Custom Baits - Forum
General => General Discussion => Topic started by: MO QWACK on 02/25/13 20:39 UTC
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I often wonder if we try to look too natural? I mean if the real thing caught more fish that a photo finish bait would be the only thing we needed right? I fish in a lake that's 99.9 shad forage but cant catch much on the silvers and greys. You put brown, blue, char. Or pink on and the bites on. What gives? All I can figure is we have 99 trillion shad in our lake (Truman) I guess the "real" bait get lost in the crowd
Do yawl have the same problem?
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A pretty smart old man told me too that "if you're trying to catch a pig you wouldn't throw a potato in a potato field" kinda thing... some times it's gotta be something a little different than what they are used to seeing that brings the interest.
my 2 pennies
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I don't know. I live in a place with extremely clear water, and I have found the more natural the better. No shad here, but lures in baby bass, bluegill or perch patterns reign supreme. You just have to make the bait act differently than the natural forage. That said, there are times when a bubble gum pink bait cleans up. It just depends on the mood of the fish.
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That's what he was saying... sometimes if it's tough you gotta change it up and throw something besides a potato.
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Yeah, most of the time the potato works here. It's mostly during the spawning season that they will react to something oddball.
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Sometimes I wonder if a fish ate hamburgers everyday for a month would he jump on a Bar-B-Que sandwich for a change like most people would. In my fishing, it seems open water crappie are the finicky eaters on a day to day basis. And white bass the least finicky.
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White bass will eat just about anything. The largemouth around my parts can be very particular. Most of the time it's all ultra realistic young of the year fish patterns or really subtle melon and pumpkin colors. The smallies seem a little more adventurous in their eating habits and will go for chartreuses and reds sometimes.
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Something to keep in mind here is that we see things way different than the fish do. Our eyes and brains are way more refined than the eyes and brains of a fish. And fish live in water, we don't. I was at an ice show in St. Paul one winter day and stopped to listen to a well renowned angler/speaker do a presentation and color. At the end of it all he asked if there were questions so of course I had to ask if he thought he could speak for the fish...what they saw down there in the sepths and under a sheet of 2 foot ice. Specifically I asked him how he drew his conclusions. After he ran thru a ten minute discussion I kindly reminded him that all of his data and theory was based on human obsevation and assumptions and that as far as I knew nobody had yet figured out how to communicate with fish, meaning that nobody can actually tell anyone what a fish sees.
We know thru visual studies that different colors appear as other colors after having descended into the water column and that the water color and clarity determine the rate of that change. Observations have been made regarding fish hitting certain colors at specific depths where they won't hit the same color at a different depth....maybe even avoid it flat out. But at best all we are doing is making an assumption that fish hit that color because...
I'm a confirmed believer in transparent colors simple becaue transparent colors get my crappies far more often than an opaque or solid color. I also have pet colors that work 99% of the time but on any given day that color might be strong for a couple hours and then quit producingfor no apparent reason. Is it how the sun's angle might be hitting the water? Are the fish relating to shade in some fashion? Did cloud cover move in? We are bombarded with natural events that can change the percieved color of the plastic we have on a jig at any time. I use the word percieved here because what we see out of the water is likely entirely different than how the fish see the same thing.
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rite on ctom I'm a big crappie fisher man color is more so in the spring and fall then summer but I got a spike-it color selector if get stuck its Petty need if you start playing with it on cloudy days and sunny days and depth of water how the color sec changes. I've I have my go to color patrons the season that I can take almost anywhere
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I hear what you guys are saying for crappie and even walleye. Color seems to make a difference. But for large mouth bass I don't believe color means that much. I use dark colors for muddy water and try to match the weeds in clear water. In my opinion they are opportunist and do not have to eat. For them timing is everything. It's when conditions are right and they move up to feed is when you can catch them. I think to many guys spend to much of the day switching baits and running to spots instead of looking for patterns of what the fish are doing at what time during the day. I remember years ago I heard Rollin Marten say It's all creepy crawly things on the bottom. What you have to do is learn how to put it in front of the bass in a fashion which he will eat it. I personally believe that's way more important then color.
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I agree that finding the fish and your presentation are most important than color, but I still think bass can be very selective at times. The water I fish you can see the bottom in 15 feet of water sometimes. The fish can be very wary and any edge you can find is a good thing. Maybe it's just a confidence thing, but when I started fishing lures that "matched the hatch", I started catching more fish. Granted there were days when the fish were really ramped up and actively feeding and I could catch them on a chrome lure even though there are no shad or other baitfish where I fish, but when they have been more passive, color seems to help.
On a side note, I was watching Hunt for Big Fish last night, and he had a really interesting technique for adding detail to your plastics using Alumidust and a heat gun. It might be a good technique for making realistic perch or baby bass patterns.
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My largemouth bass fishing is really fairly limited but I do enjoy a little top-water action while the crappies are busy spawning. I think bass in weeds and slop follow shadows moving overhead as much as they might color or scent. And where I fish I think scent is a fallacy when it comes to bass. I like the Rapala SkitterPop for my top water fishing. I replace the rear, tinseled, hook with Gammi wide-gap treble one size larger. I fish with one color of SkitterPop.... silver body, blue back, orange belly.
I target weed edges and open pockets in the weeds, slop or duckweed and most of my hits happen at or within a micro second of the lure hitting the water. The hits can happen so fast that there are times I swear the bass came up and out of the water to grab the lure before it hit the water, but for sure the fish did not have time to smell any scent and color detection is questionable on those hits too. I think most of the largemouths reaction- hit on the surface. Jigs and worms fished below I don't have any experience with.
On the other hand, I know of areas on the Mississippi River that are full of smallmouth bass. These fish will smack a top water or a spinner bait with fever and color does seem to play a big part in whether they hit or not. Dark greens and bright, deep oranges under browns are HOT colors for plastic on jigs when fished on rip-rap. These colors are also good ones for me when fishing smaller rivers that hold smallies. The Zumbro River right behind my house has a nice smallie population. It might be how I fish the smallies that will dictate what color I use since most of my smallie fishing is done with jigs/plastics. Brown/orange, black/orange, melon green...all of these colors are are colors commonly found in the crawfish populations in this area.
I'm really pretty stupid when it comes to fishing the basses but I do like that toilet-flush, sucking hit on a top-water and smallies fight like bulls. My favorite fish is the black crappie and those can be gotten up to 15-16 inches on the big river in many areas. Many times these fish have a pile of time to study a bait before hitting. While I lean hard in the direction of transparent baits, and color can come into play awfully easy, I think that profile and tail action do more to get neutrally mooded and negative fish to hit than anything.
Stop and think about the jig/plastic combination. Fished under a float in calm water and simply left there to do whatever, it might catch a few fish. Move it a particuar way and you might catch ten times as many fish. Cast it into current and let it drift and you might catch 20 times as many fish. Take the float off and jig it vertically and you might catch 40 times as many fish. The bottom line is that plastic just doesn't have any action unless some outside force...us, wind, current...applies action to it. Now here comes the tail action part. If the tail or any portion of the plastic itself reacts easily to , say a slight "pop" on the line, you are giving that inert plastic some character. Some plastics, say the small fry clan, have tails that not only react to the pop on the line very well but the angular surfaces also reflect a ton of light. The Thumper fry has a paddle tail that will move at the slightest force applied to the jig holding it. There are hundres of variations of plastic baits made for fishing crappies and other panfish. Many of those trigger fish to hit by tail movement alone, not color.
Does color play a key part? Absolutely. Yet color can take a back seat to other aspects of a plastic bait. We can make baits look pretty real and those pretty real looking baits account for a lot of fish. Day in, day out though, my favorite of all colors to put in the water to catch crappies and sunfish is a purple body with a chartreuse tail. That's followed by blue/chartreuse. These are not colors native to crappie waters. I think all of this topic comes right back to the fishes eyes. We don't have any absolute proof that fish see color as we do. I think they are more likely to see varying intensities of whites, blacks, and grays. White with uv may well be the brightest color they see. The black we make is blacker than anything in nature and is why black fished in the dead of night during a new moon catches fish...it stands out against an environment that consists of latent light. Chartreuses, piks, oranges, reds, greens....you name it, all are possibly seen as somewhere black and white, but in a particular intensity of gray. I don't think thay we can make the assumption that even a photo coated plastic will mean squat to a fish looking at it. In large part I think what we do in our bait making to get as realistic as possible is perhaps more for us than anything. We enjoy looking at hyper-realism that we have created. And by all means we should feel good about it. Still, when I hit the boat, I like to leave my flourish for the pretty back at the trailer and fish. I always start with a purple/chartreuse. No variable there. Atmospheric conditions don't matter, water color doesn't matter, current doesn't matter, depth doesn't matter. Its my confidence color and its so far away from natural that its laughable, but it works. Its hard to imagine the this color combination working because Mother Nature hasn't put it in any water that I fish. The bottom line color as we see it doesn't mean squat to the fish. That leaves us with the task of observing what colors during which conditions worked or did not work for us. For 22 years I documented my fishing religiously and right now am in the process of having all of the data put on dvd's in a chart format to help make sense of it all. One aspect of all of the data collected that has made the most sense to me is the color factor. Next is the profile/action end of it.
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I agree on the topwaters, a silhouette is pretty much all they see. Reaction baits fished quickly probably aren't a huge deal on color either. However when fishing plastics, or a suspending jerkbait, where the fish really get to scrutinize the bait, I think color can and patterns can make a difference.
To give you an idea of how clear the water is here, I'll post some pics.
(http://i87.photobucket.com/albums/k142/aladar52/basssmall.jpg)
(http://i87.photobucket.com/albums/k142/aladar52/gulpsmall.jpg)
The water is a good six feet deep beneath me in the 2nd pic. The fish really use their sense of sight in this habitat and I think little things can make a big difference in these conditions.
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WOW... Y'all have developed this into a very good thread and I've got nothing to say but that every post here is right on the money.
That is all,
Jerry
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I normally stick to the thought of clearer the water clearer the bait. The water I fish is 2 foot visibility tops, most of the time you could plant corn on it because it so muddy. I add pearls and glitters so I can reflect any light that's down there. I will say black is the color I can't explain. It rarely occurs in nature yet all fish love it. Hmmm if I ever meat I mermaid I'll ask lol
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The waters I fish up here are all colored waters most of the time and dirty much of that. We see huge amounts of agricultural run-off in this area whenever we get hard rains and in the spring when the snow cover melts. I hardly ever put an opaque or solid color bait on a jig. On really dark, thick days if I am jigging walleyes I will use a black plastic with either a bright orange tail or the bottom 1/2 of the bait bright orange orange, never for crappies though. This is about as black as I get even when the water looks like I could plant corn on it.....I like that quip...thanks.
Every once in a great while I'll tie on a white or chartreuse or hot pink or hot orange head and work thru several colors of plastic if the fishing is flat, but I think I've done that once in the last 12 months. I have a custom blend of powder paint in a color called Almost Blue that is on the line more than any others combined. Its a transparent purple with micro fine blue glitter. It looks purple from one angle but blue from another. I'll try to put a pic of the color up tomorrow. I use this color with every color and profile of plastic I make. This color does as much as black does when black is working yet still has the reflectivity and brightness at all other times.
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I'm getting more into natural colors and find them to work very well in certain waters I fish. Other waters I need to go with brighter, less natural colors. Not only is water clarity a part of it, but water color can make a difference. Part of that is light penetration and dispersion, but another part is that fish see color differently than we do. I'll have to look up the one study an aquaintence worked on, had to do with color vision and visual cues in fish. (specifically cichlids, but principles applied to all fish)
One of the waters I fish is dark and tannin stained, but the water is clear (not a lot of suspended particles). Looks about like root beer. Greens don't work in this water very well, but browns work great. Along the same lines with bright colors, orange is way better than chartreuse. And gold better than silver. Haven't used them extensively, but I would suspect purple would outfish blue on this water. A river I fish regularly is the opposite, the water ranges from clear to silty with a greenish tan tint. Greens are better than browns. Pretty basic stuff, but it seems a lot of people dont think about it. Reds and whites seem to do well everywhere for me.
Something else people don't always think about is that fish don't follow just color in visual cues. Pattern plays a big part, maybe a bigger part than color due to the variability in color caused by genetic, seasonal, or environmental effects. So if the color isn't natural but follows a natural pattern that the fish would prey on they'll likely hit the bait.
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Nick brings up a huge factor in color choices when fishing different waters. Water color and clear water staining can have fish show entirely different color preferences. Nick mentions water loaded with tannin. In our area we see this component get heavy in the local waters when leaves drop in the fall and usually will hold onto some of this staining until spring rains and snow-melt run-off add to the water volumn enough to dillute it or flush the staining away.
Nick also supports my idea that fish see things different than we do, including color. In lieu of that concern alone, I have become a practitioner of over-kill when it comes to carrying so many different colors of baits when I hit the boat. My boat stock rides in a 5 gallon pail and all of the baits by color and shape are in seperate zip-locks. I have ten baits in each one at all times. And if I have a bait at home in a storage box, I have a ten pack in the boat when I go. Many of the baits I made as trial baits are still in ziplocks in that pail even though I don't have any at home. If I had all of this in boxes, I'd have to swim alongside the boat to fish. I do carry my jigs in well organized boxes. lol
In another thread regarding preferred crappie bait colors in another area here I mention my trying to bring some natural bait colors into play with my usual pets. There is also a pic there showing some of the more natural baits I plan to use. I have seen over the last couple of years a definite upward trend in natural looking baits, but I didn't really have any access to those unless I spent the money for those on store shelves. Since I began making these things myself, working up natural colors is a snap, but I still don't think that any of the photo-image appliques do anything to get fish to hit any better. In fact, I think the photo image stuff is used expressedly to sell that tackle to people. How fish see what we drop down to them is a lot of science, so instead of trying to dissect the issue in the boat, I take a ton of colors and profiles along and work thru things as I fish letting the fish dictate what they want.
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I've found the water color issue to be true in my area too. Those ultra clear lakes I fish have a lot of calcium carbonate in the water, so they're kind of a blue green color. Translucent green plastics do very well for me while something like pumpkinseed does not. There's a smallmouth and walleye reservoir I fish that has more color to the water, and brown baits are killer there.
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I have a custom blend of powder paint in a color called Almost Blue that is on the line more than any others combined. Its a transparent purple with micro fine blue glitter. It looks purple from one angle but blue from another. I'll try to put a pic of the color up tomorrow.
This is the jighead color I mentioned in this post a couple days ago.
Almost Blue
(http://i48.tinypic.com/25rc8oy.jpg)
In the sun this color is electric. Why its such a strong color for me I have no idea, but I can fish it in the dark, on very cloudy days, in twilight and strong daylight, at 6:30 AM, noon and again at 8PM.....nothing changes, it just works.
You notice the small fry here too. I was trying a method of getting a blood line explained elsewhere. I sure like the line in the tail, but the rest is sort of funky and the process involves me dipping color which equates to me turning colors not normal for human flesh. Had to try. Short period of wonder, now I know.
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CTOM dude your skills are in real!
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Can I ask how do you get that blood line in the tail like that ? I've noticed some other pictures from other posters have them and I can't figure it out.
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Sometimes I think I'm just dumb for trying things over and over again. I did a black line earlier that was so-so, but I like vivid in the line and decided to give it another run. This time the top color is a thin blue smoke with some silver and blue glitter tossed in along with just a hint of Turquoise hi lite. This was shot over a belly a bluish firecracker color...the bluish comes from about thirty reheats with blue glitter in it....not a bad color though. Caney/Do-It X2 Hot Pink is the line color.
(http://i574.photobucket.com/albums/ss184/crappietomtackle/0ad41712-8803-4f85-9dbf-23c8510f9b5b_zpsd7888945.jpg)
Lamar....I'm using the Caney Small Fry 1.75" mold with a plate to seperate the top and bottom sections on the first shoot. I use the bottom sections by trimming off the tail and into the bottom section about 1/16". I use a razor blade to trim. Then I cut the piece off the sprue and place the pieces back in the mold on the tail half. In fact I open the mold and lay the bottom shot out and cut and replace each piece in the cavity they came from. Then I heat the top color and keep it hot. I use a tooth pick to dip just barely into the color that I want the vein. I'm talking straight, out of the bottle color now. I just touch the toothpick to the plastic ythat's been re-inserted at the very front, near the incoming plastic gate. I try to keep the dot of color in the center and close to the cut edge but not on the cut edge. You'll note that the cut pieces are just a hair short to fill the cavity, but there is a reason. First it allows the tail to fill when you shoot the top color and second, you can put a dot of color right at the cut edge at the rear. Do the dots fairly fast so they don't run. Close, clamp and shoot the top color you've kept in waiting. Shoot sloooowly and hold pressure for at least a ten count. I get right around a 30 to 50% success rate.
I've tried leaving the bottoms in the mold by removing the plate and seperating the sprue and then just dotting the front of the bottom half and shooting the top color. I really don't like the outcome doing it this way. Try it both ways to see which one works for you.
This should work with any bait that has a distinct top and bottom that can be seperated by a plate.
Keep some paper towels handy. This dipping and dotting can get messy. I have 8 thumbs and two little fingers and that complicates things for me. You can't imagine how many paper towels I use up. This little venture has doubled the rate of use. The wife swears she's putting a sheet meter on a towel dispenser and limiting my number of sheets per day.
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Got ya. I was trying to do the bleed with hot plastic and brush it in. It cools to fast. I seen Microspoon has some too. He's got it down to a fine art. Thanks for your help
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Microspoons is a pure master at plastic and color manipulation. That man has a world with a fence around it in that department.
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I've done several more shoots using this technique for the bloodline and will offer this for anyone who gives it a go. Use the X2 colorant for the bloodline dot of color you use. The regulat color is too thin and migrates all over on the half-plastic the dot goes on. It makes a mess in the mold. Also, if the X2 is too think for you, just a dink drop of worm oil or softener, or stabilizer helps to make the drop setting easier.