I make my own chatterbaits and do not use skirts on them. I just add the plastic swimbait and they catch fish. I can't see where a skirt would help; to me it looks like some weeds on the front of the bait. What do you think?
This an excellent question, I thought the same thing myself and so I tried the no skirt deal on spinnerbaits and chatterbaits and here is what I found out. With the spinnerbait there was a larger difference in the amount of strikes I got with a skirt, I had to do this a bunch of different ways as I normally don't use a trailer with a spinnerbait so I tried it with nothing on the back and then a worm, a grub and a swim bait. The swim bait did ok but without the skirt I had a large number of fish hit the blades, this didn't happen with the skirt which makes me think the added bulk really attracts the fish away from the blades. The chatterbait was a different deal, I did get more strikes with the skirt when I used grubs and worms for trailers but when I went to a swim bait it seemed there wasn't any real difference with or without a skirt. Here is the real kicker and it was pretty much what I expected, in stained water the skirt was almost required, I was getting bit more often by larger fish on average than I was without the skirt however, in clear water the numbers favored the bait without a skirt but the larger fish on average went for the skirt and I'm chalking that up to the added bulk with the skirt. In summary I'd have to say that with a chatterbait, you don't need a skirt but if you are fishing tournaments and are looking for larger fish you will definitely want a skirt. I will also add that I only conducted this observation on the chatterbait for 3 seasons, the spinnerbait I did over a span of 6 seasons, like I said, when I started making spinnerbaits, I tried everything and wrote it down, I would make 100 spinnerbaits with different lengths of wires and different blade sizes and I would go to a shallow calm water spot that was super clear and for 7 to 8 hours I would reel each bait slow, medium and fast and write down the results. There was no fish in the area I was at, it was a small wash out next to the river and was about 2.5' deep and clear, it was my testing water, and when I was learning I had the same question as Muskygary, and that was the one about whether skit material makes any difference and it most certainly does in most cases.