I like doing two color injections on most of my baits since they are geared towards crappies more than anything. I have a couple baits right now that I tend to favor when I'm picking the water apart looking for crappies and they have been working pretty good for sunfish too. Over the weekend I got an invite to spend a couple hours n a local "private" lake of about 30 acres that has been maintained for crappies, sunfish, bass, and walleye. My host and I were snooping out some shallow wood for crappies and sunnies. I got to see something characteristic of the sunfish in the winter happening now in water of 68 degrees.
Winter fishing will often allow an angler to literally sit right atop sunfish and crappies and sight-fish them thru the hole in the ice. ....meaning you are actually watching the fish approach and hit. With the sunfish on beds this weekend we were able to watch them race right up to our jigs and whack them. OR, like they have a nasty habit of doing in the winter, sunfish will race right up to your bait, slam on the skids and MAYBE, just MAYBE, suck in the very end of your plastic or jig, or bait. Yesterday Ialso noticed that the baits with a chartreuse tail piece fished on a chartreuse head got the head hit more than the tail! After slipping the same plastic on a dark head, they'd hit the tail but they seemed almost wary of the longer length of tail color. Finally I did a chop, re-weld job on a handful of baits and figured out that they hit the smaller speck of a tail color better than they did baits with more color. They also hit chartreuse heads, but not the tails of the plastic when fished with a black plastic body. This was really weird behavior for early summer fishing.
This got me to the shooting table again. Always thinkin ya know. At the top of the picture you'll see the two purple/chartreuse plastics I used on Saturday. The junebug baits are the ones i shot using just a mere speck of tail color. The welds are solid as a rock and clean. I stretched on of those Small Frys about three inches and noting let go so I gave on of the others about the same tug test and all held up. We're planning on another jaunty when he gets off work this afternoon, maybe tomorrow if he gets tied up. I'm going to squirt up a few more colors just like the junebug ones to see if the sunfish like these fished on a black head.
The sunfish, incidently, are running in the 11 to 12 inch range and are about 2 1/2" thick. We had a couple snap 4 pound line the other day. They are a riot on a 10 foot ul rod.
