but you are right any fish is better than no fish at all

Anybody, that is catching that many fish, that they can get that picky, needs to stop fishing. That has always been the biggest part of the game to me, not knowing what your going to catch when you have a bait of any kind, real or artificial, in the water. As for the part about catfish tasting like mud, and all the dead stuff they eat, first, it is a fairly well accepted fact that the yellow cat is probably the most predatory of the catfish we have almost exclusively eats live prey, and second do you eat chicken.

LMAO.....I know where you are going with that question....

Taste the difference between a Catfish caught in a lake,Compaired to a Pay=Per Catch Farm Raised Catfish.........No-Brainer......

Anyone ever ate a Catfish from Lake Monticello??YUK!


Give Me Red Snapper

YellowCats feed 99% on LIVE Bait.

IMHO the App is the best tasting freshwater fish we have. I love my Crappie but they don't compare to a big ole App

I couldn't help but chime in on this one. Almost the same thing happened to me Saturday afternoon while fishing and catching crappie over
a brush pile at Grapevine lake. I caught a 10 lb.
bluecat on a jig and bobber set for crappie and it
was a fun fight and landing him with a net was even harder than I had imagined but I did not turn him lose nor would I ever.
The cat had some of the purest white meat I have ever seen and big 1.5 - 2" filets with no bones at all. Today for mother's day I fried up
several crappie and about a dozen filets of cat
and guess what everybody at my house ate first?
I may start fishing for catfish exclusively! I think how you clean them and cook them makes the
difference. I cut out all dark meat from the cat
and washed it and soaked it in lemon juice and water in the frige overnite before cooking.
I'll take catfish over crappie any day, but I
still like crappie if they are big enough to filet. I never heard of trash fish being sold to
the public in resturants and fish markets. To each his own taste! Just my 2 cents worth!!

Anyone that can say catfish can't taste like mud has never caught one out of the Missouri or Grand Rivers in Missouri. We used to put them in a horse trough with fresh water for a day to get the mud taste out of them. It didn't matter if they were channels, flatheads or blues; they all tasted terrible unless you flushed them.

Even bass, crappie and bluegill had a tinted taste to them when caught out of those rivers.

I guess they don't call it the Big Muddy for nothing.

All of that said, if I catch a 31# flathead out of one of my local lakes it is going to become either catfish nuggets or steaks, probably both. Out of all of the catfish, flatheads are my favorite. And flatheads are not garbage eaters; they eat almost 100% live fish. What do you think it was doing around those crappie? When I do fish for them I use live bluegill. My biggest, from the Grand River, was 67 lbs. I released it because I didn't want to carry it a mile back to the truck. We already had some 20-30 pounders.

Quote from TPWD: "Fingerlings feed on insect larvae, juveniles feed on small fish and crayfish, while adults feed almost exclusively on fish."

That is the same diet as crappie except adult flatheads feed on those same crappie.

I live on lake Tawakoni and it isn't the clean lake in the world so i think that is why they don't taste very good on my lake. There are some huge catfish that come out of here. We have the state record for Flatheads 114lb. But i still can't stand the way they taste

You maybe right about the yellow cat eating 99% live bait, but other catfish don't or you wouldn't be able to catch very many on trot line, with stink baits, hot dawgs, or shrimp. All those things are dead. The typicall catfishermen don't fish for catfish with live bait they do it with shad they have caught, stink bait, shrimp and stuff they can buy at the store becasue it is easier for them. When i ran trot lines we never caught yellow cats it was always flatheads, blues and every once and a while a good channel. So catfish will eat anything pretty much and that is a fact.

Yes channels and blues will eat just about anything, but on some of the same smelly things that you can catch catfish on, you can catch carp, and trout. I am not talking about the real nasty stuff, but a lot of the cheese type baits can be used for any of those three. It is all right to have a personal preference when it comes to eating fish, and while I dolike crappie, I prefer sandbass, cause I want that fishy taste. Just like I really like sushi, but a lot of folks won't touch the stuff. I have found, that a whole lot of food likes or dislikes come from either 1 bad experience, or from what we were told as youngsters. If that ain't so, tell me how a 54 year old raised up in Young county Texas, could have developed a taste for bait and Heineken. Contrary to popular belief, there are several really good cooks out there, that can't cook EVERYTHING really good. IMHO.

It just bums me out when someone starts in on the trash fish BS! Just because you don't like it doesn't make it a trash fish! I fish for everything depending on who I fish with. I have several friends who like White/Striper/hybrid's, I have another friend with a 20' Skeeter w/200 yamahammer and fishes bass almost exclusively (and an occasional crappie). While another friend likes Catfish.

None of these fish are trash fish and the people that call them trash fish do so to offend others and to try to bolster their own activities.
Don't be a trash human and stop beating up others because they don't act like you!

PS I caught a 8lb blue in Lewisville two weeks ago and bled it by cutting off the tail and hanging for 15 minutes before cleaning. Some of the whitest meat you have ever seen. Just before we fried em up a couple of my friends thought the fillets were the crappie that I caught on Texoma a few weeks earlier!

No one said a word because their mouths were too full to talk!

If you don't like it give it to me or just throw it back but don't whine about it!

When you see several of us like myself, Ernest/Guy and a few others refer to Black Bass as "trash fish" we do it with tongue firmly planted in cheek
Maybe not the best word to throw around but I know it makes my Bass fishing friends blood pressure go up when we call a good 6# Bass a "trash fish"

I think that he was calling them trash fish becasue that wasn't what he was fishing for not becasue they are. If you are fishing for them they are fun. I love to bass fish and just got into crapie fishing a couple years ago and i still don't like it when i catch bass when i am crappie fishing, but i love bass. I love to catfish to, but when i am fishing for crappie and i catch a catfish it makes me mad. Also i think he calls them trash fish becasue he worked hard to make those crappie condos and that is what he wants to catch on them, crappie. He didn't make them to catch catfish or sand bass on you can do that anywhere. Anyway that is what i think he meant and i hope yall at least look at it from that point of view.Anyway, god bless.

a few things I firmly believe.
1. the only bad fish is one that won't bite.
2. there is no accounting for taste or lack
of it.
3. mention releasing a big fish and some
will complain
4. mention killing a big fish and some
will complain
5. " if you are warm and happy - keep you
mouth shut " ( punch line from my
favorite joke of all times )
Good luck
MO