Scents: The Smell Of Success

Most big game hunters who have used them believe in them. Some fishermen swear by them; others are ambivalent.

We’re talking scents.

Scents fill the shelves of sporting goods dealers. Some are meant primarily to mask the human odor. Others are supposed to attract fish and animals.

Mention scents in a crowd of fishermen and you’ll get a lot of opinions. Many will tell you scents rubbed on lures will mask, even eliminate, the human odor. As for attracting fish, well, some are convinced scented lures or baits will increase your chances of catching fish; others disagree.

Many hunters, especially archers, believe in them. They use scents to mask their odor and to attract deer and elk.

Both hunters and fishermen assume people emit foul and frightening odors.

If you are on the mailing lists of such big mail order firms as Cabela’s, L.L. Bean and Bass Pro Shops, you can’t help but be impressed with the large number of lures impregnated with scents that are supposed to attract fish.

Lure makers impregnate plastic grubs and worms with everything from garlic to protein minerals and amino acids. One maker even injects salt into its grubs to give fish “a natural taste.”

Many Inland Northwest anglers believe Berkley’s “powerbaits” attract fish. The company, which conducts elaborate tests, produces paste-style nuggets that thousands of the region’s anglers use at Fourth of July Lake and scores of Columbia Basin lakes. The nuggets are packed in jars that retail for $3 to $4 each.

Hundreds of the region’s anglers rely on concoctions of smelly fish meat, shrimp oil and other ingredients to mask human odor. For example, many anglers who troll for the big fish in Lake Pend Oreille slosh their plugs in solutions of fish egg and shrimp oil, fish flesh and even anise oil.

Some anglers never go fishing without a can of WD-40.

Don Ostlund of Spokane and John Carruth of Davenport are typical of anglers on the opposite sides as far as scents are concerned.

Ostlund is convinced olfactory nerves of fish are much more sensitive than man’s. Carruth, a guide, is somewhat ambivalent about scents. Maybe they work sometimes, he says, but he doesn’t depend on them.

Ostlund remembers an experiment made by fisheries biologists at one of the lower Columbia River dams more than a quarter-century ago. When chinooks were climbing fish ladders, a biologist put a hand in the water at one side of a raceway. Chinooks immediately moved to the other side or turned around and swam back down the raceway to the river.

Again and again, the biologists put hands in the water. Every time they did, the salmon would move away from the water contaminated by human odor.

Ostlund said he has believed in using scents to mask his and his friends’ odors and to attract fish since he was a boy. Both his father and grandfather used scents.

Like many Inland Northwest anglers, he squirts WD-40 on plugs and spinners, especially when he fishes for chinook salmon along the Columbia River’s Hanford Reach. Why WD-40? Because, he said, it masks human odor.

At one time, the maker of WD-40 identified fish oils as one of the ingredients used in the manufacture of the substance. Only “petroleum distillates” are now mentioned on the cans. Is it possible fish oils no longer are used?

When Ostlund catches a chinook - and he catches lots of them - he bleeds the fish and then wipes his lures over the side of the bleeding fish. Time and again, he said, he’s immediately caught chinooks on the lures. Did the blood and scales mask the human odor or did they attract the salmon? Or both? Since salmon don’t talk, we’ll never know.

Carruth said he has used scented and unscented plastic worms and grubs, but has been unable to determine for sure whether the scented lures work better.

Steve Mitchell of Deer Park is a believer. A dedicated archer, Mitchell, who in 1997 bagged a whitetail buck that scored high on the Pope & Young scale, has watched bucks trot straight to a “scent rag” hung in a tree near his stands. He squirts a few drops of doe urine on the rags before hanging them.

One bottler of doe deer and cow elk urine claims his mixtures are the “strongest and most powerful deer attractant you can get.”

Some hunters douse their clothes and boots with concoctions meant to mask the stink of people.

Both believers and non-believers in scents agree on one thing: Scents may not mask human odors or attract fish and wildlife, but using them isn’t going to hurt a person’s chances of catching more fish or shooting a big buck deer or bull elk.