August 09, 2012
By Sam Hudson
A row of sandy chum balls sit at the ready for a day of yellowtail snapper fishing in the Florida Keys. Prolonged handling of baits, chum and targeted fish can leave a “distinctive” smell on your hands.
Rigging baits, tossing out chum or even unhooking numbers of fish can leave your hands smelling nasty long after you get off the water. Many companies have specific products to dilute the smell and clean your hands, but there's also a fair amount of home remedies that seem to do the trick. How do you get rid of that smell off your hands?
Florida Sportsman member Piratelooksat40 recently started a thread that covered this topic.
“It seems like I am always the chum handler on our boat. I can never really get all the smell off my hands. My preferred method is to wash my hands with dish soap and then squeeze a lemon on them. What do others use to get rid of the smell?” The list of remedies is pretty varied, sometimes incorporating products and liquids not associated with fishing. Below is a shortened list of solutions that different Florida Sportsman members came up with:
Waldnerr: “Washing one's hands with toothpaste helps.”
Red Sled: “Fast Orange hand degreaser from the auto store works pretty well for me. It also has some abrasives in it.”
Flsharker: “Bleach.”
INTREPID377: “This will work 100 percent of the time for 100% of the smell. After washing your hands well, cover them in vanilla extract. Just rub it in like you would hand lotion.”
NauticalWheeler: “After juicing a lime for a margarita, I save the lime rind with pulp attached and turn that inside out and rub all over my hands, then rinse hands with fresh water. All fish smell is GONE! The only bad thing is that you will find out the hard way how many cuts you have, but it's better than fishy hands.”
Join the discussion and include your own solutions to this stinky problem.
