Anthony Dobson of Woodstock says squirting various scents on his soft plastic baits makes plenty of sense and helps him catch spotted bass and largemouths in all seasons in Lake Allatoona.

"I like the salty shad and the garlic scent," said Dobson, owner of Allatoona Rod and Reel in Woodstock. "After I catch three bass my partner will ask for some of the fishing scent. Spotted bass hang onto the worm longer if I've squirted some Jack's Juice on it."

Fishing guide J.L. "Junior" Collis, who lives on Lake Sinclair, said fish scents attracted big largemouth bass for him and his wife, Alta, on Sinclair and West Point lakes.

"The juice takes away from the human odor and makes the worm slick and slimy and look alive," Collis said. "It feels more natural to the bass. I use the Jack's Juice Salty Shad. I caught a 10-pounder and an 11-pound bass in West Point with it. Alta likes the garlic scent. She caught a 10 1/4-pound bass."

The bottled fishing scents or flavors also give anglers more confidence, Collis said.

The fisherman who developed Jack's Juice is Jack Patton, 65, of Stockbridge, a color matcher and formulator for an ink company who also enjoys hooking a largemouth.

In the early 1980s when a Tennessee company's spray-on fish scents were capturing the bass fishing market, Patton decided to try to make an even better one. He mixed a panfish scent and a flavor for bass that Bobby Reeves of Fayetteville found very effective in farm ponds and West Point Lake. Reese suggested the name, and it stuck.

After dinner at his son's home near Douglasville a few months ago, Patton watched bluegills and bass bite garlic-flavored strings of spaghetti in the nearby pond. He should have yelled, "Eureka. Pass the plastic worms."

With the help of a fragrance company, Patton formulated a garlic scent to squirt on soft plastic baits and the jig and pig. The bass were so wild about the garlic that you'd have thought their finned ancestors swam over from Italy.

"Bass grab a worm with garlic and hold onto it," he said. "Walleyes love it. Smallmouths will work on it. And, also catfish and carp."

This spring, Patton introduced his newest flavor, lizard, another favorite on the bass menu. Catfish and crawfish scents also are attracting bites in Southern lakes and rivers.

Patton recalls finding spring lizards - salamanders - for fish bait when he was a kid, and he used moist moss to help keep them alive.

"We tried to formulate our lizard scent as closely as possible to that scent of old green moss and the lizards," he said.

He recommends that anglers put their plastic worms and lizards in zip-up freezer bags and squirt a shad, garlic or lizard scent on them.

"Zip up the bag and rub the worms or lizards together," Patton said. "It penetrates the plastic bodies. It's neater and cleaner this way in the bags."

He observed eight of every ten bass that strike garlic-flavored plastic worms will swallow the baits.

His wife, Betty, has caught bass up to eight pounds on the scented worms.

"The first thing I do is spray the plastic worm because, I think I get more bites from bass, especially with the garlic scent," she said. "Most every bass I catch swallows the worms. Jack used to say I waited to long to set the hook, but they swallow his plastic worms, too."

Patton thinks it's important to keep the human scent off plastic worms, pointing out the odor of perspiration is repugnant to bass.

"One day you wear out the fish," he said. "Another day you get no bites. It has a lot to do with what you eat. Different odors come through the pores of your skin in perspiration when you get tensed up or nervous about catching a fish. Some odors turn the fish on, and some turn the fish off."

Also the odors of gasoline, motor oil and tobacco will drive away the fish.

In the spring, a "flavored" crankbait or spinnerbait will leave a scent trail next to stumps and fallen trees that may draw a strike on your next cast from a bass darting over from the other side, Patton believes.

"In the old days, country people went to the barnyard to dig up worms," Patton said. "They chopped up a bundle of wild onions and put them in a can of worms. They sat on the banks, and the fish came to them. This made me start thinking about bass scents."

Recalling the "you are what you eat" theory, Patton said red wigglers are fed cottonseed meal on bait farms. He wonders if a cottonseed scent would be a fine fish attractor for plastic worms.