If you anchor or tie off to rigs regularly, it is worth the effort.

I'm thinking I might try making chum balls this summer.

 

I've been doing exactly what you asked about for years. Catch ratio has doubled(or more) since I started chumming. Not only leftover bait can be used, but also menhaden, scraps off cleaning table, all your non-game fish, and shrimp boat by-catch will work. A number 32 Weston grinder makes short work of them, and yes adding menhaden oil doesn't hurt a thing. It's a little bit messy, but well worth the effort. It often makes for spectacular feeding frenzy, right behind the boat.-Mike

 

Grind, Freeze and put in a crawfish sack, great results!!

 

I do not bother grinding anything. Just freeze it and we cut it to the size we need offshore

 

^This.

It's important to have some silver sides and belly skin attached IMHO. If you grind it the silver doesn't have any flash. On a tuna boat we had a "pendejo" cut a box of Spanish sardines in halves or thirds, one every 10 seconds or so. It cuts best when half frozen and doesn't stink as much, about thumb-size.

 

I used to grind up the fish carcass after cleaning the fish, toss in the bait add cat food or rabbit food, dry oatmeal and mix it with fish oil in a couple 1 gallon buckets.
Throw them in the freezer and when we would go out I wood snap on a lid with 3/4"- 1" holes in it and tie it to the boat and toss one overboard.
When fishing a rig make sure that you anchor so the chum is drifting into the rig.
Now that there is a Buckees` in route to Galveston we just buy it.

 

I personally prefer to catch fresh for chum and prefer chuncking as you can control your chum stream better....I just give away any left over bait, dead or live, I never have a problem filling the chests, in which I acknowledge some of that may be due to good karma.....

but that's just me, I always believe you shouldn't change what works, superstitious or not.

 

Just cut up bite size pieces of last trips leftovers works great. Seems like every time we tried to grind up and do chum cloud deals it brought sharks in

 

The tinier the pieces, the better. That way the smell and enticement drives them wild, and they chomp down on your bigger piece of bait once they see it. My dad always explained it that you want to tempt them and get them to your bait, not fill them with snacks, you know?

When I was younger I worked at a small marina, and one day we dock kids found a light weight branch chipper on sale for $100. We all pitched in $20, and voila, best investment of our young years. That thing would chew whole fish like it was nothing, and made the most beautiful chum I've ever seen. We'd add bunker oil, oatmeal, any of the trash bait the shop couldn't sell, whatever we had around. It was awesome. We'd pee ourselves laughing, grinding it up. And we caught like crazy. To this day I am a huge fan of chumming

 

I have my fish cleaning table set up to bolt a grinder to the end and make chum. I also built a little slide-out table on the end of my fish cleaning table to hold a 1-gallon milk jug, which is positioned under the nozzle of the grinder. Fill the jug, rinse and wipe down, and into the freezer. When its time to use it, i slice it all full of holes, and hang it over the size with a rope.

If i want to go deep with it, i'll put the block inside of a heavy steel chum basket i built, and send that down. Let it hang a while, and slowly bring it back up to the boat.

Works pretty darn good!

 

macaroni and menhaden oil

 

Wow, this is new. Chumming will bring in all king of fish within the smelling distance, including sharks.

 

With today's snapper population who needs chum? I tried a chum churn last year was doing good before using it once I started chumming we got covered in sharks.

 

Have any of you found the some species make a better attractor chum than others? In Florida, I have ground up jacks, bluefish, ladyfish, etc. I wonder if the oilier, bloodier, fish worked better, or because they were predator fish, their chum smell actually scared some fish?

 

take this with a grain of salt, but I do not like chumchurns or chum that has been grinded. In Florida for yellow tails that works great, in Texas you get sharks.

I want my chum is cubes, very specific to the fish I am targeting with it. mangrove snapper are the only snapper I chum up, other then that we use chum for tuna, Ling, Dodos, etc... all these fish I want the chum to be the exact size of my bait, I also want to be able to toss it up in the air so it hits the water.

 

I've used my chum churn to get state water snapper within sight casting distance of the boat, call cobia up from under a weedmat, and bring mahi to the boat.

Oh, and jacks and bluefish are very bloody. If you're worried about sharks, I'm thinking they'd probably stir the sharks up pretty good, even in cubed format.