One Chum Recipe Schmidtlein: • Wash and rinse soybeans or milo about seven times until the water runs clear. • Leave the lid slightly ajar on one corner of the bucket, letting the chum ferment for 2 or 3 days in the sun. • When the water becomes cloudy and the chum emits a bad-beer odor, drain off the liquid, seal the bucket completely or transfer it to an airtight container. Or enclose the bucket inside a couple of heavy trash bags, tying the bags until they’re airtight. After storing the chum for a year, it has a strong, yeasty, stale-beer odor. The two keys to keeping it for extended periods are getting it clean so it doesn’t compost, and removing any sources of oxygen.

Not every chumming site is created by design. At the marinas around Lake Texoma on the Texas-Oklahoma border, for instance, anglers fillet scads of striped and white bass nearly every day. Filleted-out carcasses are tossed into the water, forming a pile of unintentional chum, which attracts Texoma’s blue cats. Some blues consistently gambol about the vicinity of the chum heaps where anglers tangle with some titans and numbers of smaller fish.

Likewise, channel catfish are caught around docks at Grand Lake, Oklahoma, where anglers dispose of carcasses of filleted crappies and white bass. Shumway’s use of ground shad on the Kansas River is a clever way to duplicate Lake Texoma’s and Grand Lake’s unintentional but effective chum sites.

Clyde Holscher, a multispecies guide from Topeka, Kansas, finds that the gizzard shad populations in northeastern Kansas are often meager, making it an arduous task to collect a supply of shad to grind into chum. So, he and the bulk of skillful chummers across northeastern Kansas who pursue channels and small blues in reservoirs employ soybean and milo chums.

He makes his soybean chum in 5-gallon plastic buckets, each having a lid with a narrow slit cut partway across the top. The slit allows the fermentation gases to escape but also keeps flies out, preventing maggots from developing. Anglers who want maggots in their chum should drill holes in the lids to allow flies to enter the bucket and lay their eggs in the moist, rotting soybeans. Maggots develop in 8 to 20 hours during the heat of the summer.

Holscher prefers unadulterated soybean chum, however, one that exhibits a golden hue and has a mild aroma. He fills a third of a fermenting bucket with soybeans then fills it with water and secures the lid. He normally begins to chum after it’s fermented for just 48 hours, and uses it until the bean color changes from gold to gray. Like many other chummers, he finds that gray soybeans are too rank and not as effective as gold ones. He says that in August, a milo-soybean chum is more effective than one made from pure soybeans, and he makes it the same way as his soybean chum.

Working a Chum Site

During the summer at Kansas reservoirs, Holscher fishes vertically in deeper water, at times down to 50 feet, noting that Dave Schmidtlein of Topeka is the master of the vertical presentation.

Most Kansas chummers use two anchors, one off the bow and another off the transom. But Schmidtlein shuns anchors, except when the wind howls. Instead, he works with a bow-mounted electric trolling motor on his Ranger bass boat. Even when the wind roars, he uses only one anchor set off the bow. One anchor helps tame the wind and waves, keeping his boat on top of the channel catfish covert while he uses his trolling motor to slowly move around and across a spot. Schmidtlein says that the two-anchor system prevents anglers from probing the entire perimeter of a lair, inhibiting them from presenting baits from a variety of angles, which often can be a critical factor.

He prefers 8- to 9-foot light-action rods, similar to a 7-weight flyrod, and spools medium-size spinning reels with yellow or chartreuse braided line from 10- to 50-pound test, opting for the heaviest line when he’s fishing brushpiles. He’s caught significantly more channel catfish since he switched from mono to braided line. He says that the prepared bait he uses elicits soft bites—at times, almost phantom bites. A long, soft-tipped rod makes a good strike indicator when catfish aren’t phantom biters, and a good number of soft strikes wouldn’t have been detected if he hadn’t used braided line, he adds.