If chum is too thick, it will clump up into disgusting balls, and immediately sink to the bottom of the flat. To be effective, it has to break up as it sinks. You take a small chunk, roll it around in your fingers, and flip it into the water. When it hits and begins to sink, it should start to break up in the current, and drift away in a relatively tight cloud of gunk. For this to happen, the mix has to be just right. Too wet, and it clumps and sinks; too dry, and it simply floats away on the surface. Either way it doesn’t work so good. Since there’s nothing in the world that’s quite the consistency of good chum, we can’t tell you what it should feel like – only experience will show you. This recipe is a good starting point, though.

Bait Chum
1 cup of regular corn meal
1 can of the cheapest sardines that you can buy. Get the ones packed in soy oil.
3 or 4 tablespoons (or glurps out of a bottle) of menhaden oil (also called pogey oil), the stinkiest, oiliest, filthiest, nastiest oil in the world. Do not spill it on yourself, your clothes, or your boat. Nothing – including gasoline – will ever get every bit off of whatever it touches. You will smell poorly for weeks.

Put the corn meal in the bottom of a bucket. Open the sardines and throw them in. BE CAREFUL!!! THESE CANS CAN CUT WHOLE HAND OFF!!! DO NOT EVER USE YOUR FINGERS TO GET THE SARDINES OUT OF THE CAN!!! We have, and lived to regret it.

Add
One sardine can of seawater.

Squeeze, mix, and churn the mix with your hands. Mix it well.
You can freeze this stuff, or keep it in your refrigerator in a Tupperware container. Do not tell your wife what it is. It will keep in a refrigerator for about a week before even the airtight locking tops can’t keep the smell in (that’s when it’s really good, though).

If you make it right, small beads of oil should bubble up to the surface as the tiny balls sink and disperse. If you don’t see the oil coming out and forming a surface slick, add more. Sometimes we keep a little menhaden oil in a spray bottle, and either add it into the mix or spray a little on the surface as we’re chumming. It’s amazing stuff. Dangerous, but amazing. Menhaden oil is so powerful that it can turn almost anything into bait-attracting chum. We’ve used it with corn meal (and no sardines), and we’ve used it with peanut-butter crackers. Once we soaked a Cuban sandwich half, balled it into little pieces, and attracted so much bait that two throws set us up for the day. We joked that they must have been Spanish sardines.