Try salt curing those livers.Coffee can, layer of salt ,layer of livers and so on.Works out pretty good.

Two things

Live green rainfrogs. Use them on limb lines with no weights and give them just enough slack to be able to swim on the surface a little. At nite the surface feeding catfish will go crazy over them. They also work well if they are dead an just sort of drifting a few inches below the surface.

Cut up eel. The meat is very tough and the skin is so tough that you can barely get a hook barb through it. So, it is almost impossible for smaller fish or turtles to steal your bait. Either something will get caught on it, or the eel will sit there on the hook until it rots off.

I cant say tooo much, but it did not involve a rod