Wayne Fishing Bait
The Craftsman’s Review
Section: Outdoors & Heritage
Nothing on the Stringer: Why a Dying Kentucky Bait Craft May Be the Bank Angler’s Last Real Chance Before the Cold Sets In
Almost every angler in America knows the feeling of driving home skunked. Far fewer know that the problem usually isn’t the fisherman, the spot or the weather — it’s on the hook, and it has a name. Wayne Fuller, 78, has spent 42 seasons on Kentucky Lake finding out what fish actually bite, and what happens to the baits they don’t. This is his last season at the press. What he has written down over those 42 years is worth more than any bait he ever made.
First Light in New Concord: A Barn That Smells of Corn Meal and Honey
The workshop is an old tobacco barn behind the house. His father’s trotline spool hangs on the back wall, the cedar worn smooth into the shape of somebody else’s grip. On the bench, his mother’s hand-crank meat grinder and an old pellet press the size of a mailbox. On window screens across sawhorses, row upon row of small pellets, drying. Wayne Fuller, 78, does not look up. He is running a paring knife along the face of the press, cutting pellets no bigger than a corn kernel. He has been doing this since 1991.
“It isn’t quitting the press that bothers me,” he says, still not looking up. “It’s what I don’t hear anymore. When I was a boy you’d stand on the Blood River bridge of a Saturday and hear kids hollering ‘I got one!’ all morning long. Nine, ten of ’em along that bank. I sat out there two hours last June. Not one.”
What Everyone Knows About Fishing, and the Bit Nobody Mentions
You don’t need telling that fishing has a problem. Some 57 million Americans went fishing last year, and when the people who study the sport ask why anglers give it up, “not catching anything” is right there among the top reasons. Kids quit fastest of all: if nothing bites in the first half hour, the rod goes back in the garage. That has been in the fishing magazines for years. What hasn’t been in the magazines is what happens to one particular bait on one particular hook on one ordinary Saturday morning — and that is what Wayne has spent 42 seasons writing down.
“Everybody blames the water,” he says. “Too many boats, too much pressure, the fish have gotten smart. But a fish doesn’t get smart about his supper. Go stand in any tackle aisle: a hundred jars on the wall, and nearly every one of ’em made to smell the same for every fish in the lake. You haven’t got a hundred baits. You’ve got one bait in a hundred jars.”
His father, Dock Fuller, fished the Tennessee River for a living, as his own father had before him, running trotlines and selling catfish off the back of a truck in Paducah, on the river before the Kentucky Dam closed in 1944 and on the lake after. His mother, Opal, made the bait. Honey and cornmeal paste for the carp and the bream. Fish-meal dough for the catfish lines. A gray, gritty mix she called “snail bait” for the redear on the spring beds. Every recipe went on an index card, and every card went into an old tobacco tin on the kitchen shelf. It was an old craft even then: Izaak Walton’s Compleat Angler of 1653 already recommends carp pastes made “with honey or with sugar.”
“That bait was food, not perfume. Mama cooked it on the same stove she cooked our supper on. Then the store stuff came in, and inside of fifteen years nobody on that river made their own anymore. Mama put her tin in the drawer in 1979. Nobody wanted it.”
What a Fish Actually Tastes, and What Becomes of Your Bait by Ten O’Clock
Here is the question almost nobody asks, and it is the only one that matters: when a fish swims up to your bait and swims away again, what exactly did he taste?
Fisheries researchers have been putting that question to fish in laboratories for sixty years. The answer is not romantic, and it is not “stink”:
Five Things Researchers Found When They Looked Under the Water
All over his body. He tastes the water the way you would taste soup. “He’s a swimming tongue,” Wayne says. “And the tackle aisle sells him stuff that smells strong to you.”
Roughly an ounce in a hundred thousand railroad tank cars. He knows what’s on your hook long before he sees it.
What attracts one species repels another. No single scent works on every fish in the lake.
Most trout in public water were raised in a hatchery on fish-meal pellets. Released, many barely eat for weeks. They are looking for the one thing they know.
A store-bought “carp attractant” did nothing at all. Ordinary fish-food pellet extract made the fish hold on ten times longer.
Read that list again and notice what it is really telling you. Not one of those findings is about smell the way you and I understand it. They point the same way: the right taste, for the right fish, dissolving into the water, in a shape the fish already knows. And none of that is in the average tackle box by ten o’clock on a Saturday: a dough ball that flew off on the third cast, a spray that washed off on the first, and a cup of worms that died in the truck.
That is the whole argument for what Wayne makes, and it is not the argument the tackle companies make. It is not that a pellet beats a live worm; a fresh worm beats nearly anything anyone can sell you. It is that most anglers don’t have a worm bed out back and a bait shop open at five — and the one thing that will still be good in the tackle box on the day you need it is a dry, sealed bait made for the fish you’re after.
“A fish isn’t picky,” Wayne says. “He’s particular. Give him the taste he’s looking for, in the water he’s in, and he’ll take it. That’s the whole trick, and folks make it far harder than it is.”
“Every Old-Timer Says Nothing Beats a Live Worm”
They do. Put the question to Wayne and he does not argue with it for a second.
“They’re right,” he says. “A fresh nightcrawler on a farm pond beats anything I’ve ever pressed, and the fish have been eating worms a lot longer than we’ve been fishing. If you’ve got a worm bed out back and a bait shop that opens at five, use worms and don’t send me a dime.”
He puts the knife down.
“But go and ask the ninety-nine in a hundred who haven’t got that. The bait shop doesn’t open till seven, or it closed for good two summers back. The worms are dead in the truck by ten. The wife won’t have ’em in her refrigerator, and the grandkids won’t touch ’em. Most folks won’t fight all that, and it isn’t fair to make ’em feel bad about it. A pack in the tackle box they will do. Thirty seconds.”
The same goes for making your own. Catfish men have always prided themselves on their secret recipes. “Good,” says Wayne. “If you’ve got the time to knead, make it yourself. Here’s Mama’s: a cup of cornmeal, a cup of flour, two big spoons of honey, water till it holds together, rolled in balls and dropped in boiling water for a minute. That’s free, and it works. A decent homemade bait beats a bad store-bought one every time. It’s the bad store-bought ones I’ve a problem with.”
The Baits That Send Folks Home Skunked
Which brings us to the rack by the register of every bait shop in the South. The jars of dough in five colors, the spray bottles, the foam cups of worms at five dollars a dozen: the most convenient things in the category, and the ones the people who fish every day grumble about most.
Even a leading lure maker’s own fish scientist puts it flatly: “If it’s not water soluble, fish can’t sense it.” Wayne has spent 42 seasons arriving at the same conclusion from the other end, and he can tell you exactly which four things do the damage.
Four Baits That Are Worse Than Nothing At All
“It’s lovely in the jar. Then you cast it, and half of it stays in the air.” On a hot day, dough slings off on the cast. It is the one failure on this list that does not just fail you — it fools you. “You’re fishing a bare hook and you don’t even know it. I’ve watched men sit an hour like that.”
“Oil and water don’t mix. You learned that in third grade.” A fish tastes what dissolves in the water. An oil washes off on the first cast and never reaches him at all.
“One dead worm sours the whole cup by noon.” In summer heat, worms go limp within hours, and every small bream in the cove strips them off the hook in seconds.
“Half of what’s sold is one smell in different colors. You’ve put the same supper in front of a catfish, a trout and a carp and called it fishing.” What draws one fish in pushes another away. One jar can’t be right for both.
“That’s the bit that gets me,” Wayne says. “Some grandpa spends forty dollars on jars meaning nothing but well. And what he’s bought is worse than the can of corn already sitting in his pantry.”
Forty-Two Seasons of Writing It Down: What Wayne Found Out
Wayne Fuller did not set out to make anything at all. He worked at a trout hatchery below the dam for thirty-one years, feeding fish for a living, twice a day, and fished in the evenings the way his father had fished for money. When Dock died in the fall of 1984, Wayne found Opal’s tobacco tin at the back of a kitchen drawer, the index cards still inside in her handwriting.
“I made a batch of Mama’s honey paste because I couldn’t bring myself to throw those cards out,” he says. “Took it down to Blood River on a Saturday. Didn’t think a thing about it.” He stops cutting for a moment. “Filled a stringer before nine. And I thought — well. Mama knew something.”
He wrote it down — the date, the spot, the water, what he caught — then made a batch for the neighbor and wrote that down too. That is the whole method and he has never changed it.
It did not stay a secret for long. By the late eighties the men at the Blood River ramp had a saying for it: “Wayne’s at it again.” They parked next to his truck on purpose. A fellow from Paris, Tennessee followed his boat a whole morning, pretending to fish. One man offered him five hundred dollars cash for the recipe. “Wasn’t mine to sell,” Wayne says. “It was Mama’s.” A game warden once asked to see inside the can, sure there had to be something illegal in it. He smelled it, handed it back, and asked if he could have a bag.
The hatchery gave him the rest. Thirty-one years of feeding trout taught him that a fish goes for what it knows, and most trout in public water grew up on small, protein-scented pellets. In 1991 Wayne bought the hatchery’s old pellet press at a surplus auction for forty dollars, fitted a die with a steel pin so every pellet comes out with a hole through it, and put Opal’s recipes into a shape a fish already recognized. He dries them on window screens in the tobacco barn — a building made, after all, for drying things in the air.
By the ninth season he wanted better than his own memory, so he began carrying a pocket thermometer and a white coffee-can lid on a string, lowering it over the side to see how deep it went before it disappeared. Water temperature in one column, water color in the next. Then two rods off the same boat: one with his own pellet, one with whatever jar the rest of the dock was using that week.
“That’s when the penny dropped. All those years I’d been thinking about stink. Stink isn’t the job. The job is the right taste for the fish that’s there, in the water you’ve got that day.”
The Seven-Can System: Why Small Details Decide Whether a Fish Bites
A fish decides about your bait in a fraction of a second: researchers have timed a bass tasting a bait and spitting it out in a quarter of a second. And the bite itself is a reflex, “an innate response which is not modified by experience,” as one fisheries patent puts it. A fish can learn to fear a hook. He cannot learn to stop answering a taste.
“He doesn’t swim off because it didn’t stink enough,” Wayne says. “He swims off because it was the wrong supper. So the job of a bait isn’t to be strong. It’s to be right.” For thirty years he kept seven old coffee cans on the bench seat of his boat, one for each recipe, and switched between them by the fish and the weather.
The Seven-Can System
Every pellet carries a hole about one by two millimeters. It threads straight onto a small hook or a hair rig, and the water runs through the center, so the bait gives off its taste from the inside too. “A solid bait only talks from the skin. Mine talks from the middle.”
Pressed from animal and plant proteins, the pellets release their taste into the water slowly, the way a fish expects food to. No oil, nothing that washes off on the first cast. “Nothing that works properly gives itself up all at once.”
About 0.85 centimeters across, the size of a corn kernel. That is not a compromise. It is the size Wayne arrived at after 42 seasons of pressing them larger and pressing them smaller, and it is the size his notebooks say gets bit. “Folks think a bigger gob is better. It isn’t. A big gob is a free lunch for the bait thieves. Want a catfish? Stack two or three.”
Intense Fishy and Briny Shrimp for the bass, walleye and other predators. Savory Snail Meat and Sweet Corn for the catfish, carp and bottom feeders. Fruit Blast and Pure Honey for the trout and the panfish. Red Worm for everything that swims. “One supper for every fish in the lake never worked. Mama knew that in 1950.”
Cold or rainy, Wayne reaches for Fishy or Shrimp. Sunny, it’s Fruit or Honey. “You don’t have to know a thing about fishing to follow that. My great-grandson does it, and he’s seven.”
Each flavor is vacuum-sealed in its own pack. No refrigerator, no dead worms, no bait shop at five in the morning. “My late wife Dottie bought that sealing machine for deer meat. It’s twenty years old. Sometimes a bag loses its suck on the way. Doesn’t matter a lick to the fish.”
“Twenty-Three, and Five on the Whole Dock”
Wayne takes the notebooks down from the shelf: fourteen of them, held together with a perished rubber band. More than five thousand days on the water.
“May of ninety-seven,” he says, tapping a page. “Gully-washer the night before, water like chocolate milk. Twelve boats on the bluegill beds and every one of ’em throwing corn and crawlers. I opened the fishy can.” He shrugs. “I wrote down twenty-three. Rest of the dock, all of ’em together, maybe five. Same water, same morning, forty feet apart.”
He turns further on. An entry from 2003: two bags given to a young father from Murray so he could take his boy fishing. “That boy’s thirty now. Every opening day he sends me a photograph and writes the count on the back, so I’ve got the whole run of it in his handwriting.”
“That’s the payment, that is. Not the money. Knowing there’s a grown man out there who still writes me the number, twenty-some years on. Mama’s recipes do that. They don’t give up.”
Do This First. It Costs Nothing.
Before anybody sends Wayne any money, he would like a word about your hands.
The fisheries researchers put it plainly: sunscreen, gasoline, insect repellent and tobacco can shut a catfish’s feeding down. The best bait in Kentucky is useless if it reaches the water tasting of whatever was on your fingers.
That, Wayne is quick to add, is also why “the stinkier the better” is nonsense. “Somebody said it once and everybody’s copied it since. There’s nothing under it.” A leading catfish taste researcher put it in one line: “What stinks to you doesn’t stink to fish.” Wayne grins. “What stinkier reliably does,” he says, “is get you thrown out of the kitchen. Mind, a strong bait does no harm in muddy water. Different job.”
“Rub your hands in wet grass or a bit of mud before you bait up,” he says. “Costs nothing. But do it before anything else, because the best bait in the world tastes like bug spray if you handle it with bug-spray hands, and I’ve no interest in selling bug spray.”
The second free thing: go small, and go where the fish are. A small hook, a light weight, and the bait on or near the bottom beside cover — a dock post, a brush pile, a weed edge. “I can’t put fish where there aren’t any. Nobody can. Find the fish first. Then give ’em the right supper.”
What People Write Back After a Season
“I’d honestly never thought about what was on the hook. My husband has fished the same pond every Saturday for thirty years and lately came home with nothing more often than not. I ordered Wayne’s set for his birthday because I had no idea what else to get a man who owns every rod in Tennessee. First Saturday out he came home with eleven bluegill and a catfish and cleaned them on the back porch, whistling. He hasn’t whistled in years.”
Carol B., Tennessee
“What I did not expect was how clean it is. Every other bait I’ve bought either leaked, dried out hard as a rock, or stank up the truck for a week. This comes in seven little sealed packs and sits in the side pocket of my bag until I need it, which — as Wayne points out — is rather the whole idea.”
Dale R., Missouri
The Questions That Come Up Most
“Commonest question there is, and the answer is nearly always yes. You didn’t catch on it because it was one jar for every fish. Match the can to the fish and the weather and give it a full morning.”
“October is one of the best months of the whole year, not the worst. The water’s cooling, the fish feed hard before winter, and down South they keep biting right through it. And a box in the tackle box now is ready for the first warm Saturday in March.”
“That’s the size and the hole. A small fish can peck at it, but he can’t strip it the way he strips a worm. In forty-two seasons I’ve had two men call me about bait thieves, and both times they’d jammed on a gob the size of a marble.”
A Craft Ends This Season — and So Does the Supply
After 42 seasons at the press, Wayne has come to a decision that nobody imposed on him but that his hands have made unavoidable. It is arthritis, in both hands, and worse every winter for five years now. He can still fish. He can still mix and weigh and seal the bags. But the fine work — pulling the press lever so the pin stays true, cutting a clean pellet that doesn’t crumble, judging the mix by feel the way Opal taught him — that has gone.
“The mixing’s all right,” he says. “It’s the press. I can’t hold the lever steady anymore, and if I can’t do it right I won’t do it at all. Mama would’ve had words about a crumbly pellet.”
His son Ronnie runs a transmission shop in Paducah and has no interest in any of it. There is no apprentice. When Wayne stops, 42 seasons of knowledge — the notebooks, the feel for when a batch is right — go quiet with him.
Last month his great-grandson Bo, seven, caught his first catfish from Wayne’s johnboat and asked the question Wayne has heard on Kentucky Lake for forty years: “Grandpa, why do they always bite for you?” “I told him I’d write it down for him,” Wayne says. “I suppose that’s what this is.”
What remains are the last boxes on the shelves of the tobacco barn — 386 of them when we visited in August. The final ones that will ever come off that press.
“The Money Was Never the Reason. It Still Isn’t.”
Wayne could ask more, and anyone who has fished with it would understand why. He has kept the final run deliberately low. Not as a sale. Not as a clearance. As a gesture.
“I don’t want the money. I want it on the water. I want some grandpa out on a bank this fall hearing a little one holler ‘I got one!’ That’s worth a good deal more to me than a price on a label.”
His granddaughter Jenna, 29, a nurse in Murray, runs the online side through Cedar & Tin Co. — a small shop she set up in her spare room when the orders got past what a kitchen telephone could handle. “It turns out there are thousands of people who’ve been looking for exactly this,” she says. “Something made by somebody who actually went out and checked.”
Wayne’s Handmade Fishing Bait, in Brief
Made by one pair of hands: every box is pressed, dried and sealed by Wayne Fuller in his tobacco barn in New Concord, Kentucky. Not a factory, not a production line. Each one carries 42 seasons and more than 5,000 documented days on the water behind it.
The Seven-Can System: the taste each fish is actually looking for, rather than one strong smell for every fish in the lake — because what sends you home empty is the wrong supper.
Sized for the fish: pellets about 0.85 cm across with a 1 × 2 mm hole through the center, right for a small hook, a hair rig, or two or three stacked for catfish. Seven flavors, one sealed pack each: Intense Fishy, Red Worm, Sweet Corn, Fruit Blast, Snail Meat, Briny Shrimp and Pure Honey. No refrigerator, no live bait, nothing to keep alive.
Strictly the last run: 386 boxes remained when this article went to press. Final season’s pressing from Wayne’s barn — no restock, no successor, no second batch.
Where It Is Sold
Wayne’s Handmade Fishing Bait is sold through Cedar & Tin Co., the small online shop his granddaughter Jenna runs. It is not at Walmart, not at the bait shop and not on any marketplace, for the straightforward reason that one man in a tobacco barn in Kentucky cannot supply it.
This Season Only. Then the Barn Door Shuts for Good.
The season has already turned. Across the South the water is cooling and the fish are feeding hard for the winter ahead, and the grandkids will be home for Thanksgiving. They will go down to the bank with a cup of worms, and in most places they will sit there an hour and catch nothing at all. And the shelves in New Concord are emptier every week — the run before this one sold through in eleven days.
“I want every last box of it on the water,” Wayne says. “That’s all I’m after. A quiet bank, a little one with a rod, and somebody who’ll take the time to sit with ’em. The fish will do the rest themselves.”
Nothing to Lose: The Whole-Season Guarantee
Nothing about fishing happens on a schedule, so the guarantee is not tied to a clock. Take it out on the water. If you are not entirely satisfied with the bait itself — the pellets, the flavors, the packs, the way it threads on the hook — send it back for a full refund. No conditions, no deadline, no forms. Wayne stands behind every box that leaves his barn, and so does Cedar & Tin Co.
More From the Water It Went To
“I worked thirty years in fisheries, much of it on hatchery trout. The things Wayne has thought about — that each species tastes differently, that the taste has to dissolve rather than sit on top, that a fish raised on pellets is looking for a pellet — are exactly the things we kept seeing in the water. It’s the only bait I give my grandchildren.”
Dr. Ellen K., retired fisheries biologist, Missouri
“We wiped our hands in the grass first, like he says, and felt slightly ridiculous doing it. Opened the shrimp pack because it was drizzling, and on the second cast the bobber went under. We hadn’t caught a catfish off that dock since about 2015.”
Gary T., Arkansas
“I’d always assumed store bait was for beginners and live worms were for people who actually catch fish, and that you had to pick. Turns out that was just what everybody was selling. This is both, and I resent slightly how long it took me to find it.”
Linda D., Alabama
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