Hook 'Em -- No Fish Tale: Power Bait Is A Product With A Catch

Just two words: Power Bait. I say those two words to Ron DeLaMare, fishing-equipment buyer for the 123-store Big 5 chain. He knows what I'm talking about. We're talking about a marketing phenomenon.

How many products have you heard of that outsell the competition 50-to-1, only a year after being introduced? That's what Power Bait sales did at the Big 5 stores in the West.

If you spend your free time drinking caffe lattes, maybe you haven't heard of Power Bait.

But if you've gone weekend fishing with your buddies or family, you've seen those little jars of paste. Just about all it takes to catch fish is to cover a hook with the paste and cast it out. Nibble, nibble, you've got one.

Maybe it doesn't seem very sporting. But, then, modern real-life family fishing isn't exactly meant to be a sports event. Your typical trout is raised in hatcheries, then taken in tanks and dumped into a lake or river, where it is lucky to swim around for a few months before being reeled in.

I had heard of Power Bait a while back. I hadn't witnessed its full effects until this month, when I went on one of those family fishing trips in Eastern Washington.

There were 10 of us at the dock of the resort. In real-life fishing, you don't even bother with a boat. Sitting on a dock is a lot easier. The pop machine is only a few feet away.

I started out with the traditional stuff. A nice worm, with, for good measure, a marshmallow that looked as if it had been produced in a nuclear reactor.

I sat there for an hour. I did catch one trout. Meanwhile, every other fisherman had caught three or four. They were all using Power Bait. I drove into town and paid $4.25 for the little jar (about as cheap as I've seen Power Bait is $2.95). My family fishing trip resulted in 21 trout, all, except the first one, caught with paste.

On my return, I called Berkley, the Spirit Lake, Iowa, company that makes Power Bait. As with other fishing manufacturers, it does not disclose sales figures. It did say it happily has had to revise Power Bait sales forecasts more than 10 times.

The product is such an astounding success that Berkley keeps expanding the Power Bait line, from plastic Power Worms to Power Leeches to Power Spring Lizards - all fortified with the secret ingredients.

Berkley doesn't say much more about them, other than they have ``powerful scent and flavor enhancers.''

But Keith Jones, director of fish biology for the company, did discuss the research that went into the product. The fish were very obedient.

Something like 50 aquariums were set up, containing, at various times, everything from trout to perch to catfish. Then quarter-inch cotton pellets were dropped into the tanks.

Let's say the fish was a trout. It would attack the cotton, even if it wasn't soaked in some flavor it liked. A trout attacks a bare hook, although within a second it spits it out. Or it just might appear to bump or kiss the hook.

That's because some fish have taste buds not only in their mouths, but on their teeth, their lips. A catfish, for example, has taste buds from one end of its body to the other.

``A catfish is like one giant swimming tongue,'' Jones said. That's certainly an image to remember next time you're at that New Orleans-style restaurant.

Berkley tested hundreds of ingredients: shrimp essence. Compounds extracted from mashed-up worms. Compounds known from previous fish biology research, with names such as L-norvaline acid, acetamide and ethanolamine, all found naturally.

It turned out that rainbow trout liked a wide variety of these ingredients. Crappies were the pickiest.

After three years of testing, Berkley finally isolated the stuff that fish liked. What the company does is concentrate them in levels ``substantially higher than in nature.'' The bait is sold in various colors, not because there is scientific proof that fish like fluorescent yellow, but customers think they do.

By then, Berkley had also developed the paste to carry the ingredients, designed to dissolve at a certain rate so it creates a scent cloud to attract the fish.

Yes, yes, I realize it doesn't seem fair, and it won't get any more fairer now that Berkley says it has isolated even more powerful fish attractants.

But, frankly, bait ethics isn't something you spend much time thinking about, as you're driving home with your 21 trout.

Let the guys on the outdoor TV shows discuss proper fly-tying techniques. This is real life. We want our fish.