Catfish tips and tricks for beginners.
 

Just out of fun, my boss and I went and fished a catfish tournament this summer in July on the Chippewa River and Lake Wissota, we both live near and grew up fishing this water and I have fished catfish for over 30 years on this body of water and thought, hey it will be fun #1 and #2, we have a chance if my spots are on... We prefished a couple of mornings and evenings, using every trick, tip, and bait we have ever heard of. With a 10 fish per person limit, getting 20 cats in 12 hours is tough here on this water no matter who you are or what you are using. Prefishing we used everything but my secret weapon, did o.k, we got 6 one morning in about 2 hours, got 4 one evening before dark, so we were thinking o.k. that will work thinking if we could get that number of fish on the tournament evening and morning and a few at night we would be sitting good. Well I decided to be a idiot and go to a lighter, fluorocarbon line in case the fish were finicky (yes, even catfish can be finicky) well we were boat 21 out of 44 in take off, we got to our starting spot which we did not pre fish just because it is that good of a spot that I didn't feel we needed to do so. We got there in record time and were fishing with in 15 min of take off, in the first 40 minutes, I broke off 2 fish on hook sets, 1 while fighting and straightened out a thin shank hook. We landed 2 keepers and threw 1 fiddler back. I was using smelt that I had bought at a store since it's illegal to use them due to VHS, every bite came on smelt and we were using smelt, crawlers, cut bait, stink bait and a homemade dough ball bait in spawn sack. That told me I needed to stick to smelt. I switched spools on all 3 of my rods so I was using heavier mono line and we did pretty good. We weighed in 14 fish that night, with the 2 break offs early in the evening, 1 break off fighting and 1 that straightened the hook out, we would have been in great shape. we ended up in the top 10 but the winning team had 18 fish for a total of over 150 pounds, that should have been us. I guess the moral of the story is over the last 30 years the best bait I have ever found for cat fish (channel cats) is Smelt. 2nd best is cut bait, sucker works great, fillet it out like you are going to fry it, no skin, no bones and chunk it up and away you go... Crawlers are good also, 3 or 4 fatheads on a hook works well too.

Sounds like you had a great tournament. Those are good baits.