Imagine a couple of guys crowded in a basement, trying to bring a fish back to life. It may seem like a scene out of Frankenstein, but it’s actually a reality for Zombait - an emerging startup that’s hoping to help fishermen save time and money when it comes to bait.
OK, technically this team isn’t really bringing fish back from their watery graves. But with the robotic device it’s developing, it will seem that way. I spoke with Zombait founders Matthew Borowski and Jessy Cusack, and they brought me up to speed about their recently launched Kickstarter, what they have in the works and - most importantly - why.
How did they think of this?
For people who aren’t too familiar with the intricacies of fishing, which is totally normal, I should explain that if you’re looking to catch big fish, you have to get a little more sophisticated with your bait. You can’t entice an enormous tuna to bite with your grandfather’s tackle; you need to lure them in with live, small fish that are still squirming. And that can get tricky.
A friend of a friend of Borowski’s family has been a commercial tuna fisherman for more than 35 years and, one night, dinner conversation somehow led itself to the topic of live bait struggles. People have to either buy live bait - which has a tendency to die while aboard ship - or they have to hunt down schools of small fish and trap them for bait. Turns out, both options are annoying, and Zombait is hoping to make both of these methods unnecessary.
According to them, it’s feasible to reanimate live bait. After many rounds of prototyping, they’ve come up with a device that you shove down the mouths of little dead fish and that makes them robot, seeming as if they were still swimming strong. And big fish fall for it.
“We’ve gone to fishing events in Nantucket, Gloucester and Newburyport, where we spoke to hundreds of tuna and striper bass fishermen,” Borowski started. “The response level was great. But the need isn’t just local.”
“There are fishermen all over the world - in Europe, Australia, Southeast Asia - who could use Zombait,” he went on. “We’re only starting with the East Coast, moving down the Atlantic. But we’re learning about how others in the worldwide market could benefit from our technology.”
Both commercial and recreational fishermen could use this nifty device to haul in more prized fish - if they have the stomach for it.
“Basically, it can be used to catch any kind of fish that are going after other fish,” Cusack said. “There’s a number of species, and they’re typically pretty valuable - valuable economically.”
“Or valuable because they’re award fish that people mount,” he continued. “In general, they’re all very sought after species.”
Fixing the biggest problem with fishing
“There’s a saying, ‘no bait, no bite,’ and it’s true,” explained Borowski. “People come up with so many different reason as to why they aren’t catching anything. They’ll blame the tides, the phase of the moon, the day of the week. But when it comes down to it, if you have the wrong bait out there, that’s the main reason why nothing’s biting.”
Now, instead of buying expensive live bait - or, god forbid, spending hours trying to catch it yourself - you can simply stuff dead fish with this device. It makes the bait kick its tail back and forth post mortem at a natural speed and angle, so it looks pretty darn close to the real thing.
Making sure Zombait realistically mimics live bait has been a thorough, but comical process. It’s involved ample playtime with dead fish for the team.
“Our first test was in my kitchen sink in Somerville,” said Borowski. “My wife was a gem for letting us do that. We got really excited that it worked and were ready to make it smaller and more powerful.”
“We’ve been testing our prototypes in an aquarium,” added Cusack. “We’ve stared at dead fish, asking, ‘What do you think? Is that the right speed? What should it look like?”
From basement to bait
While the final product isn’t on the market yet, the Zombait team is getting close. With the Kickstarter funds, these guys are hoping to crank out more devices and find the perfect channels through which they’ll be selling them. In the meantime, they’re working away in a basement, coming up with future features, like sounds and movement profiles, to add to Zombait.
“We created a little manufacturing space in the basement,” Borowski told me. “We’ve spent hundreds of hours building these things down there - music blasting, soldering and waterproofing all of our prototypes.”
“There are days when I watch myself on-video playing with a dead fish and I ask myself, ‘What the heck am I doing?’” he laughed. “But we’re so numb to it now. It’s not normal, but it’s the new normal to us.”
Image via Matthew Borowski.
