Hey, thanks for resurrecting this thread. My impression of channel cats is that they like anything they can enter for egg laying. Plastic barrels would probably be good, too.
To get the 5 gallon buckets to lay on their sides, how about drilling two smal lholes on the side and wriing a brick (the kind with holes in it) as a weight on one side?
We never got around to dropping our big drain tiles, but we may do that yet this fall, especially now that most people have stopped fishing at the lake in question. - Roberta