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How sensitive are fish

Posted: Tue Feb 27, 2018 7:19 am
by lcharge
Hi all. As some of you are aware, I manufacture and market voltage tuned fishing lures. During my journey of the development of these, I learned a few things about fish.
To start with, we all know that some boats fish better than others, and some can't catch fish at all. This phenomenon has been a mystery to most anglers for decades and I have been accumulating data in order to put it into context.
When I started my lure tuning about 5 yrs ago, I sent some of my anodes to a friend in Ontario, so he could test them while ice fishing for perch. Six guys went out and drilled their holes in about a 50 ft circle. My buddy got my concept wrong and instead of attaching the anode to his lure metals and creating a galvanic cell, he attached it to his line, up about two feet from his bait, like a split shot weight. For the first half of the day, he caught nothing. The two guys closest to him caught very little, and the three furthest away caught decent amounts. At about mid day he removed the anode completely and all catches became equal.
This information fermented in the back of my head until last year. I advertised free help to anglers who had problem boats, with respect to fish catching. I had several responses. Quite a few were from aluminum boat owners in fresh water where corrosion is minimal and cathodic protection is often overlooked. One in England and another in Ontario had similar stories where neither one could catch fish unless they trolled 150 ft of line behind their boats. I had posted on the Piscatorial Pursuits forum, some info including a video on small aluminum boat bonding. One of the forum members responded with "My aluminum jet boat went from zero to killer in 2 zincs".
I have sent Mini Inline Tuners to Ontario anglers this winter to test on a variety of species while ice fishing. The first report was on perch where one angler outfished his three buddies by 1 1/2 times as much. He also swapped holes with all of them throughout the outing.
So, my point here is that some stand alone metal alloys appear to repel fish. I recently took part in a seminar hosted by scientists at the University of Thunder Bay, where they talked in part, about galvanized culverts spilling stream waters into Lake Superior. I brought my findings to their attention and posed the question; are returning fish being effected by the possibility of a fish repelling signature coming from the culvert. Refer back to the perch repelling incident. The anode used there was an alloy that is mostly zinc based, similar to the culvert coating. Now think about other hatchery equipment, pens, tanks, etc. Are those made of aluminum or galvanized steel? If so, are fish being stressed by voltage signatures or are stream markers that fish rely on to find their stream being altered?
If this is the case, the voltage signature of metals can be altered. As an example, galvanized steel can go from an anode to a cathode by adding sacrificial anodes like magnesium.
The Thunder Bay people that I talked with had never made that connection before and were forwarding my findings to fisheries biologists for further study. If any of you have contacts with western fisheries biologists, please relay this to them as well. Maybe,.....just maybe, it might help. I can be contacted at allan@lurecharge.com