When I worked for the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation, one of my duties was conducting fishing clinics for youngsters.

My clinics typically were conducted in Tulsa parks that had small ponds. They included some basic instruction and practice with casting, knot-tying and so on, followed by a couple of hours of actual fishing.

When we were lucky, the ponds were stocked ahead of time with catchable-sized catfish. Often, though, we just took our chances with whatever fish inhabited the ponds.

I learned quickly how to improve the fishing success of some of the children.

Chumming.
If you're not familiar with that term, it just means feeding the fish to draw them closer to your fishing spot, and maybe to put them into a feeding mood.

All it took was a can or two of generic canned corn or hominy scattered a few feet from shore at a spot where kids were going to fish. Repeatedly, I saw kids who fished the baited areas catch fish quicker and more often than the kids who fished in the non-baited areas.

Many years before that, when I was the outdoor editor of a Tulsa newspaper, I took part each year in an annual children's fishing tournament at Lake Keystone. Members of Tulsa-area bass clubs volunteered their tackle, boats and time to take dozens of kids from area orphanages and institutions out to do a little fishing.

There always was a mixed bag of success until one year when a participant came in with his livewells crammed full of catfish, carp and other fish. That group swept the competition and their kids won the biggest prizes. I'm not positive, but I think it was the late Joe Krieger, host of a local television fishing show that aired for most of three decades on Tulsa stations, who had the winning team that day. And the reason for the huge success was that they had chummed their fishing spot for a couple of days before the contest.

That launched a storm of chumming in later events, which resulted in the kids catching many more fish and having much more fun. Even if they didn't win the big prizes, they got a lot more enjoyment out of the day because they caught a lot of fish.

"Coarse" fishermen in Europe have turned chumming into a fine art. Anglers there employ slingshots and floating or sinking feeders to dribble bait into the water and have lengthy arguments about which concoction is best for chumming this species or that.

Here in the U.S., there are many schools of thought about chumming. Some anglers use dog food. Some use cattle food cubes. Cottonseed cake, although sometimes hard to find these days, has long been a popular choice. You can find recipes online for a variety of chumming baits, like grain fermented in beer and water.