Scents are a thing when it comes to fishing. Actually, an important thing. Scents make fish bite better … or make them wrinkle their noses and flee the area at top fin speed.

There are good scents and bad scents. Great work has been done to find fish-attracting scents and market them.

For example, Berkley’s R&D to develop their ultra-successful Gulp! baits. Fish love it and many professional anglers (including myself and my crew) use Gulp! regularly and liberally.

Sadly, we know precious little about what smells make fish lose their appetites. Other than shark repellent, we have a dearth of available research on the repulsive side of our smelly equation.

The best we have are observations and opinions of charter captains, fishing guides, and professional anglers.

An observant angler or crew member can engage in plenty of ongoing research aboard fishing boats. I’m happy to share some of my thoughts, and those of my crew member, Capt. Tiffany Vague (owner of Vague Rods), based upon decades of experience as charter captains.

For one, I cover up and hide from the sun rather than smear on sunscreen. Of course sunscreen wearers catch plenty of fish and certainly all sun screen products are not created equal.

Yet, I have watched good bites suddenly shut off for people who just slathered on copious quantities of sunscreen, picked up their lure, or grabbed a piece of bait and sent it down to tickle the nose of an unsuspecting fish who evidently then went cross-eyed and scurried away.

Let’s be scentably sensible:

Can someone handle a salad or sandwich drenched in vinegar-based dressing and expect a fish to not notice? Is it reasonable to hope a fish fails to notice that an angler grabbed and devoured four big handfuls of fiery habanero chips before handling a bait or lure?

What else? Well, fuel and oil don’t exactly put fish into a feeding frenzy. I’m even wondering if hand sanitizer is yucky to fish. On the other hand, WD-40 will sometimes add to the attraction of lures.

We do not yet have adequate research available to us to plumb the smelly depths of this onerous issue, but I have found a workable solution and it should come as no surprise.

After a lunch or snack or after slathering on the sunscreen, wash your hands with soap and saltwater. Rinse copiously with saltwater.

Then with very clean hands, handle bait like squid or anchovies. Now those fishy noses will not be offended, and you may just catch the fish of a lifetime.