A vendor that comes around to do jobs at my place of business,told me he has a friend that fishes Choke with them.The clams from the lake that is, and catches big cats on them.Anyone ever been experienced in using them.And what do you suggest to use for the bigger ones,catfish that is.

If you can find the clam beds definitely fish them!

Have used them many times in the past on Choke. Look for the ones that racoons have laft out of the water to open. Prodices good blues.

Yep I have caught a 30# blue on them before

That,s awsome,never would of believed it.Thanks for the info.

What about those big snails? I've heard people using those before but I've never tried and I haven't known anyone personally who has caught anything on them either.

A couple of my best spots on LW are mussel beds

I grew up in the fifties and just about any creek with flowing water would have thousands of them. (before pesticides and pollution).

My dad and uncles would take us kids down to the creek during the week near our home, and we would wade around and throw the mussels up on the bank and they would open them up, scoop them out, and put them in gallon glass jugs and then on ice, and then when the weekend came around it was off to Lake Mathis (lake Corpus Christi).

It was a job, and all they did was trotline fish for catfish and gaspergou.

They brought back hundreds and big cats all caught out of a wooden flat bottomed boats and aluminum LONE STAR boats with small "kickers" on the back. (that's what an outboard motor was called).

We took several gallon jugs down there and they had to be kept iced or....well, you get the picture!

Find an area on the bank with mussel shells and you will find them under the surface of the water sometimes all the way out to 10' or more. We would pick up the shallow ones and then have to dive for the deeper ones, but you have to feel around in the mud and dig them out to get the live ones.

Once you find them throw them on the bank or have a sack and then using a short stiff bladed knife, pry them open and scoop out the meat. Oh and be use caution because they can cut like a razor, and I've got scars to prove it.

Best catfish bait you'll ever find.

They stay on the hook good too.

Yeah, I'm 13 years older than Jimbo, and he wasn't with us when we first started fishing with mussels on Mathis lake. I was only about 6 or 7 at the time. My dad would get beef liver from one of the meat packing houses in San Antonio and that was what they'd bait the trotlines with. One trip, we were running the trotlines in the back of a cove (I was always with them. If that boat moved, I was in it.), and we noticed hundreds of things sticking out of the water near the bank. It was mussels. They picked up some and opened them, and dad said that he thought they'd make good bait. Nice white meat, and that gristle along the edge where you could hook it. They picked up a bunch of them and baited that trotline there with them. When we came back to check the lines, all you could see were these BIG tails flopping around. That trotline was loaded with big catfish. After that, they never brought liver again. The first thing we'd do when we got to the lake was go hunt for mussels. That got to be almost as much fun as the actual fishing.

We call them mussels around here. Had a friend on the Little River collect a bunch of them and ate them. He called in sick for the next 2 days.lol You find those beds, they are great to fish around. My best luck comes off the beds in Late May, June and July. I've cleaned channel cats and blues with those shells all in the intestines. You fine them, you found a honey hole! Those clams you talk about, might be the same thing. Anyway, I would try them!

When I was a kid I use to dive for them in lake granbury. We never ate them, just picked them up, looked at them, and tossed them back in the water. It was more of a challenge to dive down and find them. I never new they were in the Trinity system.

How would someone get come of these without diving for them? Or other than a vendor, would that be the only other way?

You have to remember back in those days 40's and 50's there wasn't a whole lot of commercially prepared baits if any, and even ice boxes were bulky and insulated, and usually you bought a block of ice and used an ice pick if you wanted crushed which didn't last a long as a block, so you iced down food and drinks rather than bait, so the answer was use what you had available at the lake.

Most fresh baits that we use now for catfish, people back then would never think of putting them on a hook.

It was work to seine bait, or hunt down or catch some fresh bait first before you even thought about setting lines.

I don't see the freshwater mussells like we had them in the past, due to what I mentioned in an earlier post, so finding them is going to be harder, and then there is all the work involved to convert them to bait that most will shy away from.

With todays commercially prepared baits it isn't practical for a lot of folks including me, but if you want to give it a try, you'll find that it works as good or better, than any bait out there.

Can you still get the little plastic tubs of chicken livers and gizzards at the grocery store? That's what we used to stop and get.