A recent disappointing trip to Thermalito Afterbay, below Lake Orville, left my partner and me wondering why we caught so few fish, in spite of what we thought were good autumn temperatures, a favorable moon, and high water levels. We couldn’t blame angling pressure, because we were the only ones on the southern end of the impoundment. On the drive home, the issue of the scent of sunblock on one’s hands and face and subsequently on the flies, came up (anglers are always seeking excuses). We didn’t develop any concrete answers, but during our discussion, we found enough examples of scent on flies or lures influencing angling success to make the question worth exploring.
Before I retired, instead of purchasing a midlife-crisis Ferrari or Porsche, or seeking a young girlfriend, I bought a high-powered center-console boat and learned about sophisticated bait fishing in San Francisco Bay, the Sacramento– San Joaquin Delta, and the Pacific Ocean from Monterey north to Bodega Bay. On one trip to the Benicia area of the Carquinez Strait for stripers and sturgeon (often we bait fished and fly fished on the same trip, even in the ocean), I found that I was being seriously outfished by my partner. We were both using the same rigs, which consisted of fresh threadfin shad on a sliding sinker rig. This rig was striper candy of the highest order.
Both of us were seated on a crossboat seat with rods pointing back over the stern. We used rigs with rubber-banded toothpicks on the rod butt, above the handle, which gave just enough tension to hold our lightly weighted sliding sinker rigs on the bottom in the outgoing tide. A hungry fish would pick up the bait, pop the line out of the toothpick with minimal resistance, and we had a “runner.” Engage the reel spool, set the hook, and you were into a fish — in those days, often a very large one.
After a quiet 20 minutes without action of any sort, my partner, Hal, took out a can of WD-40 lubricant, rubbed his hands together with a gleeful smile, and started spraying his bait before each cast. I laughed and gave him a bad time. Forty-five minutes later, he had two stripers and a keeper sturgeon in the boat. Swallowing my pride, I started spraying my shad with the magic potion and soon was hearing the distinctive toothpick pop and the sound of a running fish on the reel clicker. It made a believer of me.
Subsequently, either the United States Coast Guard or the California Department of Fish and Game outlawed that use of WD-40. Along the way, an early Google search showed that WD-40 is water soluble and that it was said that across the nation, 50 percent of its use in retirement communities was on “senior citizen” joints for arthritic issues, not on rusted nuts and bolts.
With WD-40, you could see a sheen that came off the bait, and it had a distinctive, slightly sweet odor. In saltwater fishing in Florida and Mexico, I’ve seen flat, glistening “slicks” covering a quarter of an acre or more. I’ve witnessed several in the Delta and one at San Luis Reservoir. They are a telltale sign that predators are slashing baitfish underneath, and they beg for a cast fly.
In the ocean, I preferred the mooching method for taking salmon, using live or fresh bait on a light sliding sinker, but I also trolled, often to locate spread-out fish. We used a rig consisting of 17-pound-test monofilament line with a sinker release that held a small, round eight-ounce weight, a six-inch-long silver or gold “dodger” or “flasher,” and a chartreuse or pink rotary “salmon killer” that was a harness for an anchovy, herring, or sardine. Remembering WD40’s value, I tried rubbing cut anchovy or herring on all components of the rig. We tried it on one side of the boat and then switched sides as a control. Most of the time, we took fish on the “doctored” rigs. It didn’t matter if you switched sides back and forth. The scented gear usually caught the salmon. The baits were less than 10 feet apart in the water at the same depth, and the salmon vectored in on the smelly ones. We couldn’t say whether it was the smell, or the sheen, or the masking of human odor or that of outboard oil or gasoline, but it was dramatic enough that we became more careful about washing our hands before baiting up, even carrying bars of Lava soap onboard (made by the same WD-40 people) and rubbing our hands with anise oil (a great carp and catfish attractor) after washing.
All of this made me wonder about the efficacy of doctoring flies with scent. I tried crawdad scent and shad scent, but found that the commercial products of the time were oily and gummed up flies, so they didn’t breathe very well.
Another glaring, yet different example of the significance of scent in fishing occurred in the Reserva Marshes of the Parana River in northern Argentina. A friend and I were there to fly fish for golden dorados — both the fish and the country were on our bucket lists. A day’s routine included a welcome lunch stop on a low-lying island. A small portable grill was set up, and we gathered wood and thick vine stalks that would be burned down into coals in the Argentine way. Argentina has the distinction of having the highest per capita meat consumption in the world. It’s in every meal. One day in the marshes, wonderfully light and airy grilled chorizo sausages were the midday choice, always washed down with some robust malbec. (The good stuff is rarely exported.) My partner found that when paired with hunks of local bread and spicy mustard, the chorizo made mouthwatering hot dogs, which we gobbled one after another.
After lunch, we doused the coals, packed the grill and condiments, motored to a new spot, and continued fishing. On his second or third cast and subsequent retrieve into a seam where two channels joined, my partner’s line went strangely slack, with no tug or subsequent resistance — nothing whatsoever like the violent explosion experienced in a hookup with a golden dorado. He reeled in, and we discovered that his line was cleanly severed about 12 feet in from where the shooting part of the integrated head joined the running line. We were baffled.
I resumed casting, and the same thing happened to me on my first cast . . . again, a 90-dollar line cut cleanly, to our bewilderment. We mentally backtracked and remembered that before lunch, we were catching four-to-five-pound piranhas that destroyed our f lies quickly with their razor-sharp teeth. One fly, one fish. They were fun fish, and our English-speaking guides quickly assured us that they weren’t the man-eating kind, perhaps responding to fearful looks on our faces. In fact, there are many species of piranha, most not life-threatening.
A little later, but better later than never, a light bulb went off. We figured that the toothy fish now were severing our lines where the chorizo scent from our hands was heaviest, which was where we gripped our lines to double haul.
This incident, which occurred a few years ago, illustrates how incredibly refined a fishes’ olfactory senses can be and how quickly a detected scent can be honed in on. We asked the mistress of the house back at our estancia for some soap for the boat and were very careful on subsequent days to wash our hands before handling our backup lines.
For several years, I’ve been popularizing my version of Tom Nixon’s Calcasieu Pig Boat largemouth bass fly, which has origins going back to the 1950s in Louisiana. I use brown, crawdad-color UV Polar Chenille for a bulkier body on a large wide-gape hook and hackle it with 12 strands of variegated orange/brown silicone Sili Legs that dance and breathe, finally adding a thin sliver of salt-impregnated plastic bait as a trailer. It’s effective when cast to dock pilings and allowed to sink or worked down shoreline banks using a floating bass taper and a 10-foot leader. I’ve been refining this fly for four years and fish it 90 percent of the time when angling for subsurface bass because it may imitate a crawfish. Bass and lots of other creatures love crawdads.
My bass season at a 1,600-foot elevation foothill lake starts in mid-February. February was close to the late January date of the International Sportsmen’s Exposition in Sacramento, where my wanderings in the Expo hall had led me to a booth that sold “scent enhancer” products like those used by conventional-gear bass anglers and, as I found out, commercial fishermen.
I was fortunate in that the owner was there and responded when I asked if he carried a water-soluble scent. His company did, and I walked away with several products to try. I also learned at his and other booths that both recreational anglers and commercial fishermen use a variety of scents.
The long and short of all this is that I experimented at my foothill lake with a water-soluble “shrimp” scent on my Pig Boats, just as the conventional-gear bass boys do on their plastic baits. This use coincided with more hookups of large fish than I had experienced during any of the previous 11 years. I liked the water-soluble product because it didn’t gum up my carefully tied flies or oil my fingers. Also, I observed that the bass picked up and “held” the fly for a longer time. There was even a milky, sheenlike cloud coming off the fly that I liked immediately. Often I would see my leader arcing through the water before I felt anything, and the fish held on to the fly long enough to give me a chance to gather in slack and set the hook.
Whether you think that scenting your fly, lure, or plastic bait is ethical or not, these examples show us that we should always avoid noxious scents coming from our hands or gear that may throw up the caution flag for fish. Most of us know that sunblock harms fly lines and irritates your eyes. Lots of other products that can get on our hands don’t belong in the water we fIsh and might be dissuading fIsh from taking our offerings. If a salmon or steelhead can track down the parent scent of its home river, it stands to reason that outboard oil, sunblock, line cleaner, or something else on your fly, line, or leader might just send a fIsh scurrying.
You can use scent to mask your own body odor or the odor of something you’ve picked up or to increase a fly’s attractiveness. It turns out that there are numerous products on the market that may have value, and many are “natural,” made from fish or fish products. After catching my first fish of the day, I gently touch my fly to a fIsh’s skin and rub the fly in my hand that removed the hook. I swear it helps to remove any odd scents the fly might have. But then, perhaps confidence is the best attractant. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could bottle and sell it?
