Velvick Spills His ‘Slick’ Secret

By Todd Ceisner
BassFan Editor

“You ready to see how this thing works,” Byron Velvick asks as he stows a box of swimbaits in the driver’s side front compartment of his Triton.

He opens another storage bay and emerges with a full-sized Super Soaker squirt gun. He jumps up on the front deck, points the nose of his boat toward a rocky, wind-blown shoreline and starts spraying the area with whatever’s in the pump-action squirt gun. He sprays an area roughly equal to the front deck of his boat. He turns back to the dock and smiles.

“Now, watch the water,” he says.

What was just moments before roiled water that most wouldn’t even think of attempting to sight-fish in had suddenly gone mostly slack, all because of Velvick’s liquid assault.

“Now, I can go through here and sight-fish the whole area,” he says as he primes the plastic gun with several pumps of the fore-end.

Granted, the area he set up for this example was adjacent to a boat ramp at Lake Guntersville, but it’s easy to see how his squirt gun trick would work in any cove, pocket or other exposed area of the lake. For years, he’s told people – co-anglers, marshals, even his competitors – the substance in the plastic toy gun was a fish attractant solution. He’s been reluctant to say publicly that the substance is, in fact, nothing more than vegetable oil.

He first let the world in on his secret at the Smith Mountain Lake Elite Series in 2009 when Bassmaster.com published an article about how anglers improved their sight-fishing prospects in the face of deteriorating conditions.

At that event, pollen gathering on the surface reduced visibility in the shallow water. Some competitors employed squirt guns filled with dish washing liquid to clear the pollen – one squirt would help dissipate the pollen. Velvick, meanwhile, was sure he was the only one using the tactic, just with cooking oil.

"I thought I was the only one.,” he said then. “I actually use vegetable oil. I figured it out on my own years and years ago when I was in my twenties. … I've been using it ever since."

Last year, while filming an episode of his Outdoor Channel show “Guide’s Eyes”, he said he broke out the squirt gun while at Table Rock Lake.

“Last year was the first time I ever did it on film because I figured it’d be a good thing to put on TV,” he said. “It’s such a visual thing. The guide I was with at Table Rock asked what I was doing. He figured it was a scent formula.

“I used to lie. I used to tell my co-anglers that I put scent or fish formula in it. I’d go, ‘Yeah, it smells like shad and activates the fish.’ I was BS-ing the whole time. One guy goes, ‘It smells a little like vegetable oil.’ I said, ‘No, it’s fish formula.’ They also noticed that it slacked off the water and I was like, ‘Yeah, that’s a nice by product.’ I didn’t want them to figure out that’s what I was doing – slacking the water out.”

Junior High Science

For much of his career, Velvick has been considered one of the alpha dogs among pros when it comes to sight-fishing. He also has a well-earned reputation as a swimbait fisherman. He relied on both tactics in notching a runner-up finish at the Lake Guntersville Elite Series behind close friend Skeet Reese.

He used his squirt gun to help zero in on some bedding fish on the first couple days of the tournament. Other anglers were photographed with squirt bottles or small garden sprayers on their front decks.

The backstory on Velvick’s sight-fishing secret is nearly as good as the lengths he’d go to in order conceal what he was doing. Velvick said the genesis traces back to a visit to his mom’s house years ago. She was a school teacher and he stumbled upon a junior-high science textbook while using the bathroom at her house.

“There was a part about a kids science experiment where you could make a ripply pond flat by putting a little oil in the water,” he recalled. “There I was 25 at the time and I was ate up with bass fishing and I was like, ‘Ah-ha,’ so I started doing it sight-fishing.

“It was in the spring and the next time I went out fishing, it was ripply,” he continued. “I sprayed some out there and all of a sudden the ripples stopped. I was like, ‘I know there are beds here,’ but I couldn’t see them. I squirted the oil and it slicked off and I could see the beds. I was like, ‘I can catch that fish.’ It’s definitely a situational thing for sight-fishing when there’s a breeze and I have some fish marked on beds.”

In tournaments, his competitors would be amazed at how the areas Velvick was in always seemed to be less impacted by windy conditions than where they’d be fishing.

“I’d be bed fishing here and boats will come by and they’d ask me why the wind wasn’t blowing on my area,” Velvick said. “I’d be like, ‘Oh, I guess I just got lucky.”

Strategic Aim

The science behind Velvick’s trick is not new. Benjamin Franklin was the first to investigate the effect a small amount of olive oil had on a small pond in England in the 18th century and his work has led to additional experimentation.

As Velvick waits for his live demonstration to take shape, he looks back in the water near the boat ramp and points out several bream beds that weren’t visible moments before.

In order to maximize an area, Velvick says he’ll find the area he wants to start on and locate the farthest wind-blown spot. He’ll fire a couple sprays of oil into the water in that direction and wait for it to gather together.

“You have about a 5-minute window before it starts moving,” he says. “The more I did it, I started learning that if you’re going to spray it, spray it at the farthest bed into the wind and follow it down the bank from there.”