Scents make fish bite better — or wrinkle their noses and swim for cover. After all, 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 was a smelly success. 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 appetite. Other than shark repellent, we have a serious 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 find 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, based upon decades of experience as charter captains. For one, I cover up and hide from the sun rather than smear on sun screen.

Sun screen 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 sun screen, picked up their lure or grabbed a piece of bait and sent it down to tickle the nose of an unsuspecting fish who evidently went cross-eyed and scurried away.
 
Let’s agree to be scentibly sensible. Can someone handle a salad drenched in vinegar and expect a fish to not notice? Is it reasonable to hope a fish fails to notice 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.

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 hands with soap and saltwater.

Rinse copiously with saltwater. Then with very clean hands, handle bait like squid or anchovies, and get back to fishing.

Now those fishy noses will not be offended and you may catch the fish of a lifetime.

Capt. David Bacon is a boating safety consultant and expert witness, with a background in high-tech industries and charter boat ownership and operation. He teaches classes for Santa Barbara City College and, with a lifelong interest in wildlife, writes outdoors columns for Noozhawk and other publications. The opinions expressed are his own.