Tales from the Outdoors: The Lowly Earthworm

By Bob Chapin

For thousands of years, man has been collecting earthworms and using them to catch fish. They still work! Despite the money I have invested in fishing lures and tackle, I still rely upon earthworms to put fish in the live well. 

I have friends that wouldn’t be caught dead with “Garden Hackle” in their possession, especially in pursuit of our various trout species. Somehow that is looked upon as cheating…it is just too easy. In fact, among some of the sport’s purist even the suggestion of “sweetening” one of your feathered offerings with a piece of earthworm is a heresy.

Most of us began our angling careers using worms starting with cane poles and bobbers. Nothing stoked the anticipation of a day of fishing like scouring the backyard with a flashlight after dark the night before looking for the telltale shine of a couple of nightcrawlers trying to start a family.

If you were stealthy and quick, you could catch them extended out of their burrows and they were easy to collect. However, if you were heavy footed or slow to pounce, it was amazing how quickly they could return to their underground lairs. 

We would sometimes aid the dew less nights with a light sprinkling from the garden hose about a half hour before to get them moving on top. A casual perusal of available U-Tube videos will give you a selection of electrical contraptions that are guaranteed to produce crawlers literally shooting up out of the soil and some of them actually do work.

Today the average fishermen is not so involved and simply buy theirs from one of the many convenience stores or bait shops along Route 302 and other convenient locations.

One tip: always open the lid on the shallow plastic tubs and make sure the container you are buying holds live robust worms. They often sit in these locations for weeks waiting to be purchased. If you see a web of fine tentacles across the black dirt, that usually means the worms have expired. More than once I have arrived at a remote location and opened the container to discover a putrid mass of expired worms.

During our walleye trip out to Ohio last year, the captains we chartered used earthworms exclusively. They used a bait box for Canadian nightcrawler that was designed to keep them cool throughout the day.

They lasted longer and were livelier than any I had seen before. They are a great leap from the cylindrical container we used to carry on our belts as a kid.

I bought one of the bait boxes and have used it religiously ever since. It has a central compartment where the worms reside, but then around the perimeter are smaller compartments designed to hold cool packs or simply ice cubes…they work great.  I don’t know where they get the dirt they pack worms in, but it is quite black and was forever getting all over my boat and was a pain to clean.

Now, when I get a tub of worms, I pluck them out of the containers and drop them into an old cottage cheese container three-quarters full of cold clean water. It rinses them clean and makes them much easier and cleaner to handle. A clean wet rag gives them some cover and is all you need to keep them happy and alive for several weeks if you put the whole container in the reefer when you get home from a day trip.

Kids love fishing with worms. After they get over their initial squeamishness, they enjoy playing with the worms. Yes, you will get some questions from them about whether the hook hurts them, but that is soon forgotten once the first sunny comes into the boat or onto the dock. I use a #6 or #8 bait holder hook when fishing worms. Occasionally, when I know there are larger prey around, I will go to a #4.

Even through the ice, a worm will catch them most of the time. I am partial to a nightcrawler as they offer a hearty meal to most of the species we concentrate on and the style of fishing—trolling—we practice most. However, when fishing for trout on smaller streams and rivers where you will be tumbling a bait down through the current and around the rocks, we often lighten up to red wrigglers or straight trout worms, not necessarily night crawlers.

There are other terrestrial baits that you can use such as grasshoppers, hellgrammites, beetles, and ants, but nothing tops a worm for just about any species including catfish, any of the trout species, and even salmon. If you haven’t tried worm fishing lately, get in touch with your childhood adventures and give it a go. <