Live bait or artificials?  It's an age old debate and one in which I find myself on both sides at times.  Both produce and sometimes one can outfish the other.  I'll go out on a limb and say there's situations where you may stand a better chance catching more fish chumming and soaking live bait, but at the same time there's some fish you wouldn't have caught unless you were throwing artificials and covering tons of water.  Pick your poison I suppose. 

My last trip out we had the baitwell blacked out with 3" whitebait and a pretty good beat on a few fish.  I thought for sure a little chumming would get the action going.  As it often goes, I was wrong.  We rained sardines on them for a little while but had no takers, so we switched over to artificial and covered some more water.  Not long into that we boat 1/2 a dozen slot fish and called it a day.

Artificial's ruled that day.  Tomorrow may be a different story.