Episode 233: Do Fishing Lures Actually Need to Look Real?

Why do bass crush lures that look absolutely nothing like anything they would naturally eat?

This week on Outdoor Journal Radio, Pete and Angelo are joined once again by Fish’n Canada’s resident fish scientist, Dr. Steven Cooke, to break down the science behind modern fishing baits and one of the strangest lure crazes to hit the fishing world in years.

Fresh off ICAST, the guys dive into the exploding popularity of the bizarre urchin-style and Koike-inspired baits that anglers are scrambling to get their hands on, with some selling for hundreds of dollars online. What does a bass actually think it’s looking at when one of these things falls through the water? And more importantly, why does it work?

Dr. Cooke also breaks down what researchers actually find inside bass stomachs, why fish regularly eat lures that look nothing like their natural prey, the importance of colour, scent, vibration and action, and why classic presentations like worms, chatterbaits and other seemingly unnatural baits continue to catch fish.

Plus, the crew talks bait-selection strategy, how bass manipulate prey before swallowing it, the role of reaction strikes, why realistic-looking lures aren’t always better, and whether some of fishing’s forgotten old-school baits deserve another shot.

Also in this episode: listener feedback, invasive carp updates, the Fan Question of the Week, and this week’s Outdoor Journal Radio Bonus Code.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe for more fishing stories, science, news and everything happening in the Canadian outdoors.

Transcript

SPEAKER_05 0:22

This episode of Outdoor Journal Radio is brought to you in part by the Invasive Species Center, protecting Canada's land and water from invasive species. Freedom Cruise Canada, rent the boat, own the memories. And JMB Cycle a Marine, your home for all things power sports, boats, and equipment. And now, another exciting episode in the adventures of Outdoor Journal Radio. You celebrate a new mention, and you are going to be cheering when you hear what today's topic is, kiddies. Come on now. Oh my God. Joining us again here in a couple of minutes, our very good friend, our in-house fish doc, uh, Dr. Stephen Cook. The subject today. Come on now. Subject matter is the science of modern fishing baits. And we got a doozy. I got a gazillion questions. Because the thing about Dr. Cook is that um, yes, uh a renowned uh scientist, um, very deeply involved in all things fishing, but especially bass and bass behavior. But above that, he is just uh everyday angling dude. Yeah. He loves being out fishing. Yeah. So you got the best of both worlds with uh Stephen Cook. And uh we got some questions for him today. Of course, uh just freshly, well, almost freshly back from iCast. We saw a million baits, uh, some uh new, some old. We talked about it on the previous podcast. Uh the one we want to speak to uh Dr. Cook about is the latest craze that's out there now. It kind of looks like this little ball with tentacles and it's an urchin bait, or there's there's a million different names for it. You know, it's a phenomenon right now. It is uh in North America and Japan and and all other places. Yeah. Um, so maybe he's got some input on what in the hell is it that makes that thing sell? And uh, I mean, the obvious answer would be, well, it must catch fish. Well, we'll find out here in a couple of minutes if it does or not. Um, but first it's gonna be good. It's gonna be good. First, Mr. Bowman.

SPEAKER_02 2:42

What do we want to talk about, Ash? Uh listener feedback? You want to go right to the listener feedback? Let's go.

SPEAKER_05 2:46

Yeah, this this uh Dr. Cook thing is so hot today, we want to not waste any year about it. Let's go right to it. Let's go to listener feedback.

SPEAKER_02 2:53

In response to our Red Pine Lodge podcast, which you just recently did, Hurley Lock 6460. We've heard we've heard her Hurley before via YouTube. Awesome show. I like all the podcasts where you have guests, but when it's just you two guys telling these stories are by far my favorite. That sounded like such a great adventure going up that river. Sounds like uh far past, oh, sounds like far past where you really should have gone. I'll know well, he says. Just been the idea what might be uh up there, and a little bit of unknown just gets me excited. And then Dave Fleming1117 also says 100% love it when it's just Pete and Angelo shooting the shit. Those are my favorites. Well, then we better cancel Dr. Cook. Cancel David Cook. You're done, buddy. You're done. No, you know what? He'll be our one guest only. How's that?

SPEAKER_05 3:44

For Hurley's sake, the uh episode he's talking about is where uh Nick, Dean, and I went uh scouting up a an unknown piece of water, it was a river, and we uh we used all of our technology to get through what could have been a total disaster in terms of uh bulk damage.

SPEAKER_03 4:07

I swear, I swear, if there was one iota less of a piece of tech that we we didn't have with us on that on that trip, we would have lost the lower unit, lost the skike, something bad would have happened, ran out of gas for Christ's sakes, okay? Because I told you I mentioned it last time. We even had the drone up at one point and be like, holy shit, it's shallow here. Yeah, I would have had to fly that thing all the way back to camp with a little note that says out of gas.

SPEAKER_05 4:32

That's right, too.

SPEAKER_03 4:33

Help me.

SPEAKER_05 4:34

Help anyways, it was truly a great adventure uh for us, and that's all part of fishing, right? Without fishing as a platform, the three of us wouldn't have been able to experience that. So that's right. Um we love it as much as you did. In terms of when Pete and I are sans guests, uh, I think Oh, French, you got your French work in there, man. It's we Oh, excuse me.

SPEAKER_02 4:59

Yes. Uh you've been corrected, my friend.

SPEAKER_05 5:03

Uh yeah, it's fun when we have uh nobody that we have to and I hate being selfish about it, but nobody that we have to share our time with except ourselves and you, the listening audience. So some of those do tend to be a little deeper, I think. A little more revealing. I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 5:23

It's more fish-oriented or something. Like if we get a cabin guy, you know, there great stuff, but it's maybe less fishy. Maybe our audience is total hardcore fishing. I don't know. I mean, you know, if it's boats versus fishing, it's you know, when we talk here, usually it's something very specific. Very fishy.

SPEAKER_05 5:40

Like today's subject. Exactly. Uh so, anyways, either way, uh keep listening, keep watching. Let us know. Thank you. Thank you for watching. Let us know. Like, this is wonderful information. Send us, send us messages, whether it's via YouTube or any of the other uh uh how what are the other many ways they can reach us? Well, we have uh YouTube, YouTube is nice, the Facebook, uh Instagram, email, uh pet carrier pigeon.

SPEAKER_03 6:08

Okay, we do that too. We do do that. It's it's a rare form. Um smoke signals, right? Well, obviously smoke signals. Yeah. Okay. But you know, preferably the main three, you know, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, email, those big four. I'm good with those big four. But uh Dino, I need you to hit that news button because I'm interjecting. Uh oh.

SPEAKER_00 6:28

Hold on, hold on.

SPEAKER_03 6:29

Oh, I'm holding. Oh. It is time for a bonus code.

SPEAKER_05 6:36

Oh, so early.

SPEAKER_03 6:38

I'm telling you, I'm I'm throwing people around. This week. Wow. This week, what do we want to make? I don't even have one yet.

SPEAKER_05 6:47

You know, yeah. This is our way of sneaking this stuff in so people so we don't become so obvious.

SPEAKER_03 6:52

I hate being predictable. Predictability, you know, cancer life.

SPEAKER_05 6:56

With me, I'm liable to forget this in about you know 10 minutes. That's okay.

SPEAKER_02 7:00

If you forget, guaranteed, but I might not forget.

SPEAKER_05 7:03

Well, you know, I'm so used to doing it at the end of the show. This is a whole new area.

SPEAKER_02 7:06

I like this though. I like just implanting it and uh making people look for it and search for it.

SPEAKER_05 7:11

But how do we ensure that people are gonna stay with us? The ones who are just in it for the Because Stephen Cook's coming. Oh, I forgot!

SPEAKER_03 7:18

Because we have fish talk with the doc, baby.

SPEAKER_05 7:22

Okay, I forgot. I forgot. All right. So we need uh, well, how about uh can we no? I think we used uh urchin.

SPEAKER_03 7:30

Urchin it's a hard word to spell, too.

SPEAKER_05 7:32

Urchin. Yeah, urchin.

SPEAKER_03 7:34

Okay. Urchin spelled U-R-C-H-I-N, I believe. Yes. All caps. All capitals, no uh, no lowercase, don't edit it. Urchin. U-R-C-H-I-N. Come on now. There you go.

SPEAKER_05 7:50

Uh for uh Adina Nick, are you fully recovered from your trip south of the border?

SPEAKER_03 7:56

I I I I always am recovered from my trip south of the border.

SPEAKER_00 7:59

It's actually a nice, it's not too stressful. It's it's it's nice being down there, and the heat down there is not that much conditional. Jesus is up here. So it's a good thing.

SPEAKER_03 8:06

I heard I heard the other day we were hotter than Egypt. No kidding. Toronto with the humidex was at 44. Wow. And Egypt with the humidex was at like 39 or something. It's just crazy.

SPEAKER_05 8:19

Anyways, we survived it. We endure, we always do. Uh, conservation corner uh brought to you by the good folks at Invasive Species Center. Uh, we are, I don't know the number of weeks because I don't have a crack research department that can supply me this information. Phew and a snap in a snap of the finger. But uh, you know, I was gonna say we're, I don't know, 20 weeks into fishing season and we have not heard hiding her hair. There's been no report of any uh grass carp cycling.

SPEAKER_02 8:49

That's a really good point. It's a good thing, I guess, if we didn't hear it. But are we just being left out of the loop? I hope not.

SPEAKER_05 8:55

No, I think we have a big enough army out there uh working on behalf of the same cause that are keeping an eye out. And I think uh had there been any sightings, I think we would have heard.

SPEAKER_02 9:05

Yeah, the Great Lakes are going uh full force right now. This is uh now the salmon is going, right? The big derby's on. So there's a lot of boats out there too, right on that body of water and on Lake Ontario, and I'm sure Erie's going hard too.

SPEAKER_05 9:17

So anyways, uh never too late if you're not on the team uh to join forces with us. Go to invasivecarp.ca, download the information on the grass carp, and you too can be part of the force, the fishing force.

SPEAKER_02 9:33

The force, I like it.

SPEAKER_05 9:35

I need a Star Wars button or something. Yeah, like something like that would have so nice.

SPEAKER_00 9:38

You should have warned me.

SPEAKER_05 9:38

Well, it's too late now. It's it's it's this program is organic, it's organic in nature. Bring in, I'll bring in Hunter's lightsaber. He bought a new lightsaber. Oh, yeah. Loves that thing. Uh, invasivecarp.ca is where you need to go. In the news, uh, JMB Psycho Marine brings you the news once again. Uh, the by the way, the largest uh uh Princecraft Mercury boat dealer in the nation is bringing you this news. That's a big deal. Uh in the news, why anglers are uh paying 285 bucks for this Bass Lure? We forgot to mention uh US bucks, uh therefore a billion dollars Canadian. But this is the big deal, and there's a wonderful article uh uh in uh in fishingcanada.com right now that will fill if you have been living in a cave somewhere are not aware of this new bait that's on the market now. Uh mind you, it's on the market, we can't get it because they're all sold out everywhere. Unless you want to pay these prices, unless you want to pay uh 200. Yeah, there's people who pay 285 bucks for it. I'll guarantee you.

SPEAKER_00 10:45

Like if you had like a tournament coming up and you thought I'd need, like, I mean, they're gonna get those things.

SPEAKER_02 10:50

You're you're pre-fishing, you had that one collar that worked, and you got, oh my god, it's worked, I got it, and they're at the chance of winning 10,000 or $100,000 or whatever. I mean, look at that. You're gonna buy one, you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_05 11:00

You're gonna look at who in the world said, Hey, I know what's gonna work, catch these fish. I'm gonna put a bunch of legs sticking off of a rubber ball and put a hook in it, and bingo, bingo, and I'm done. I'm I'm gonna cash in. Well, that's what it was. And at iCast uh a short time ago, this was the number one talk. I think every bait company, uh soft bait manufacturer, is either has it or is working on a version of this to put in their lineup. Everybody is cashing in.

SPEAKER_02 11:34

I think there's people that are creating companies just making the roll and starting. Oh, there are. Well, there are just little mom paws that are just saying, let's do this.

SPEAKER_05 11:42

Anyways, uh the whole story is on fishingcanada.com and it's uh well worth reading because this might be I'll even go farther than might. I say this is the biggest thing to hit the fishing industry in terms of baits that I can remember. It's that big. Yeah, it's it's just everywhere.

SPEAKER_02 12:03

It's bigger than when the Senko came out. Oh, like when Baker came out, it's got longevity and it's got but it was gradual.

SPEAKER_05 12:08

It was gradual. This is overnight sensation. Yeah. Uh, and none of us know why. But hopefully, Dr. Cook here will be able to shed some light on that. Fan question of the week from uh Matt Steen via email.

SPEAKER_00 12:23

Uh now, so is this not is this qualified? I wish it was because he wrote in a huge story and sent us pictures of his walleye and everything, but he did email this this question.

SPEAKER_03 12:34

What if what if we just ensure that Matt leaves it as a comment as well? And then technically that's some collusion, but maybe we'll cut that off together. Yeah. All right. I guess we can't do that. We can't. We can't do that. I know, but okay.

SPEAKER_05 12:49

Basically, uh, Matt goes on to tell us about a time he was out fishing and uh a pollen storm uh hit the body of water he was on, and he goes on in detail. It's a wonderful piece. We don't have time to read the whole thing, but uh maybe we can put that up somewhere that folks can read it. What do you think? And um he goes on to tell us about his experience during and after that pollen storm moved through, and he was asking our advice on uh on what uh should happen during uh a pollen storm, and then he goes on to ask us after all that the main question have you ever experienced a pollen storm? And if so, has it affected your fishing? PSS, keep up the good work, everyone involved. I look forward to the uh podcast every week on drop day and watch the new episodes every Saturday morning while playing Tackle Box uh in my fishing man. I love it. Thank you, and we uh we appreciate uh the support, by the way, uh Matt Steen. Um, a pollen storm. I can say personally, I have not experienced one as it's happening. Right, I've I've seen it after the aftermath of one. Yeah and it's pretty wild looking, I'll tell you that. But I can't imagine during.

SPEAKER_02 14:08

Yeah, that'd be nuts, especially if you had allergies. Imagine if you had allergies to whatever rap pollen was or whatever. But I've never, yeah, I'm the same as you. I think we probably experienced them together. I remember uh I remember Esnagi Lake one year. That was good to see that big long pollen trails from the wind. In fact, we didn't know what it was at first. Exactly. It was algae or we didn't know what it was. And then we got told it was pollen. It happens apparently. Fish bit underneath it. That didn't seem to matter, you know, it didn't matter to them. But um that by the way, all those pictures, I don't know if you saw them, the the pictures where they came with this email. They were fishing on uh Lake Kippewa in uh Quebec. Oh, yeah. What a body of water that is, man.

SPEAKER_05 14:46

This episode is brought to you by Sale. Sale is proudly Canadian and stocked with over a hundred Canadian brands you know and love.

SPEAKER_02 14:52

From rods and reels to sonars to kayaks and every last lure you've seen on the Fishing Canada show, Sale has all the gear to get you on the water.

SPEAKER_05 15:00

Drop into one of 12 stores across Ontario and Quebec and talk to the real fishing specialist or gear up online anytime at Sale.ca. Sale, the ultimate destination for your outdoor adventures. Hey, time to check with the doc. Uh, we're gonna talk about science of modern fishing baits, and we've got uh Dr. Stephen Cook back with us. Uh Steven, this is a topic that, you know, nope pun intended. Uh, we better make sure we don't bite off more than we could chew here.

SPEAKER_02 15:28

Wow, but boom. For sure.

SPEAKER_05 15:31

Because we're gonna be talking about baits that maybe are people's favorite baits, and we might be giggling and laughing and and whatnot. So let's be careful on that one. Yeah, yeah. But it's it's true though. I mean it it just behooves us. So so, first of all, let's get right to the chase. The the hottest thing at iCast uh recently uh was this the only way I can describe it, it's that urchin bait, it's got little tentacles and and a little ball in the middle. We first saw it. Oh, I'm gonna say East Coast. How long ago? A year? Is it been a year? Last year, yeah, it was either about a year or so ago. And there's there was this little kid, a local kid, who was making these things with a little sponge square, and he had all these tentacles stuck through it. And we saw it, and he was and he and by the way, he was saw them like crazy. We'd never seen it before. What the hell's up with that? And uh he says, No, I just I just thought about it. Because I because we both said, Where'd you how'd you come up with that? Like, what does it look like? What's it supposed to emulate? No, I I I just saw it. I just saw it, you know. I don't I didn't know what he was saying. He had a vision or something, yeah. And uh all right, and then I I don't know, about a month later we said, Oh, he saw it all right. It's only the biggest fad in the US right now.

SPEAKER_02 16:52

So in that tournament, uh Steven, we were on uh St. John River in uh in New Brunswick, and half the contestants were throwing those things for smallmouth, uh, you know, small size uh drop shotting, and they were they were weighing fish in with them. I mean, these things look like uh a spider at best, and it'd be one ugly spider, and who knows what colors these spiders are at best. So yeah, that's the craze that's definitely on right now.

SPEAKER_05 17:14

The reason we wanted you to be on this topic with us is because we don't know anybody else that can sort of maybe cut away some of the the fat in on this subject. And because you're an angler, you know you you you've been enticed into making these purchases a million times, but you're also a scientist and you work with fish and you see what fish eat, you know how they behave, you understand them better than anybody else that we know. So let's come clean with this stuff. Go.

SPEAKER_01 17:45

Yeah. Uh when you say all that, I feel like I should be a better angler, but uh I come home frustrated many a day. So yeah, you know, it started back when I was a kid, you know. I had the dance's eel, which was I think it was like 20 bucks back in the day, it'd be like a hundred dollars today. Uh, it caught fish, but what was it? What did that thing look like? It was this soft, foamy thing, it had a head and a wiggly tail. It looked like a sperm, right? It's like there's nothing out there in the wild that looks anything like it, yet we used it. And then, of course, there was a helicopter lure. Oh my favorite. You know, I don't remember. I remember the name of it.

SPEAKER_05 18:26

That went back at the at the so it went flying. That's the flying lure. That's not a helicopter. That's the flying lure. Helicopter just just spun down all the way down. Okay, that was Roland Martin, I think was endorsing that one. Okay, yeah. Wow, but you're right.

SPEAKER_02 18:39

Yeah, these things were all, I don't know if they were what you call them fads or whatever. Well, clearly they came in and most of them are no longer around, right?

SPEAKER_05 18:48

Including the banjo minnow was another one. That was another huge, huge hit.

SPEAKER_01 18:53

Yeah. Um, there's there's lots of other stuff that has come and stayed and looks nothing like what we see in the wild or in the guts of fish. So maybe I'll just start with quickly breaking down. What do we see when we look in a bass stomach? Yeah, yeah. And anglers do this. If you ever harvest a bass, uh, you can look in their gut. You know, I always do that. Or sometimes they'll puke. Uh, they'll puke in the live well, they'll puke alongside of the boat, especially if it's say a smallmouth that you brought up from depth, so you can get a feel for what they're eating. But when we do research or other scientists do research, we really do it more systematically. And so I looked at a couple of those studies that have been published over the years. There's one that was done on smallmouth bass, and they looked at over 200 smallmouth stomachs. Almost half of them were empty, which is pretty interesting, right? You know, you assume that fish are eating machines, but that's that's not always the case.

SPEAKER_05 19:48

But isn't that doesn't that make sense though? Because those fish were caught by an angler. If they were full of food, maybe they wouldn't have been caught.

SPEAKER_01 19:57

Yep. Uh, although, you know, you you gotta be opportunistic when you're a fish, right? Uh, you know, the the dinner bell doesn't ring at 6 p.m. and somebody serves you something. So when there's food, you should probably eat it, is is that's true. That's true.

SPEAKER_02 20:14

I remember one time very quickly before you got, I remember one day I was out for pike, kept two pike, and I think I told this story to you guys or to somebody, and one had five shad in his belly and still ate my bait, and the other had five bluegills in his belly and still ate my bait that same day. So opportunistic, obviously.

SPEAKER_01 20:30

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So so what do we see? What do we see when we look in bellies? We see crayfish. Uh, and uh I think you know, we we know smallmouths love crayfish, so do largemouth. Uh, they're definitely one of the more dominant food items. And sure enough, we've got all sorts of baits that we use that look like crayfish or various crayfish pattern, you know, things that that we throw and and for good reason and fish slurp those up. The other thing are are smaller fish. So perch are certainly uh a favorite of bass. And so, not surprisingly, I think most of us have tackle boxes that are filled with things that look like this. Um, bass also like to eat other bass. And so the good old baby bass pattern, you can never go wrong there. Uh, and then of course, things like bluegill. Which way am I going here? Bluegilly or or other sort of you know, silvery minnows, golden shiners, things like that. So that's that's the obvious stuff, right?

SPEAKER_05 21:32

Yeah, we can we can deal with that. We can understand that, right?

SPEAKER_01 21:35

Yeah, yeah. If there's a lot of perch in the lake and there's perch in the belly of bass, I should probably throw a perch. Um, but there's also lots of other things that we have in our tackle boxes that we use. A crutch for me is a chatterbait. You know, I throw a lot of a lot of chatterbaits. Yeah. What do these things look like? What are the, you know, they make an incredible amount of vibration. Uh and Yes, you can get them in oranges and browns and things that that look like crayfish, but I I still am perplexed. What does a fish see when they see this? And why do they slurp them up like they do? Um, you know.

SPEAKER_05 22:14

We've talked about this on the show with you before. You know, you know, what's the most important criteria? Is it color? Is it profile? Is it action? And we've never really determined, you know, yeah, right. We've never really come up with a solid answer to that question. And it'd be great if we could break through that wall today, Steve. I'll be honest with you. I don't want to put any pressure on you, but it is summertime.

SPEAKER_01 22:40

Uh I I can tell you two things. We know that to catch a fish, your bait or hook or lure needs to be near a fish. Right. And second of all, if that fish is hungry, there's a greater likelihood that it's gonna hit it than if it weren't hungry.

SPEAKER_04 22:53

Right.

SPEAKER_01 22:53

Beyond that, there's a whole lot of other stuff we we don't understand, you know.

SPEAKER_02 22:59

What about, Stephen? Very quickly, what about just the the predatory attitude of a fish? Sometimes they're just I own this place and get the hell out of here, or I'm gonna eat it, or I'm gonna kill it, or whatever. Is that a big thing, do you think?

SPEAKER_01 23:10

Or I I think so. And you think about a lot of the sort of fast reaction baits where they don't have a lot of time to think about it. They don't have a lot of time to look at it and say, geez, you know, what was that? It it looks like something that would fit in my mouth. I don't think it's gonna hurt me. Whack, uh, as opposed to something that you're fishing really slowly, uh, or that, you know, you're pausing, you know, where the fish might come up and have a look at it, uh, look at it quite closely. I think in those cases, the smell, uh, the look probably needs to be, you know, and then the the finesse of what you do with it, you know, shaking it or wiggling it just at the right time and or letting it pause just at the right time. Um, so yeah, I I think that's the thing. There's no one way to catch fish. You've got those reaction bites and you've got the sort of really, oh, you know, reasoned analysis. The fish is really checking it out. And and you see that sometimes, right? You see a fish on your bait and they don't always pick it up. You know, they've come in, they've inspected what you've got to offer, and for various reasons, it might not smell right, it might not, it might be the wrong color, or you might have wiggled it in the wrong way. Yeah, and they turn around and swim away.

SPEAKER_05 24:30

Obviously, with the uh advent of forward-facing sonar, we are now in a position where we see this happening on a regular basis. Yeah, and it drives you absolutely crazy because you know the fish is there, you know he's interested, you know he's looking at it, but he's just not biting. He's just not gonna make that fight. And and it it's a we say he's not committing. The fish is not committing to it. We need to find out how to make that fish commit. Yeah, that's what we need you for.

SPEAKER_01 25:02

Yeah, what's fascinating is even when we use really slow-moving baits. So let's, you know, here's a Senko style bait, right? Um, what does it look like? It looks like a pink worm. How many worms do we find in the bellies of fish? None.

SPEAKER_05 25:19

Okay, like for that matter, for that matter, then just answer your own question. Why do we use dew worms? Why are dew worms, live dew worms, such a big deal?

SPEAKER_01 25:29

They are, they're amazing. And do you know that Ontario is the dew worm night crawler capital of the world? We export our dew worms all over all over the world. They are the biggest, they are the best. Yeah. And you know what is also crazy is that those worms were not here 200 years ago. Dew worms were introduced to North America, and they have gone gangbusters in our neck of the woods, in Ontario in particular, the perfect soil conditions for them. Um, so yeah. So so again, why do bass, and I have thousands, as do you, you have thousands of plastic worms. What in the water looks like these?

SPEAKER_05 26:13

True. That is so true. That is insane.

SPEAKER_02 26:16

When you really break it down, you've never seen a worm in a bass or any stomach ever. Where would they get it?

SPEAKER_01 26:22

I just wonder tiny, tiny worms that they'll pick these little red Wrigler worms that are about less than less than a quarter inch long and have about you know 0.0007 calories in them. Um, if the fish are really desperate, they will slurp some of them up off the bottom. That's it. Uh we've got the chironomids. Uh, and they end up turning into into those little midge flies eventually. Uh that's it. We don't see dew worms, we don't see, you know, even worms that are an inch long. Uh they're just not really a food item. But as you said, you know, any corner store is selling dew worms, and you do very well with them when you're fishing.

SPEAKER_00 27:08

Tim, right, you do. Could it just be the case? Oh, sorry, Ange. Oh, go ahead. Is it possible that it's just the case that they they swim almost exactly like a leech? They kind of have the same color and they float in the water similar. And could it just be that?

SPEAKER_01 27:23

Yeah, uh although we don't also see we also don't see a lot of leeches in the bellies of of uh of bass. Uh and and they've certainly a a great uh a great bait. Uh when I was a kid, used to fish Simcoe with leeches, and it was dynamite, you know. Uh, you know, you you'd you had to really screw up not to not to fill the boat with bass when you were using leeches.

SPEAKER_05 27:48

I remember one of the greatest marketing ploys, still to this day, as far as I am concerned, was a product called Worm Up. Anyone remember? So tablets. It was it was genius because you took the number one selling bait in the world, which was the dew worm, right? And you added something to it, you added color to it, oh yeah, and made it chartreuse, or you made it pink, or you made it whatever. It was brilliant and it sold like crazy, but it died just as quick as it came because I'm making an assumption that the chemical that was used, because you feed you have to feed your dew worms this product, okay, and then they eventually transform, or you can buy them already colored, which we used to sell. Yeah, I remember those the shareuse shreds are yeah, but I think they didn't work because the chemicals that were used in making that transformation in color probably was very offensive to fish, I'm assuming. It probably scared the hell out of them because it did not work at all. But really, did they sell? Oh my god, it was insane. Wow. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 28:58

What's interesting with dew worms, you know, if if I'm fishing off the dock with dew worms, they'll still be hesitant, you know. The first time, you know, if there's a school of bluegill and you drop a half a dew worm into it, they'll kind of be hesitant. They'll go and they'll they'll sort of peck at it, and one will have a bite and they sort of chew on it for a second, spit it out, suck it in again, and then another one will grab the other end and tug on it, and then all of a sudden it's just a a feast, right? They're on. And every time you chuck a uh a dew worm on the end of a hook in after that, you will catch them. It doesn't matter how many of their brothers and sisters they see yanked out in front of them, they cannot help themselves. But even then, they're a little bit hesitant the first time until they're like, whoa, there's this food item that's falling from the gods, right? It's falling from the sky. It makes no sense. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 29:46

How much predation does fall from the sky? I mean, we we've we've talked about what you've seen in bellies of fish, etc., but there's got to be some documentation, some study that shows, you know, and I don't know what that would be, but butterflies or dragonflies or or caterpillars falling off of a uh overhanging bush, or how much of their diet comes literally from the sky? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:13

So for adult bass, very, very little. Uh for juvenile bass, it would be more important because they're eating smaller food items. They can't fit a three-inch perch or a two-inch bluegill in their in their mouth, their gape limited, their mouth only opens so big. So they're gonna be the ones. Um, or think about a trout stream where you've, you know, the the stream is 10 feet wide and you've got trees and shrubs and grasses overhanging, and grasshoppers are falling in the water and other things. That's where the fish are really tuned in and tied into those terrestrial baits that are are coming in. Um, but they tend to come in pulses, right? You know, those those tent caterpillars kind of all appear at the same time. Dragonfly hatches, the, you know, the mayfly hatch, you know, those are those are pulses. And so they'll exploit them for a day or two or a week, and then they're gone, right? You if your goal is to feed yourself on Mayflies all year long, you're gonna be waiting right, you know, for 51 weeks of the year. It's you're gonna be awfully hungry.

SPEAKER_05 31:24

Yeah, you're gonna die for sure.

SPEAKER_02 31:26

Steven, how important are the sunfish family? Uh let's talk largemouth bass because you guys do a lot of studies with that as a as a food base for those, like uh bluegills, pumpkin seeds, even rock bass. How important are they in a largemouth from spring to fall? Is it all year thing too? Do you know anything about that?

SPEAKER_01 31:46

Yeah, uh definitely in the in the fall, less so because they the fish tend to move out and are are deeper. And uh yeah, I I think the little ones really hunker down and the big ones, the big bass, the big bluegill are off kind of together. Um it's it's really in that sort of spring through early fall where you will see bluegill and pumpkin seed and rock bass and small crappie in the guts of bass, but small ones. Um they are spiky, they are, you know, uh, you know, bluegill grow as they grow long, they also grow tall. Yeah. And, you know, many of the bluegill, uh, if you go catch a seven or eight inch bluegill and try and shove it in the mouth of even a an 18-inch, 19-inch bass, it just doesn't fit. And so that's kind of a starting point, right? They're they aren't gonna come and chew on it and pick away at it, they're gonna inhale it. Uh, you know, the tail might be sticking out of its mouth if it's a if it's a big fish, but they have to be able to get the bulk of the body into their into their gut. So, yes, but they're eating small ones, they're eating the ones that were born this year or maybe last year. They're not mowing down the the larger fish in the population.

SPEAKER_05 33:08

I've always thought about this, and it's it's interesting that you just mentioned that the tail will be hanging out of its mouth. And I love jerk baits, I love hard-body baits, I love all of those beautiful horizontal presentations that we use. But if you really analyze that to death, it's all wrong. Because these fish are these fish should be taking our baits from the head, not from the back. Right? And we're always moving that that bait horizontally, and I wonder how many times we don't catch because the predator is saying, Oh, I can't do anything with that. You know what I mean? I I gotta I gotta be able to get that thing turned around and into my my into my mouth.

SPEAKER_02 33:54

I gotta ex- I know exactly what you're saying, but I've been following this guy on Instagram, and he has Belinda. He has a big large mouth in his tank, and he throws bluegills to her all the time. And she'll take them any way she can get them, but she won't eat them that way. She'll play around with her mouth, she'll try and change it around. They sit there with it in their mouth, and they do that, and then it all of a sudden blows it out and grabs it again. And if it's not right, blows it out and grabs it again. Finally, it goes head first and socks it down.

SPEAKER_05 34:20

Much like the experience we used to have in our tank.

SPEAKER_02 34:22

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_05 34:23

Fish are constantly um taking their food and turning it and manipulating it. They have to be able to solve it. So, back to what I was just saying with with our horizontal presentations, our our jerk baits, our crankbaits, or whatever. We maybe need to start fishing them a little bit different, right? Because what's what's the general consensus here? When you you're using a jerkbait and you pause it and you get a strike, you got to set that hook because the fish is gonna spit it out, right? But maybe that's not the right way to do it. Maybe that fish is just trying to get that bait turned. Oh, for sure, it is, right? Right, and what we're doing is just pulling away from it.

SPEAKER_02 35:01

You're a better man than me for letting that. Oh, I can't do it! Okay, that's good. Okay, get it, let go.

SPEAKER_05 35:06

Okay, based on that, right? That should be the way we kind of start thinking of fishing horizontal or hard baits. If and it's true, it is true. They do eat them by the head. They will do whatever they can do. Yeah, and not only uh um, you know, minnows or or fish food, but crayfish as well. It you know, we used to get a lot of uh great visuals of these big, large or smallmouth bass in our tank when we would uh we would throw in a half a dozen crayfish just for the hell of it. And it was a chore for them to take these fish in. Like they would spend 15, 20 seconds, 50 a minute of pick up, spit out, pick up, spit out until the crayfish was beat up enough that the fish could come in in a in a manner that it could suck it in from the back because it did not want to have quaffers.

SPEAKER_02 36:03

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 36:04

Right?

SPEAKER_02 36:04

So it's kind of opposite. They that's the opposite of a bait fish, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 36:08

Yeah, wow, that's cool too. And yet we don't think about that when we're fishing baits that uh emulate any of these.

SPEAKER_02 36:14

See, people listening and watching here, just if if you don't know it, um Stephen and Angela both say this, but if um when I was going back to the bluegill thing or the uh the sunfish, they have a spiny dorsal fin on them. And that spiny dorsal fin only folds down one way. Right. So when you bring it backwards, try to swallow it backwards, run your hand backwards on that, it's just grinding it will be.

SPEAKER_05 36:32

All of their fins, their pecs, everything is kind of designed to.

SPEAKER_02 36:35

But that one will stop them. They know that they're they know that by instinct, and that has to fold over as they take it down in their throat, and then that's the only way they can do it.

SPEAKER_05 36:42

But yet you say a man who spends his life, he has made a living, a career, out of studying fish and fish feeding, you say very seldom do you see any of those in their guts?

SPEAKER_01 36:58

Yeah, the really big ones, you know, like it's that handling time, right? There's a cost to handling as well. Um, and they can, you know, just um, you know, we work with a a fork and knife, right? And there's a cost to that, you know, if it's too complicated, you know, it's it's not a big cost, right? We can absorb it, but if you're at a fish and you've got to handle this thing, you might lose it, you spit it out, something else grabs it, or it gets stuck, even worse, right? You don't want to find yourself stuck. And I found I'm sure you found a dead fish with another dead fish in its mouth that's ridiculously large and jammed in there. Oh, yeah. That happens, you can you can make mistakes, uh, and there's no you know, there's nobody there to give you the heim like so the most uh uh brilliant example I can give you that happened to me in Alberta.

SPEAKER_05 37:46

Um I think um great lesser slave, I think. Ray Colrust, right? Yeah, with Ray. And uh we were out, uh Steven, and it was like uh just a mill pond, not a breath of wind anywhere. We're out in the middle of this big body water, and it's like like your bathtub water, and it was hot, and the fishing was terrible. So we were having lunch, we're having a uh a bite of our sandwiches, and I spotted something way off in the distance, and I I thought it was a just a big old dead pike that was on the surface that had succumbed to the heat or whatever, and it was a tremendous algae bloom uh on the water as well. Anyways, so we just slowly make our way over towards this thing, and as we got closer, we we could see that we we we stumbled onto exactly what you just said. Here was this big pike, but it had an equally large um white fish, could have been something of that nature. It was not a predator fish, it was something other than that, but it was as big almost as the pike, and he had it halfway down his throat and they he was on his back, totally motionless, just dead to the world. So we thought, oh wow, you know, what are we, you know, what are we seeing here? Can you imagine the fight that was you know going on? And and so I decided I wanted to net them and and you know, separate them and have a look at them and all that stuff that you know kids do. Um, and I went to touch him with the debt, and he came the the big uh pike came to life and obviously spat out this other big fish that was halfway down his his and and he swam off. And the other and we thought, what did we just witness here? That poor pike probably has spent the last four or five hours waiting for the right moment that he could, you know, that other the bait would succumb to his pressure, whatever, and he was gonna swallow him whole, and he almost killed himself waiting, and we came in out of nowhere, and it ruined his whole life.

SPEAKER_02 40:04

He pissed off.

SPEAKER_05 40:05

Oh, it was it was the weirdest feeling because that's what we did. We interrupted what nature was doing. Nature was was just in the most magnificent way. This big pike was just waiting for that one moment where he could make that final gulp, and we screwed it up for him. Wow.

SPEAKER_02 40:23

Can they so uh there's a point there because we've seen it multiple times, and even when the pike or the predator is upside down, laying motionless, can they breathe properly with that thing in their throat still? Can the can the uh gills work uh properly or will they eventually die or scrubbly impaired at some level?

SPEAKER_01 40:43

It the fact that the throat itself is blocked isn't a problem because the gill the water's not going down the throat, it's going over the gills. Right. But if your mouth is full, you can't pump, right? You there's a pumping, it's not you can't just open and close your gills, your mouth has to be part of that. There's a right uh I got it's called a buccal pump that's that's part of that process. So yeah, so it's your mouth's fall. Yeah, uh, yeah, hard, hard to hard to breathe.

SPEAKER_02 41:12

Gotcha.

SPEAKER_05 41:13

It's incredible what goes on out there, man. That's crazy.

SPEAKER_02 41:16

First Sanko, like uh soft stick bait you held up, a pink one. So no, we're all wondering about the shapes. What about color? Like, what the hell? Pink is a very good color. He proved it, and his brother proved it to me in Lake Skugog 25, 35 years ago. That's all they threw, and they won tournaments with it and they did everything. To this day, right now, there's a there's a color called Morning Dawn on certain worms. It's a lot of pink in it, and it's one of the hottest colors. I throw it all the time. I catch fish on it all the time. What's a pink? What does pink got to do with anything in the in the water?

SPEAKER_01 41:47

Yeah, no clip. I going right back when I was a kid fishing for pike at Valen's conservation area near Hamilton there, uh Valens Reservoir, uh, I would throw pink worms and just hammer the pike there on them, which is weird. And if I have somebody in my boat that doesn't know what they're doing, they've never fished for bass before, I'll throw one of these on a circle hook and they will catch largemouth all day long.

SPEAKER_04 42:15

Yeah. True.

SPEAKER_01 42:16

Yeah. I it bubblegum, discarded bubblegum is the only food item I can think that's out there that looks like this.

SPEAKER_05 42:24

Like nothing makes sense. That that uh that uh wonderbred lure from Yazuri, that purple wonder. Like, what the hell looks like that and what nothing, and it is killer, it's a killer color color for water. As anglers, I'm sure you'll you'll test this. One of the things that we have, we have two sections in our tackle boxes. We have those perfectly detailed, wonderfully realistic looking uh baits that like you'd swear that's a baby bass sitting in my box, right? Or a perch. And then on the other side of the box, you got this this craziness going on that is like psychedelic in nature and and and and then the wildest looking colors that you can imagine, and yet we've caught fish on both of them, and effectively.

SPEAKER_02 43:15

Yeah, a lot of times uh better fishing on the crazier stuff than it is on the natural stuff. Yeah, I've seen that so many times, like so many freaking times.

SPEAKER_05 43:24

It doesn't make sense. Fishing doesn't make sense.

SPEAKER_02 43:26

That's what I'm that's what I'm uh concluding. What about no? We can't conclude yet. But what about the urchin thing? What's going on here, Steven? What is it? What is the deal here? What are these fish thinking, doing? What's going on?

SPEAKER_01 43:39

So it started off with that fuzzy dice approach, right? That you described where you take like a you know a chunk of plastic and you you you weave through it some some skirt material. You kind of get that, right? You know, it pulses a little bit. There were already some like Nico rigs and you know that had that kind of thing. I guess it slowly falls and pulses. Um, but it also looks because a lot of people use like, you know, like pumpkin green. It to me, it looks like an algae ball. You know, and bass are not slurping up algae balls. Right. Uh and then to me, it's even the this sort of searchin-looking thing looks even more absurd and less like anything that's in nature. I've heard the the only rational description I've heard as to what a fish might think of is that there's a food item in the middle, and there's all sorts of little fish working on it.

SPEAKER_04 44:34

Hey, that's it.

SPEAKER_01 44:35

And so, and when you shake it, it looks like their tails and they aren't paying attention because they're so focused on the food item. And so Bass comes along, inhales it, and thinks it's getting a mouthful of you know of tiny little fish. In reality, it's it's that makes sense.

SPEAKER_05 44:55

That does make sense. That makes total sense. Wow. See, I'm looking at that now through a different lens altogether. Because I'll be honest with you, you know, the last few days at iCast a couple of weeks ago, I I I marked that whole thing as a crazy marketing thing that just miraculously took off and and everybody started, you know, all it takes is one, right? And everybody said, Oh my god, well, he's he's catching, I gotta get if he's getting I so I attribute it to that. But now the way you explained what a fish might be looking at, it's starting to make sense because if you drop uh a corn-sized piece of anything in a body of water, you'll see a bunch of fish converging on it, and they'll all be picking away, right?

SPEAKER_02 45:45

So that works. Yeah, and this is these representations too, they're very slow dropping, so it's very easy for a fish to hone in on, too, right? There's very it's just like a really slow drop, not this little so yeah, it could be easy. Yeah, I love that. I love it.

SPEAKER_01 45:59

A little bit of shake and and those, you know, they they some of them are are chunkier and might not wiggle quite as much. Some are made with really soft material. I would think if if that is correct, if that's what a fish is thinking when it sees one of these things, I would think an interesting approach would be to have that center chunk or ball be a different color than the tentacle thingies that come off of it. Yeah, um, as opposed to you know, solid pink or solid blue or solid silver. Something in the middle that they're all feasting on would look, I don't know, that that's yeah, I haven't tested that.

SPEAKER_05 46:38

That might be next. We better delete that from this podcast because that he might be on to something hot that we need to put a patent on right away. Because you're right, all of the uh all of the products are out there right now. Uh the centerpiece is a variation of the tentacles in terms of color. Yeah, but you're right, if you make that sort of the outstanding color and then silvery, blacky, whitey little tentacles, that would be exactly what you're seeing when when I first gave it some thought, I thought maybe, maybe, and because bass anglers are always first to the trough when it comes to new innovative ways to catch fish, I thought maybe what we could explain it as uh is is a big spider, uh uh you know, a dock spider. Yeah, because because I'm sure this thing was given birth fishing docks or overhanging trees or something where a spider could fall in the water, right? And I thought docks would be the perfect place, but I like your explanation a thousand times better. And now to the point where I think I'm gonna use it. Oh, hell yeah. I wasn't going to, but I think I'm gonna use it. That's great.

SPEAKER_01 47:46

And then I've got some on order.

SPEAKER_02 47:47

Uh yeah, good luck getting them, eh? I've had some on order for weeks.

SPEAKER_01 47:51

Yeah, and delay the mom and pop shops, and they they you'll say you know, you'll see on Facebook, they've got them for three hours and then they're gone again.

SPEAKER_05 47:59

So have you seen the prices of some of these things?

SPEAKER_02 48:02

Oh, though, on eBay, they're still reasonably well, they're not reasonably priced, but they're made out of that elastomer, a lot of them. So as long as your line doesn't break, these things don't break apart. You don't lose these baits usually. They the hooks holds them really good. But if your line breaks, yeah, I mean the 20 the the the original is a koike, hide up koike is what it's called. And this has been around for like 20 years, that thing. Really? Yeah, it's not new. I never saw it. It's been in Japan forever. Nobody saw it. Nobody even they pushed it away and this and that and the other, and then all of a sudden, through tournaments and this and that and the other, and me and social media, boom, it hit up. But that's that's one of them is it that's one of the quality things about these baits is that it's floating material, so you need to have a little bit of a weight in there, and they you can pull a shit out of them and they don't break. They're they're they're very hard. It's like that same idea as that. Yep. The triple X, whatever. Yeah, the old school, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 48:56

You know, I think baits are like bell bottoms and platform shoes. You know, if you hold on to them long enough, they'll be back. They'll be back. Some of those old baits that that we cut our teeth on. I mean, a lot of the similarities now with today's baits, you could it's not hard to reimagine what it was like back in the 60s, whether it's uh a hula popper, you know, crazy crawler, uh, any of those baits. If you look at some of the topwater baits today, well, I mean, all the the the really high profile topwater baits got their start back in the 40s and 50s.

SPEAKER_02 49:31

And throw those two baits you just mentioned, now you'd catch the hell out of fish. Why would no problem?

SPEAKER_05 49:35

Why would you not catch fish on a crazy crawler? Of course you'd get them on a crazy crawler. I guarantee you get them on. Which one of us would would openly in front of possibility of people seeing it would even think of throwing a crazy crawler at the way?

SPEAKER_01 49:50

You'd be embarrassed. I've got a tackle box uh that is way somewhere buried in my basement that has all that stuff, stuff that I'm almost embarrassed to have with my you know, with the usual stuff. It's certainly not in rotation. Yeah, it's not something like, gee, I wonder where that is. I want to throw it today. It's just I you know, it's it's for posterity. I remember buying it as a kid and I just don't want to get rid of it. But will I ever throw it?

SPEAKER_05 50:16

Yeah, exactly. What does a scientist slash angler do when you go out fishing? And let's let's say it's a body of water that you are not that familiar with. What's your the process? What do you go through for bait selection? How do you determine whether it's one of these gaudy things with wings and whatnot, or that natural, hand-painted, beautifully detailed bait? How do you, as a scientist, make that decision?

SPEAKER_01 50:46

Yeah. I think so, first of all, most people, you know, you include, you know, you fish with somebody else. So I like that. I like the fact that you can be throwing two things at once, and it shouldn't be the same thing, right? You don't have, you know, you're not both throwing, you know, Ned Riggs to start the day. You're not both throwing chatterbaits, you're mixing it up and somebody trying things that are faster, somebody trying things that are slower, bigger, smaller, more realistic, more, you know, more pinky. Uh and letting that guide you. So I think, you know, we all of our favorites are standbys, our confidence baits. The problem is if you only rely on those, you will have days where you absolutely falter, where where that's nice that you have confidence in those baits. That's not what the fish are are biting. So um, yeah, so I think it's a matter of of mixing it up and not being afraid to try something, something different. Uh fish are, you know, things change throughout the year, things change throughout the day, light levels, water clarity, uh, different hatches. Again, it's not quite trout fishing, but you know, paying attention. Crayfish colors change throughout the year, the breeding colors of of uh the the minnows change over the the spring period. So, you know, even when we say, you know, what is a what is a um a golden shiner look like, or what does a fall fish look like? If we're trying to emulate that, it looks different over a two or three week period because of those those changes. So I like to mix it up until you pattern them, you know. Uh that's that's my approach.

SPEAKER_05 52:28

That's a great approach. How do you start? Where do you start? So you answered that, but you reminded me of a lawyer that I once had to pay a lot of money to uh answering questions that I would ask. I was expecting straight answers, right? But he would take me around this whole and I loved his answers because they all made sense, but at the end of it all, it was like eating, I know, Chinese food. I was still hungry because I didn't get the answer I wanted. What does Stephen Cook, the angler, do when he goes out on a body of water he hasn't fished before? What does he reach into his tackle box for? First, Joe, you're talking the first bait, right off the hot. Very first bait. You've never been on your fishing bass, and it's it's I don't know, it's June.

SPEAKER_01 53:08

It's gonna be a chatterbait, gonna cover lots of water, gonna do it quickly. Uh, even if I don't catch anything, I will see fish. I will see them ignore it, I will see them snap at it, and those are signs. Uh, so it gives you a you know a feel, you know, it also will, you know, if there's pike in the lake, uh, you know, it'll it'll tell you where they are, uh, which is also informative. Um, I like to use it to find the good weeds. And sometimes I think I can see what are the good weeds, where the fish will be, but but sometimes there's too many of them and they all look the same. And so the chatter baits will help you, or any fast moving bait will help you figure out kind of where the fish are, and then I slow it down. But I'll also go back to I like to fish in different ways. Uh, even if there might be something else that's catching more fish, but I like to fish certain ways, certain certain baits. Uh, so I, you know, I haven't flipped a bank in a while. I really want to flip a bank.

SPEAKER_05 54:08

Are there still are there still fish under banks?

SPEAKER_01 54:11

There are, yes. And I yeah, I'm one of those weirdos that still chases them. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 54:17

That used to be a great way to fish.

SPEAKER_01 54:19

Same with same with lily pads, right? You see these massive pad fields, and you know there's bass in there. Um, but I don't want to work it too slowly, you know. So I'll start, you know, I'll work the edge with chatterbaits, kind of see if there's, you know, are they holding on two or three, you know, pads, these isolated pads, or they deep in, you know, in these openings, and then slow it down with frogs, throw it down, slow it down with uh with jigs or with with soft plastics. So yeah.

SPEAKER_05 54:49

Chatterbait's another interesting bait, isn't it? Because you know, it came out of nowhere and it uses baits that parts of baits that we've used, you know, since we were kids, right? The basic flip and jig style of hook with with some kind of a big bulky skirt um and and a trailer in a lot of cases. And then, you know, really is the is a chatterbait much different than a spinnerbait in in the fact that we're using metal with lead and plastic combined, right? So really not that much different. Why chatterbait versus a spinnerbait? I'll ask both of you guys.

SPEAKER_01 55:24

Well, from a practical perspective, the chatterbaits don't get destroyed. Uh all it takes is one pike, and that spinnerbait is never gonna, you know, it doesn't run the the same way uh that it did before. That that's for me the simple part. Um, it's just a practical thing. I I cover more water with a functional bait, whereas with a spinnerbait, it gets and the the little weed thingies get tangled in the the blades. So I think I can cover twice as much water with a lure that's actually working. And when it's not working, when a chatterbait's not working, you feel it instantly and you can fix it. A good rip and it's it's working again with a spinnerbait, just tends not to work that way.

SPEAKER_02 56:09

He said pretty much everything I would have said. The only thing I also say is I find a chatterbait more versatile than a spinnerbait, too. Especially if you went to a half ounce chatterbait, you can fish it right on the top, you can fish it. I know you can do a spinnerbait too, but but uh you can get some good speed, you can lift and drop, you can work it out on the bottom like a jig. There's just so much versatility to a chatter.

SPEAKER_05 56:28

And so much more streamlined for casting. Oh, it's that's especially if you're confronted with with a lot of winds, headwinds, uh chatterbait will slice right through like a sharp knife, whereas uh a big double-bladed willow leaf uh thing will just sort of do what are these going through there, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 56:45

Yeah, and and one tip for anybody that wants to get into chatterbait fishing, you gotta have the right rod. That is one thing that is crucial. I was the worst. My my ratio was horrible, horrible. And then I went and I studied it. Study says, okay, I'm gonna buy this rod. And ever since that, I cannot believe how my my chatterbait fishing has changed.

SPEAKER_05 57:04

Just unbelievable.

SPEAKER_02 57:05

And what did you find in a rod that was I needed a softer, much softer rod, uh, but lots of backbone. So it almost looks like one of the old fiberglass cranking rods. It's not, but it's you know, but it's got a good thick backbone, 7'2, 7'3, I think is what it is, and a nice soft tip so that when that fish takes it, you don't pull it away from that's the key to that whole thing, is that that and fluorocarbon, don't use braid. I use fluorocarbon and let that you know that he'll grab it, and then you can just keep reeling. You gotta kind of catch up to the bite, then, right? Versus having a hard bite, and then you can slam the hook, and it just makes a half a second makes all the difference in the world. It's unreal.

SPEAKER_05 57:42

Uh I want to talk to you quickly about, and I know we've discussed it on this program with you and with others a million times, but I want to talk to you quickly about scent. We've talked about the colors, we've talked about profiles and shapes and all this stuff. So when Steven is out on that boat on the weekend off the clock and he's fishing recreationally and he makes that first cast with his chatterbait, does scent enter into your day at all?

SPEAKER_01 58:13

For something like chatterbaits, no. Um, for things where again the fish might come up and give it a sniff, then I I definitely think about that. Um and the reality is that most things have some scent or flavor. Uh, it's hard to find things that don't these days. Uh you know, I can go back in my tackle box from yesteryear and find things that, you know, even even you know, back in the day, they had that was that Anise licorice sort of scent on on them. Um some of that have that awful garlic, uh, garlic scent. Uh, but I like something to mask, you know, to mask you know what we have on our hands. That said, I've never been one to keep a bottle of scent at the front of the boat uh that I I dip things in. Um, you know, I each each year when I'm sort of thinking about my fishing goals or what I'm gonna do differently, I say, hey, I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna give that a shot. I'm gonna you know give scent uh you know the the the additional spray on or dip scent uh a fair shake and I never do. Uh it's just sound familiar?

SPEAKER_05 59:20

Ah so true. My question has always been, all right, and maybe you can answer this. How much science goes into those scents? Do you think all of those companies that are putting scents on the market have got uh a uh research department that has you know a bunch of uh white lab coat people with fish in tanks and dipping stuff? Or do you think it's marketing?

SPEAKER_01 59:45

Yeah, so um the big ones do because they can afford to, uh, because that's expensive. Uh uh so, for example, you know, it's no surprise that Berkeley invests a ton in that space. So Dr. Keith Jones is a fish sensory physiologist who ran their lab and he's written a couple books, which are pretty interesting. Uh one of them is called Knowing Bass, and it's based on his experience learning about bass in the lab, being able to, you know, to systematically manipulate sense and shapes and presentations and then quantitatively assess what works and what doesn't. And all of that theoretically goes into the products that that we buy. So, yes, sense matters, right? You know, like whether it's vibration, whether it's color, whether it's scent or flavor, all of those things at in different combinations, depending on the lure, the presentation, the fish, do matter. Um, you know, whenever I see claims like, oh, you'll catch 30% more fish, I tend not to, you know, I I tend to ignore those numbers. Um, it's too good to be true. But on a tough day when you when you're not catching fish and you need to tilt the scales in your favor, heck yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna select the things that I think might give me that edge, give me that when it's a tough bite, that that scent, that that, you know, that look a little bit more realistic, that's when I'm really gonna dig a little bit deeper in the tackle box and think about what could give me that edge.

SPEAKER_05 1:01:26

Do you remember we came up with this brainwave idea about scent?

SPEAKER_02 1:01:32

We're in Hasty Lake, right? We were in Hasty Lake.

SPEAKER_05 1:01:34

Oh, I can't remember. We no, this this came up in our studio one time. We were trying to come up with our own. We said, what would be the perfect scent? And our thinking was much like you've been dialoguing today about like what does that crazy looking bait look like to fit? Fish doesn't eat that stuff, but why are we using it? Scent to me is the same thing. Why are we using stuff like garlic and uh you know anise and and and all of these the fish doesn't have that in its environment, so why all of a sudden do we think it wants to eat uh raw garlic? So we were at the time with Coleman, and Coleman had just introduced this um food saver that went on to become a huge thing. But one of the uh things that Food Saver could do, it could not only you know suck air out of vacuum sealed bags and seal them and and close in the freshness, but if you put a product in this marinating jar thing that it had and hooked it up to the machine, it would whatever was in there, whether it was a chunk of meat or whatever, it would suck in all of that marinade that you've got in the jar, it would suck it somehow miraculously through the into the meat and it'd all be gone. So I said, wait a minute, wait a minute. Is there a better way to infuse our baits? Especially if they have to be porous, obviously. Is there a better way to infuse our baits than with this marinating vacuum thing? I said, yes, brilliant. Oh, I remember you going to be able to do that. We were going absolutely insane. This is the this is incredible. We just broke the wall down. But what are we gonna put in there? We we're not gonna do the usual stuff. I got it. We need natural scent. We're gonna take minnows and crayfish and worms and all the things that we know, minnows and all these things that we know fish love to eat, and we're gonna put them in a great big blender, and we're gonna just puree the hell out of that crap, and we are going to put it in every bait of our. I'm telling you, we spent a lot of time and money doing that for a season. And then we at the end of it all, we said, you know what? But I thought it was brilliant because we can actually get the scent, impregnate the baits with the scent, right? We we even to the point where we were starting to do it with non-porocy as well, like hard baits. We take the we take a hard bait and put it in there and see if we could get that scent stuck in the room.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:10

We put them we put them in at one time. Remember the little Berkeley, uh, I think Berkeley had the little jars, jars, the little acoustics. We'd fill that shit up there and close it off and put it in the fridge and hope it didn't stink like hell when you open it up a week later or something like that.

SPEAKER_05 1:04:23

We did so much experimenting through the years. Um that uh and I I gotta be honest with you, that was part of the joys of growing up in this industry that you know we can now look back on. All those wonderful experiments and and things that we tried to get the upper hand on on that little green fish down there, you know, through the years. And and at the end of the day, um, I think uh although I'm sure some of it works and I'm sure some of it helps us as anglers, I think a lot of it is between the ears. If we believe that that crazy pink and yellow and wild looking thing is going to work, I think this tells us to work it harder, fish it better, you know, get in tune with the presentation. And consequently, we may catch a fish or two more than we would if we were not totally committed, and that goes back to confidence.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:05:20

I I'm gonna share one quick final story with you. Um, I was speaking to our good friend recently, Roland Martin, um, who he fished the tournament with his daughter, or his daughter, his granddaughter, Hillary, uh a few weeks ago. And this is a great observation that you know we all are we're all in tune with, but it's funny to to hear the goat of fishing uh sort of think that he just discovered something brand new. Okay at the age of eighty-five. Anyways, he said, I was fishing with Hillary and we and we won a tournament on Okochyobi. He's uh Was really good. And we we weighed in, I don't know what it was, 25 pounds. And uh and uh man, but yeah, and he this is the way he talks, right? He's so he's always excited when he talks fishing. He just he's all over the place. And and and so he says uh she was catching all kinds of little itty bitty bass, but she was working on that that that that forward-facing sonar and all the time. So she had the front of the boat, and I couldn't really fish, and I didn't want to bother her because hell, you know, she's my granddaughter, and it's it and and I learned and so about two hours into it, uh, she had caught, you know, a hundred fish, and the biggest one was a pound and a half. And then he paused a bit. So he says, I figured I need to get away from where she's fishing with that sonar thing on the front of the boat. And he tied on a great big, I think it was three-quarter ounce, he said, uh bait, and he was started throwing way way beyond her area that she was, and they were fishing a bank, but they were fishing just off the bank. And he says, I started catching fish after fish, and they were all five pounds. And he said, I think, I think something's spooking those fish. It could be the electronics, could be the motor, could be the boat, could be the noise, but he I'm convinced, he said, that the fish that I was catching were bigger and more of them because they didn't know we were there. How important do you think that would be in your day on the water? Or do you even give that any thought?

SPEAKER_01 1:07:32

Yeah, uh, I like long casts. Okay. Uh and I need to do long casts because half the time my kids are jumping off the boat and swimming and you know, commitsing, and so uh so I like long casts. Uh uh fish have incredible hearing and they have great ability to detect vibrations. And so I want to be, I want my lure not to be competing with my trolling motor, uh, with you know, kid noises, with horrible music that my kids are playing, all of that stuff. Um that said, you also know darn well you can catch fish right under the boat. You can catch fish, you know, you know, uh with the trolling motor on, a bass will come up and whack a lure. They are they are reeling back to the boat. You don't, you know, you stopped fishing it, and they'll come and slam it right in front of the trolling motor, which is on. So again, fish do not read the rule book. Um, you know, we could we could write a rule book for fish, and uh the sadly they would not read it. So yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:08:35

And not all fish are doing the same thing at the same time. That's right. That's right. So what that tells me, and it's funny because Reno and I used to fish this way back in our early tournament days, we would not, if we're and you know we spent most of our time in banks, right? Yeah, but only one guy would be fishing a bank. Yeah, the other guy would be casting parallel way up the bank and working it back. And we used to both be able to get fish that way. Yeah, we didn't even know we didn't even know why or how we came about that. But that's that was our system. One guy would be constantly throwing blades or spoons or something way up the bank, and the other guy is you know doing his dunking right here at the boat. Both of them effective, both of them would catch fish, and then we we kind of forgot that. Yeah, we don't do it that much anymore either ourselves, right? No, no, we we don't we don't have to burk the bank like this boom, boom, boom, exactly, exactly crossing. Whereas back then, we didn't know why. All we knew is that it worked, right? One guy would be constantly looking for those fish that might be a little more spooked by the presence and whether it was sound, whether it was just the presence of this boat, motor, electronics hovering above them, right? There there were still fish to be caught that way, but just as many that wouldn't bite unless you were way up at the bank. Uh and we don't do it anymore.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:08

Yeah. Interesting.

SPEAKER_05 1:10:11

Anyways. Wow. That was pretty good. That is a treasure trove, a treasure trove of goodies, Dr. Cook, as per usual. Uh, are you uh fishing this weekend?

SPEAKER_01 1:10:23

Yeah, uh, hopefully fishing uh in about 20 minutes. So yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:10:26

And what uh and what are you going to be using for bait?

SPEAKER_01 1:10:30

Uh chatterbait. Probably, yeah. Probably start off with uh the kids throwing chatterbaits. Uh that's always, you know, it just it's pretty safe too. When you're fishing with a bunch of kids on a boat, you gotta, you know, and there's things being whipped around. Uh multiple treble hooks is is never a good strategy. They're still a little little young for uh for that. But uh yeah, I'd I'd like to throw some plastics, some soft plastics. I think that uh the bat, you know, the the spawn is done, fish are starting to move out. They're I don't know, I think they're a little deeper water. Um you can catch them, you know, over the top at night on topwater or at at dusk on topwater, but during the day they're down in, and I want to find some of those fish that have the feed bags on. Nice. Cool, cool.

SPEAKER_05 1:11:18

Uh well, say uh stay hydrated, obviously. It's gonna be a hot one again. Yeah, that's crazy. Um thank you very much for sharing those uh deep, dark secrets. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:28

I'll go uh yeah, go fish some more unrealistic. Absolutely, and catch fish out. Who knows what these things look like to a fish, but they work.

SPEAKER_05 1:11:38

All right, brother. Thank you so much for joining us. Uh take care and have fun out there. See you, Stephen.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:42

Hey, next year you gotta take me to iCast. Done.

SPEAKER_05 1:11:46

Done, deal. Absolutely. Thanks, Steven. Talk to you soon, my friend. Dr. Stephen Cook. Wow, it's always fun. I could do hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and days with him. But you know what I love about him? He's not pretentious, right? He knows so much more than any of the rest of us do with this stuff. Yet he's not going to tell you anything but the God's honest trick. Whatever he knows. This is what science has taught me, and this is what angling has taught me. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:19

And he's the first guy to say, I wish I was a better angler. You know what I mean? You'd think he'd be the best angler in the world. You would. But yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:12:26

I would be if I was a scientist. All right, kiddies, that are it. We've burned up enough of your time. We want to thank you for joining us. Uh, don't forget uh fishingcanada.com, the gateway, the portal to your next fishing adventure. Uh, don't forget all of the goodies that are being given away each and every week. Uh what else? Oh, we are going to get you a code here in half a second. We lost our code man there for just a moment. A code reader. Uh, we need a code for the contest. What do you think, Nikki? We did the code earlier. What do you forgot? Oh, you gave the code away? Oh, we did it twice. I'm not going to say it again. Well, let's do it. Let's do it twice. Come on. Say it again, Nick. Come on. Because if they jump together, come on, buddy.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:12

Because if they jump to this part of the video waiting for it.

SPEAKER_05 1:13:14

See, I'm as confused as the uh viewers are. I was looking for it at the end, but you're right. You guys switched it up on me. I didn't even forgot. I didn't even know where it is to put it on the screen.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:22

You know what the best part is? I don't even know where it is on the screen.

SPEAKER_05 1:13:25

Okay, that'll be. On behalf of the entire uh team, uh Nikki V, uh Mr. Dean Taylor, Peter Bowman, I'm Angela Mile. Thanks for joining us, folks. Take care. Talk to you next time. This episode of Outdoor Journal Radio has been brought to you in part by the Invasive Species Center, protecting Canada's land and water from invasive species. Freedom Cruise Canada, rent the boat, own the memories, and JMB Cycle a Marine, your home for all things power sports, boats, and equipment.