Custom painting lures

[Guest]

Whatever the case might be, I've hammered the big bass in dirty water with chrome rattle traps & square bills. They flat out catch Giants. Stained to muddy shallow lakes. 

[Guest]

Wrench, I like my chrome to have hook rash & teeth marks, it looks like an injured Shad imo 

[Guest]

I like white & black (bombers baby striper) on cloudy days & chrome on sunny days. The flash makes a difference. 

[Guest]

 I'm Sure you can catch these same bass with a spinnerbait or chattetbait, but I like crankbaits better. 

[Al Agnew]

Just reporting what the physics are...fact is that colors that look flashy or highly visible to US, when looking at them above the water or looking DOWN at them while they are in the water, look entirely different from the fish's viewpoint, and are often very obscure.  Chartreuse is the perfect example.  We see chartreuse in the water against the dark underwater background, with the light hitting the top of it where we are seeing it.  The contrast between lure and background is extreme.  But the fish looking UP at that same bait in that same position sees the underside of it against a background of sky and sunlit foliage, etc.  Bright object against a bright background...almost invisible.  It's why chartreuse is my go-to color in clear water and bright days if I'm using surface lures or lures that stay high in the water column.  

Under ANY conditions, the most visible color in any lure the fish are going to be looking up at is black, because they are always seeing it against the brightest part of their underwater world.  Want to paint deeper diving lures that really ARE as highly visible as possible in muddy water?  Paint them with pearl white BACKS and BLACK bellies.  That, of course, looks completely unnatural, because just about every critter in the water (or on land, for that matter) is darker on the back and lighter on the belly.  Why?  Because light hits it from above, lightening the back, while the belly is shadowed, darkening it.  Thus the critter appears low-contrast against the background, less visible.  Flip that color scheme, where the light enhances the white back and the black belly deepens further in shadow, and bingo, you have an object that really contrasts with the background.

[Mitch f]

This all brings up a good point...if chrome is nearly invisible in muddy water, and spinnerbaits are usually a great choice for murky water, is it mostly the vibration the fish use to locate with their lateral line?

[Guest]

That's it, I'm dumping out my box & painting everything in BBQ grill black 

[Guest]

I've got a home made single blade spinnerbait with a #8 Indiana blade (musky size) put a white skirt & white swimbait trailer on it. It puts out lots of thump. 

Funny thing, I noticed jason Christie throwing one very similar at the grand lake bassmaster classic a couple years ago. I liked his flat rubber skirt better than silicone. 

[Al Agnew]

1 hour ago, Mitch f said:

This all brings up a good point...if chrome is nearly invisible in muddy water, and spinnerbaits are usually a great choice for murky water, is it mostly the vibration the fish use to locate with their lateral line?

The difference between a chrome-sided crankbait and a spinnerbait is that the chrome on the blades of the bait is constantly changing position in relation to the light, so it is always flashing as the blade rotates, and the flashes can reflect into the eyes of the fish no matter what position the fish is in relation to the bait.  So yeah, they can see that kind of flash a lot more.  HOWEVER...physics says that any critter can see only the light that is entering its eyes.  In muddy water, light doesn't penetrate far.  If YOU can see 6 inches down into the water, that means that the light has penetrated the water 12 inches--6 inches down to the object you're seeing, then reflecting off the object and traveling another 6 inches back up to the water surface, where it then moves easily through the air to your eyes.  So theoretically, light is only penetrating that far into the water, and anything deeper than that should be "lightless".  In practice, however, light does penetrate farther into muddy water, as I've found when snorkeling in my pond.  Still, it doesn't penetrate all that far, and I found that once I got below about 3 feet in 6 inch visibility water, everything was dark brown and I could just barely see my hand a couple inches from my eyes.  Since fish eyes work pretty much like human ones as far as light is concerned, what this means is that, in muddy water, the fish are definitely NOT locating lures by sight in water deeper than a couple of feet, and are barely seeing them even in the final attack.  A lure passing a foot or two from a fish in 6 feet of muddy water is passing unseen.  But the fish can certainly "feel" that lure, and probably hear it as well.

It's difficult to wean ourselves from our own perceptions and put ourselves in the place of fish, but when it comes down to it, color probably doesn't matter at all in muddy water.  You could probably catch fish on a clear lure as well as a black one, a chartreuse one, or a fire tiger one...except POSSIBLY, a high contrast color allows the fish to see it a little better in the last few inches of its approach.  And true fluorescent colors also are a little more visible in deep or muddy water.

Another fact about color and light...the wavelength of some colors penetrates farther in water than others.  Red penetrates the least, blue and green the farthest.  Red basically turns to dark gray or black in appearance in depths greater than 5 or 6 feet even in clear water.  That red on your deep-diving crankbait might as well be black, because the fish are going to see it the same way.

[dtrs5kprs]

4 hours ago, TrophyFishR said:

Why is it so hard to find chrome & black square bills. 

Firetiger & chrome/black are my go-to colors in muddy water 

It's too old fashioned for the ultra realistic swimbait and flat billed hat crowd.