There was a time when I cured my own salmon and steelhead eggs. I had a simple recipe — a little Jello, brown sugar and a lot of Borax.

One day my uncle Jon Lewis told me about Pro-Cure. “Use rubber gloves when you mix it.” That was 1984 and it is still good advice a lot of people don’t follow. Those are the guys whose hands are fluorescent pink, their beards are pink, their overalls are stained. They smell like fish, too, because they catch a lot of salmon.

In places like Tillamook, White Salmon, Klickitat, Troutdale, Kalama, Soldotna and Talkeetna, you see Pro-Cure “pinkies” at coffee shops before first light and in greasy spoon restaurants when they come off the water.

In the last week of June, we watched salmon counts over The Dalles Dam. Sockeye numbers were climbing. Ed Iman called and said we were going to put some new gear to the test.

We met at Freebridge Brewing in The Dalles for dinner, ate breakfast at Cousins Inn and headed to the river. We launched on the Washington side, in Jason Hambly’s 20-foot sled. I took a seat close to Hambly; Iman and Steve Lynch sat closer to the bow.

Hambly is of the old school, with pink around his knuckles, pink under his nails — and he is one of the fishiest guys I know.

There was supposed to be a light wind out of the west, but we had a pretty good blow going by 7 a.m. out of the north.

I tied on a Mack’s Lure Cha Cha Sockeye Squidder with 10 inches of leader and handed the lure to Hambly. He produced a hot pink coon shrimp, threaded it on, and I dropped it back, counting down to 25 on the line counter.

Iman and Lynch were in a mood to talk. Hambly tacked back and forth, fighting the wind. I steered the conversation toward Pro-Cure’s new line of Super Sauces.

Pro-Cure operates under the principle that it is really easy to catch fish when fish are in a mood to bite, but when they’re not, we need all the help we can get.

To that end, the Salem-based company has been working on a product called Super Sauce with good applications for anglers who ply the waters of Central Oregon for rainbows, kokanee, lake trout and bass.

Super Sauce is a cross between fish oils and gel. Chemists blended in a tactifier to make the thinner blend sticky, “like bar oil on a chainsaw.” The Super Sauce hits tackle stores this summer, in 10 flavors and five colors.

The company uses natural bait as the base for its products. And one of the most important items on any big fish’s menu is a rainbow trout. Picture a truckload of hatchery-raised rainbows in a blender. You don’t have to wonder what’s in the Trout formula. It’s rainbow trout! Think browns, lake trout, bass and large rainbows. They all eat baby rainbows.

In some lakes, the tui chub is a major food source. Lynch recommends the Trophy Trout blend, which uses the chub as the main ingredient. Apply it onto big minnow imitations, up to one-third of the size of the fish you’re targeting. And hold on.

For hatchery trout, the Shrimp Krill sauce appeals to the conditioned tastebuds of fish raised in raceways and turned out in some of our favorite lakes.

Monster Bite is another one Lynch says we should try in Central Oregon. The company uses four food-grade branch chain amino acids to provoke aggression.

Super Sauce will also come in Kokanee, a blend of the five flavors our most finicky of finned favorites favor.

Like a lot of companies, Pro-Cure adds an ultraviolet component to make the bait show up in murky water. It used to be standard practice to apply scent to the lure then spread it up the line. That’s a mistake when using UV because it will make the leader light up in the water.

The product isn’t hard to use — just squeeze it on — but what a lot of people miss is the care of the gear afterward, Lynch said. “We tell people to clean their plugs, spoons and spinners at the end of each day.”

Otherwise, the product cooks on, the odor changes and it attracts cats and skunks and raccoons into your boat after dark. After a raccoon has chewed a Kwikfish and a cat has sprayed it, chances are a lake trout isn’t going to be as interested.

Some use dish soap and water. Lynch employs WD40. “If you don’t clean it off your lures you won’t get bit,” Lynch said.

Down in deep water, our Double D dodgers flashed and shimmered, our baits tantalized. Up on the surface, the 20 mph winds beat on us.

A fish grabbed Lynch’s bait then threw the hook. A sockeye took my spinner and spit it back out. I lost another soon after. Then Lynch had a solid take. We thought it was a sockeye at first, but when we saw it, the black mouth was a giveaway — a chinook. Because it hadn’t been fin-clipped, Hambly twisted the hook out and let it go. One of the first salmon to fall for the new sauce. We hope he doesn’t tell his friends.

— Gary Lewis is the host of Frontier Unlimited TV and author of Fishing Central Oregon, Fishing Mount Hood Country, Hunting Oregon and other titles. Contact Gary at www.GaryLewisOutdoors.com.