I've read here that cut carp is a reasonable good bait for cats. I catch carp regularly, and want to alternate by fishing for cats. I would think keeping the skin on the carp would make the pieces stay on the hook better, which means scaling first. Can anyone offer advice on this? I intend to use an electric knife. TIA.

I scale it and filet to hand sized chunks. Works great for big blues.

Yup, scale it, then cut to whatever size you want. I’ve caught a lot of big catfish on pieces the size of my thumb. Leave the skin on.

Big fish will eat a small bait but we only use smaller baits on our 2 inside rods and they rarely catch trophy fish. Our biggest baddest fish come off our biggest baddest baits 90% of the time. We put the smaller baits on the inside rods so my son gets some action and those are the rods that catch the eaters most days. I use smaller baits when anchoring but when I’m pulling boards for trophy’s I go big. There are a few exceptions when I downsize like the day the front hits or east wind high barometer days. On those kinds of days I will downsize everything but my 2 longest boards but even then the really big fish still go for my biggest 2 baits quite often.

In the dead of winter,water temps in the 40's,cut carp will out catch shad most days out west here.I usually scale then chunk some larger baits and if dragging filets that flutter work well.If you cut it all up at once and place it in a small container soaking in the blood it just seems to work better..........at least that's been my observations.

As far as size of baits,I let the fish tell me...........I've caught some of my biggest winter blues on smaller chunks but as a rule I toss out both large and medium size and upgrade baits accordingly

Thanks all for the guidance. Seems clear-cut now.