Dockyard bait and chum

jules (US1)

I know what the bait does for the fish over the pier when you do it personally.
what do containers of chum do that you make at the dockyard and what's the difference between the two groups I know there is a difference somehow but I can't figure it out what would they do if I put them on the ships

Grandpa Squeak (US1)

It depends on the type of chum. When you use a bucket of ordinary chum it increases the number of any type of fish caught per hour by 10%. This takes up one equipment slot on your boat.

In way of explanation:
A fully upgraded trawler has 12 slots for equipment/crew

The trawler catches 15 fish per hour and fishes for a total of 2hours and 45 minutes so adding a bucket of chum would allow you to catch 1.5 more fish per hour.

The Roy crewman catches 10 fish per hour.

If you add a Roy crewman to your ship, your ship catches 10 more fish per hour. A bucket of chum would make Roy catch 11 fish per hour instead. Since both items take 1 equipment slot its only better to add a bucket of chum to your ship if you are using more than 10 Roys but a ship with 11 Roys will catch 125 fish per hour and the ship can only hold 195 fish which will waste more than half of your fishing time since the boat will be full long before the fishing time expires so ordinary chum is never worth while.

Any of the shellfish chum increase the fishing speed of all non-shellfish by 15% which means that adding a Roy instead will still be better than adding shellfish chum and shell fish are too rare in my opinion to be wasted as an ingredient for chum.

Adding a herring or tuna chum increases fishing speed of lobster, cod, salmon, and swordfish by 20%. You will have a surplus of herring most of the time (but not tuna) so you could make herring chum  and you will also have a surplus of lobster so there is no point in using chum to catch lobster. It could pay off for swordfish, salmon, and cod except that the math works out poorly. A Trawler with only 5 Roys won't be able to fill the hold in the fishing time but a trawler with 5 Roys and a herring chum or 6 Roys and no herring chum will be full before the fishing time expires which is a waste of that time and a partial waste of that equipment slot. You can try to balance it by using a large freezer to increase capacity by 16 fish per freezer but freezers are more than twice the cost (in farm dollars) of a single Roy so its better to waste half a Roy or half a herring chum instead of using a freezer.

This brings us to the exception. Lobster chum. Lobster chum increases fishing speed of cod, salmon, and swordfish by 25%.

You will have a surplus of lobster and you get good fishing experience making lobster chum. 4 Roys and 1 lobster chum will bring in more fish than 5 roys and no lobster chum without wasting any fishing time or exceeding the capacity of the boat.

The question is what to use the other equipment slots for and the answer to that is Brigettes

Brigette is the travel time crew member. She shaves 27 minutes off of the travel time of the boat in each direction (total of 54 minutes saved per Brigette per trip) and she is the least expensive crewman/equipment to add to your boat. Especially valuable when fishing for cod, salmon, and swordfish since they are always in the fishing pools that take the most travel time to reach (the farthest fishing pool takes 11 hours travel in one direction) and are the most valuable fish to sell.

In fact a Brigette will save more time for the slot used than the lobster chum saves from fishing time reductions but the lobster chum is a better use for the slot in terms of fishing capacity use.

nuke9104 (US1)

Note that chum does not affect the fishing rate as published.  It is actually about only half the rate published.  I reported this with details earlier in the following post (and was told that this had been previously reported) HERE

The Dockyard Strategy Calculator can be used to help load your boats, and you can choose to use the various forms of chum.  Through experimenting around with the various items, you can see in the calculator what their affects will be to fishing time, income, cost, profit, etc.  Note, for chum, the calculator uses the actual affected rate adjustment for chum used by the game, and not the in game published numbers.  The post for the calculator is HERE

Heather Norsk (US1)

I think Grandpa Squeak described it well with showing the pictures, but I also agree with Nuke9104 about it doesn't work as it should. Personally, I don't use chum to catch extra fish, I save it to fill contracts when they come up (but that's just my personal choice).