Well since no one else is giving you anythings ill give you what i can.

Mostly the bait fish i use are greenbacks(threadfin herring), mullet and menhaden. If you looking to make some sort of trailer for a lure or something along those lines simply fillet the fish and cut those fillets into long triangular shaped slices, saving the head to drop to the bottom for those bottom dwelling bastages. The smaller bait fish, a common way to use the "belly section" as u said would be to plug it....simly by cutting the tail and head off leaving a plug of the body.

hope that helps

-Jeff

did you need an explaination of filleting?? maybe i misunderstood...

i like that site
http://www.capmel.com/how_to-fillet_fish.htm

Thats a great site and those are great explainations

One thing to add on the skinning part. Before you cut the fillet from the body leave the last peice of the fillet nearest the tail attached(hanging off by a peice of skin. This makes it alot easier to skin the fish because you can use the fish as a handle to hold the fillet while you run the knife between the skin and meat....

knife has to be supersharp, otherwise you chunk the meat and produce a lot of waste, unless you're not preparing ceviche, but...watch your fingers

There are many ways to prepare bait, one way for snook is to "butterfly a bait. I use croakers for this. You just fillet both sides from the tail to just behind the gills, then remove the spine but leave the head attatched. Hook it up through the mouth and fish it on the bottom under the pier.