Viewer Question: “is garlic salt on shrimp good for catfish? - Joel”

That’s a good question. To be honest, I’ve never used garlic salt as a scent enhancer for catfish. But my gut feeling is that it won’t work…or at least, it won’t work very well -especially in water systems that have plenty of diverse food sources. I did however use garlic powder (not garlic salt) as an enhancer to a dough ball mixture for carp.

When I’ve tried this “garlic dough ball” for the first time, I didn’t get a single bite on it even though I gave it a fair trial throughout the day. Yet on that same day, I have caught carp on my regular dough balls. This leads me to believe that they had no interest in the garlic scent whatsoever.

I could picture them slowly approaching the bait but quickly turning away from it as soon as they’ve picked-up its scent. Since that experience, I didn’t bother with the garlic scent any more.

For catfish, raw, fresh shrimp is an excellent bait - much better than old (almost spoiled), freezer burnt or even cooked shrimp. There’s no question, catfish can pick-up the natural shrimp’s scent very easily without adding scent enhancers - as their whole body is one big sensory organ. And also without question, a catfish will easily smell the garlic shrimp; but if they’re anything like carp, they may also ignore it.

One time while fishing for channel catfish, for bait I had one freshly-caught white sucker and a bag of almost one year old frozen cut bait. Good thing I had the sucker to cut-up and use, because, I had absolutely no hits with the old frozen bait. The fresh bait worked great. I think the truth is that catfish are picky eaters. So anyway, I would say to drop the garlic salt and stick to the natural shrimp. But, if you do try the garlic shrimp and it works great, please let me know as I’m very interested in matters like this. Thanks for allowing me to share these thoughts with you.

Claudio

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