestors have passed this bad-dip bait recipe for catching catfish down for several generations. Here's Burch's directions.

Use two gallons of dead shad or minnows, 7 pounds of Limburger cheese and one ounce of oil of anise. Put the minnows or shad in a 5-gallon bucket, cover the fish with water, put a lid on the bucket and bury the bucket in the back yard. Three to four days later, dig the bucket up. Pour off the liquid, shred or melt the Limburger cheese, and mix it with the oil of anise and the spoiled fish. Then dump the mixture into pint fruit jars, and put lids on the jars. Don't screw the lids down tightly, or the jars may explode. Within a week, you'll find this bait ready to use.

Take pieces of plastic worms and thread them on your hook. Dip the plastic worm in the stink-bait mixture. Then cast the bait out and hold on to your rod because the cats will come.

To make a more stiff bait that you can put on your hook, take an old microwave oven out of the house. Pour a pint of the mixture in a glass or microwave-safe bowl, cooking the mixture until it becomes more stiff. Only do this outside of the house. If you cook this bait in the house, your family may leave and never come back, and you'll certainly have no chance of ever selling your home.

To learn more about how anglers fish for catfish all across the country, go to Night Hawk Publications' Home Page (www.nighthawkpublications.com), and click on fishing books to see "The Masters Secrets of Catfishing."

Tomorrow: Doughball Delight, Rice, Peanut Butter, Wheat and Soap