Fishing basics and newbie tips equals fish

Here's one of the very fundamental fishing basics. Fish, as a rule, don't like the way we humans smell. We exude a chemical called L-serine. It's a non essential amino acid and fish hate the way it smells. Some of us exude very little of it and some of us exude a lot of it.

This is another of the little goodies I learned reading In-Fisherman a long time back. They even tested it in a pool and when a drop was put in at one end most of the fish immediately moved away from that end of the pool. For a while there was even a place you could send in a test strip and they would tell you if you had a lot or a little.

If you fish out of a boat you probably have some gas, oil or grease on your hands, if you fish from shore and you filled your car up you probably have some gas smell on your hands. Guess what, fish don't like the smell of that either. It's one of the fishing basics.



When you bait your hook or put on your lure you transfer whatever scents or smell you have on your hands to your bait or lure. Fish can smell that and they won't hit it as often if at all.

I used to outfish one of my buddies in the summer time on Mille Lacs by a wide margin. Sometimes 10 to 1 and the fish I caught averaged a larger size than what he would catch. Because we were just drifting the mud flats we were both using the same terminal rigging.

Just your basic Lindy rig with a 3-5 foot leader and leeches for bait. Sometimes on a jig, sometimes not. I don't use scents in the summer to often and we didn't do it there. So we were roughly equal. At least as equal as we could be.

The only difference between what we were doing was I would make sure the truck and the boat were both full of gas and oil the night before we left and everything was loaded and ready to go. That way there was nothing hat was going to get on my hands that the fish would find objectionable.

When I got up in the morning, after breakfast and packing my lunch I would go spend about 5 minutes washing my hands with some scentless soap. You can now buy soap for fisherman that leaves no scent of any kind on your hands.

I also had a small piece of soap I carried with me just in case I got into something that would turn the fish off. If I did I would lean over the boat and rewash my hands to get the smell off.

Remember, this was the only difference between us. My hands were clean and smell free and his weren't. Lol, if we had to get gas I'd have him put it in while I went in and paid for it so I didn't have to touch the gas pump or get close to it. ;)

Same setups, same boat, same depth, same everything and yet I would outfish him by a ton. The only difference was I made absolutely sure my hands were smell free and he didn't. BTW, I never told him or anyone else about this one. Well, hey, it's nice to be able to outfish people.

Bottom line is there are scents that will help you catch more fish and there are scents that will turn the fish off and make it hard for you to catch them.

I know from experience that scents work in cold water and I know from experience that having clean non smelling hands will catch more fish. All I can say is invest a couple of bucks in some of the non scented fishermans soap and use it before you start fishing. It for sure won't hurt your fishing and in fact may help it more than you thought possible. I can tell you for a fact that this fishing basics tip can make a huge difference.

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For more fun fishing tricks like these, check out these beginner fishing tips to help you get the edge up on your fishing buddies.