Among a certain subculture, catching fish is more than a pastime, it’s an avocation and a battleground event complete with cutting edge innovations like TactiBite™ sound and vibration technology and “state-of-the-art hydrophone and computer technology.”
From this rather pricey lure to this grotesque flight of inventive fancy, much effort has been spent on considering the problem of getting fish to bite down and thereby, join a lucky fisherman in his boat.
This isn’t your dad’s fishing and you are definitely not in Kansas anymore. Well then again, maybe it is if your dad is Jeff Danos.
Danos and his son, Jack, are raising money on Kickstarter at this very moment for a 3D printed device they’ve dubbed The Fish Call. They say it’s a tossable electronic lure meant to attract the chicken of the sea by creating a facsimile of the sound of fish feeding.
Using the aforementioned TactiBite, a patent-pending technology which broadcasts the sounds in question, they say their device simplifies the process of catching fish, and their 3D printed prototypes have been exhaustively tested in conditions featuring saltwater and freshwater.
“What do you get when you combine a 16 year old coder/web developer/engineer/designer and a 47 year old entrepreneur?” they ask. “A father-son dream team that can do just about anything.”
At under a pound and about the size of a can of beer, the Fish Call can operate and send out its jams for around six to eight hours on a single 9 volt battery.
While the Danoses have hired a manufacturer to make the production models of their device with injection molding, they’re offering the 3D printed versions now.
And in what is either a vote of confidence for the technology behind the Fish Call or a testament to the lengths to which anglers will go to haul in fish, their campaign is on the verge of tripling the original funding goal of $10,000, with $29,596 raised as of the time of writing (and rising!)–and the campaign set to continue through September 17th.
Jeff and Jack say that, though they’re “amateur anglers,” their discovery of this new sort of transducer process – and nine months spent on engineering and testing with their 3D printed prototypes – yielded the multicolored Fish Call.
By flicking a switch and tossing the Fish Call in the water, Team Danos say it will cause fish to gather in schools and begin aggressively biting. From there, it’s all about casting a line into the feeding frenzy near the device and hauling out the bounty of the seas. 
And what kind of catch can you expect?
“We have done most of our testing in coastal saltwater and freshwater ponds,” they say. “We have caught Red Fish, Speckled Trout, Black Drum, Flounder, SheepsHead, Black Tip Shark, Blue Fish, Channel Mullet, Bass, Catfish, Bowfin and Blue Gill. All were caught within a few feet of The Fish Call.”
You can get one for $99 via the Kickstarter campaign.
So, does it work? One convert, charter fishing captain Charlie Thomason of Bayou Charters, says it works like a charm.
“They show up with this product and they tell me hey, this is going to revolutionize the way everybody catches fish, and I’m like, ‘OK I’ve heard it a thousand times.’ We go out fishin’, we throw this thing out in the water, I am not kidding, we start catching fish, we were catching them so close to it, we were actually hookin’ fish and they were running into it and we’re reeling it in with the fish,” Thomason said.
What do you think of the Fish Call? Have you ever seen 3D printed tackle to rival it? Let us know in the 3D Printed Fish Call forum thread on 3DPB.com. Check out the Fish Call’s promo video below to see it in action.
