How To Bait A Hook With Cut Shad

I covered cut shad and how to cut shad in another article and catfishing video yesterday at Learn To Catch Catfish and in typical fashion wanted to take and build upon that with some more information on using shad as bait for catfish.

If you have not already done so, you might want to go back and read these articles and watch these videos:

Benefits Of Cast Nets

Parts Of A Cast Net

Preparing A Cast Net

How To Throw A Cast Net

Storing A Cast Net

Cut Shad – How To Cut Shad

While baiting a hook with cut shad or whole shad may seem as simple as simply slapping a piece of bait onto the hook it’s really not. I am a huge fan of circle hooks for blue catfish like the Daiichi Circle Chunk Light and Mustad Demon Circle Hooks that I have outlined on my catfish tackle page. These circle hooks are my “go to hooks” especially for big blue catfish. The process of baiting a hook with cut shad works for using other types of hooks (like kahle hooks) also but circle hooks can pose one specific problem that many people don’t recognize and it can take them forever to figure out, and some never really figure it out.

if your taking a big chunk of cut shad and slapping it on the hook with no rhyme, reason or thought behind it then chances are you have missed the very little step when baiting your hooks that could really be costing you a LOT of fish.

The problem becomes when you put a chunk of cut shad on one of these circle hooks and the bait begins moving around in the water, flips around and ends up double hooking itself covering the hook point and filling the gap of the hook, often causing missed hooksets and in turn missed catfish.

There is a very specific process that you need to be following when baiting a hook with cut shad or cut bait, again especially when fishing with circle hooks but you need to be aware of it for ALL different types of fishing hooks.

In this video I cover:

• How to bait a hook with cut shad.
• Where to toughest part of the bait is to hook the chunks.
• How to keep them from falling off.
• Several different ways to keep them from causing you missed fish (VERY IMPORTANT)

I know it’s going to come up so I will address it now. I am working on some circle hook articles to answer all of the questions that have been sent in.

Once you are done watching the video be sure to leave a comment below and let us know what you think, what you do, and if you have any questions, and then be sure to click the “LIKE” button.

Here’s the video, Cut Shad, How To Bait A Hook With Cut Shad:

*If the video is blurry below look at the bottom right hand corner of the video player and change the setting from 360p to 720p

**I am fully aware that due to the angle of the video it is a bit difficult to see so watch closely and you will get the understanding. I am still trying to get the hang of shooting videos, finding my mistakes, making them better and doing so without any help. If you would like to volunteer to be my camera man, speak up!