By Louie Stout

Bait Fuel

Perhaps I’m showing my age, but I remember when Fish Formula became the first liquid fish attractant designed to entice more bites.

A few years later, Berkley introduced PowerBait and Gulp! with attractants built into the soft plastics.

Fish Formula has since disappeared while the Berkley products have remained popular and rightly so.

BaitFuel, produced by American Baitworks, has proven to be a worthy competitor. It’s not only a liquid formula to be applied to any lure, but the company also infuses it in some of its own soft plastic baits, similar to what Berkley has done with PowerBait and MaxScent.

Count me among the new believers, which include several Bassmaster pros.

I’ve seen situations where it seemed to produce more bites, especially when fishing with someone who isn’t using it.

That doesn’t mean that it’s going to draw fish from afar or that you’re going to catch every fish that swims near your coated lure.

But I do believe it can get you a few more bites on a tough day.

Nor is it simply a marketing ploy. BaitFuel was developed in a lab by biologists who are also anglers. It went through two years of testing before it was released to the public. And unlike some liquid scents, it has no odor and doesn’t stain the carpet.

I squirt some of it in bags of jig trailers and drop-shot baits and let them soak overnight. I’ve also applied it directly to some baits, but have found giving the plastics time to absorb the scent tends to produce better results.

On one occasion this fall, my partner and I were drop-shotting for smallmouth. The bite was slow, so I reached into a bag of Strike King Dream Shots I had juiced up the day before. I caught six fish in 30 minutes and my partner, an excellent drop-shotter, got only one bite fishing the same area.

Bassmaster pro Scott Canterbury said it can be a difference maker when fishing largemouth bass around the spawn and anytime when fishing smallmouth.

American Baitworks, which also manufactures NetBait and STH soft plastics, sent him a few “prototype” drop-shot baits prior to a smallmouth tournament. They didn’t tell him the baits were injected with BaitFuel.

“They sent me the STH Flat Sided Shad drop-shot baits to use,” he recalled. “I fished a lot of different plastics with mild success, so I decided to give the new baits a try. It was amazing…I caught the fire out of them and used everyone I had.”

When he got back, he called Baitworks to report his success, and that’s when they told him the prototypes had BaitFuel built into the plastic.

“That made me a huge believer,” he said.

Fellow Bassmaster Pro Chris Zaldain shared a similar story. He was fishing spotted bass on Lake Lanier. He was fishing a little swimbait around 35-feet deep standing trees and watched bass on forward facing sonar follow it back to the boat.

“I reeled in and applied BaitFuel to it, cast it out there and didn’t get three turns of the handle and one ate it. I was a skeptic but I’m a believer in the technology.”