It’s that time of year to think about new lures, rods, reels, line etc., but around here there are a couple of things that we need for our fishing trips that a lot of folks kind of take for granted and just pick up on the way out.
I’m just as guilty of it as the next guy but, there are items that really should be researched to find the best available for your situation including the subject of this review and recommendation which is insect repellent, or as it’s affectionately known, “bug juice”.
Around here we tend to fish early mornings or late afternoons into the night and bug juice becomes a necessity. We’re all familiar with the acronym DEET. This is short for N-diethyl-meta-toluamide, which happens to be the active ingredient in most insect repellents. A lot of people don’t know that DEET was developed by the U.S. Army in 1946 and was registered for use by the general public in 1957. There are currently well over 140 products containing DEET on the market.
The only real trick to choosing one is to recognize that while there are varying percentages of DEET in different products ranging from 10 to 100%, the percentage itself is not the end all in terms of effectiveness.
What The Percentages Mean
So what are the differences? To begin with, if you buy a product with DEET in a percentage greater than 23.8, you will get long lasting protection. Here is a summation from the New England Journal of Medicine. DEET-based products provided complete protection for the longest duration. Higher concentrations of DEET provide you with longer-lasting protection.
A formulation containing 23.8 percent DEET had a mean complete-protection time of 301.5 minutes. A soybean-oil-based repellent protected against mosquito bites for an average of 94.6 minutes. The IR3535-based repellent protected for an average of 22.9 minutes. All other botanical repellents we tested provided protection for a mean duration of less than 20 minutes.
Okay, so DEET really works. So what now? There are so many products, how do you narrow it down to only one? You have to keep in mind there are other factors that affect the performance of DEET based products such as how acidic your sweat is, how profusely you are sweating, how much exposure to water splashing on you will you receive etc. For most of the products out there, they use fillers if you will, to make up volume in their packages.
Put It All Together
Most of these fillers serve no purpose other than taking up space. Some companies on the other hand use ingredients that are effective for enhancing the overall performance of their product. Sorry to take the long way around but I figured some background info was in order.
3M’s Ultrathon insect repellent is the one that I now use exclusively. The reasons are that this product contains 34.34% DEET which is more than enough to be effective. Other ingredients in the Ultrathon make it both splash and sweat resistant which gives the 3M an effective working time of somewhere around 12 hours.
Not bad to be able to go to the lake and apply bug juice only once the entire day or night! This is the property that really got me using the 3M. I also like the fact that it comes in a cream as opposed to a spray so that I can put it right where I want it without having to worry about squirting it in places it wasn’t meant to go. I can tell you from personal experience that getting a nostril full of bug juice is at best unpleasant!
The packaging makes it easy to carry and keep in you tackle box and it doesn’t have the kind of truck stop bathroom cologne aroma of some that I have used in the past. So if you’re planning on walkin’ the shore or pounding the bank with casts that put you into that zone where all the buggy critters will find you, this is a must have. I can tell you that the 3M Ultrathon insect repellent is the best bug juice that I have used.
See ya’ on the water …