When fishing for Catfish when should I use a Carolina Rig?

As deep water bottom dwellers, cats are far less dependent on their eyesight for feeding, but instead, depend primarily on their sense of smell and touch, using their olfactory senses and barbels. Also, cats can “hear” vibrations in the water, caused by whatever source, which might just be your Carolina Rig, as it is dragged along the bottom of the waterway. These “jagged” vibrations are considered to mimic or relate to the vibrations made by a distressed or injured fish., thus attracting the predators to finish the job. Carolina Rigs are essentially a cast-and-retrieve, bottom-fishing rig whose biggest proponents are bass fishermen, who find these devices to be uncommonly effective at getting these mostly lazy Largemouths to come over and investigate. The Carolina Rig’s sonic values aren’t the only things that make it useful, though - the fact that it relies on a leader and a free-floating bait item makes it well-suited to catfishing, too, as this is similar to the design of a true catfish favourite, the Slipweight, or Sliding Ledger rig, a true necessity in the catfisherman’s toolkit. Where catfish are concerned, the Carolina Rig variation on this system can have some value, in places where there is a clean rock bottom, and nothing to snag the line on, and where the gentle clicking of the rig, as it is slowly drawn back in, after being cast and allowed to sink, can be the deciding factor in bringing a cat in close enough to find your bait, and strike it. The bait should still be soft, well-presented and smelly, to complete the ruse, and should be on a long enough end-leader to let it float freely, without much line pull.

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