Dr "GULP"John Prochnow

If you haven’t tried the new range of “GULP ALIVE”your seriously missing out on catching more fish. I use heaps of the 3 and 4 inch minnows on my home waters of Tuggerah Lakes and Lake Macquarie for all my estuary favourites such as bream, flathead and whiting. Just before Gulp Alive was released in Australia the Berkley Pro Team were lucky enough to spend some time on and off the water with Berkley’s head chemist and father of Gulp Dr John Prochnow.

John started work for Berkley in May 1986 as a chemist, he joined the team at Spirit Lake with a brief to design a range of deodorants, repellents and sunscreens for outdoors men. John quickly applied his experience in formulating cosmetic ingredients into producing scented fishing baits and lures for Berkley. One of Johns first projects was Berkley Power dough followed by the Power Bait range of tournament winning soft plastics. John’s very humble about it all, when I asked him how it all happened his reply was, Dr Keith Jones supplied me with the substances that fish liked and I formulated baits and lures using these substances. I often wonder if he knew at the time what he had created and how successful it would be world wide.

Not long after Power Bait was catching fish around the globe Tom Bidell and his father Berkley gave John the assignment of creating a biodegradable lure that would be less intrusive on the environment if it was lost. 18 long years after the Gulp concept landed on the the drawing board it hit the shelves of tackle stores. Along the way there were many design problems that kept John and team at Spirit Lake working day and night to perfect Berkley’s dream. John explained that shelf life was a big problem, the baits would get brittle and fall apart or simply melt. Other prototypes were too hard, to soft or too sticky. Any thing you could imagine could go wrong did go wrong but John and his team stayed persistent until they got it right.

The team at Spirit Lake are always on the front foot searching for ways to improve the performance of Berkley products, after another three years of exhaustive work Gulp Alive was ready to hit the shelves and hot sticky little hands of Australian anglers. Gulp Alive has up to 20% percent more scent and flavour by weight than regular Gulp packed into the same shapes and profiles that Aussie anglers have learned to love. One of the things I really like about the tubs is the baits are free floating and nearly every bait is symmetrically perfect, so they swim like champions every time. Baits can also be recharged by placing them back into the tub, Ye Ha!

Checking out Gulp Alive with John Prochnow in the Berkley bunker prior to field testing .

It was pretty cool getting to some time on the water with John and show him the sort of species and techniques Aussie anglers use to catch fish with Gulp and Berkley products

The Dog, Guesty and John with a couple of the first fish to be caught in Australian waters with Gulp Alive

John with a nice Aussie snapper caught on a prototype Gulp Alive profile

John does plenty of fishing back at home in the good old US of A and also gets to wet a line in many locations around the world, he’s a fine angler and understands what fishermen want out of their equipment. He fishes, he listens, the angler is his boss, its the creed he lives by and I’m glad, I couldn’t imagine spending a day on the water without one of Johns creations on my hook.

Captain