Amazing how much better fresh bait works... Lol.

Had good morning, son and I cleaned 10, tossed several smaller but legal fish back. Nothing real big, 8 and couple 4's, but lot of fun. Fishing same areas, same rigs, that old shad was a bust...
Fresh shad, and also jello chicken breast. Both got bit good today. Sun came out about 1 and bite stopped and got hot. Time to quit.

Thanks all for the help.

Tight lines all.

Ken

Weird, bite didn't turn on till the sun came out for me.

I always bring back a big mess of Ladyfish from the coast every year .... they work pretty good for blues.

We also did pretty poorly yesterday. Fished till noon and got 11 eaters. We caught our fish in 5 ft, 18ft, and 25 ft. Had 2 good pulls on the big baits but couldn’t get em hooked up. I marked big fish in all 3 areas but couldn’t get one to bite. I used just about every kind of bait in the lake yesterday. When I was reeling everything up a 40 lb blue surfaced 5 ft from the boat and laughed at how sorry we did.

Crazy, we use frozen shrimp, let them thaw out over night, put them on a hook catch mega cats. Another thing that works good is minced garlic, red Kool-Aid packet, and cut up hot dogs, mix all together in a zip lock bag, for some reason, they LOVE the smell of those things. Use the pool noodle/PVC "jug" method on Livingston catching some nice big ones. This guy was almost 8lbs, caught Jan 23, 2021. When the shad start running we catch those with a cast net and use those as well, have a little live well bucket rigged up that we take out with us and use them on the noodles and on the rods.

Jumbo shrimp from your local Mexican meat market= Pescados! Especially in your local flooded creek in the spring! Blues love it next to shad

The lady in the backround reading the book is exactly like what my wife does when I take her fishing.

The answer to the headline is- yes.

I ran a little experiment some years ago on Arrowhead.

When it was extremely low in 2012-2014 we averaged 100+/- fish a trip. Most days having 5 or 6 over 25, with several kickers in the 35-40 range. It was some of the best couple years of catfishing I'd ever experienced.

Just knowing we'd wear 'em out every single trip, we decided to try different baits to collect some redneck data.

We fished fresh Shad side by side with frozen. We used some cut buffalo, carp, and drum as well.

Fresh Shad out fished frozen (frozen over a few days) 20 to 1. Straight up. Those fish were stacked and did not want frozen shad at all.

Side note- we killed a 17lb fish one day in 2014, in there. It had a 8"-9" femur in its gut lol, no lie.