Another keeper

[ctom]

I have had a long standing love affair with the Junebug color and just about every bait I use or have will have a version of Junebug/Chartreuse tail if at all possible. Being fairly new to this plastics stuff I tend to take baby steps and yesterday I had some time so I sat down with a bag or thirty of trim colors and began to snoop out a Junebug/Chartreuse creation using Jason's Fish Fry in the 1.75".

This one was done using a standard colorant and was my first shot using the CCM "killer-free" plastic. Jason had included a glitter sample in an order a while back and it was the green that goes into a standard Junebug so I added that as well as some heat stabilizer and just a tad of violet hi lites....love the hi lites. I really wanted a chartreuse tail on this and took about 5 different colors of chartreuse trim and mixed them up to an opque chartreuse so giving any details about the tail color is a moot issue. But the color works for me and now I have about a cup of it ready to do some serious tail shooting today.

At any rate, this is the new pet color. I can see this baby having a serious date with some crappies along about March 1st if the winter stays mild. I have a shore spot on a local lake that opens up with some current between two areas that stay ice covered for a few more weeks and the crappies flock to this area along with smallies. The smallie season will be closed, but they are real hard to communicate with and seem to horn in on the crappies from time to time. I don't keep bass anyway, but a few of those crappies are going to come home for dinner and this bait will make the ideal invite.

[andrewlamberson]

Darn that is good looking! What is it about crappies (and smallmouth) and chartreuse?? They sure do seem to love that color!

Makin' ice this week!!! I'm going to shoot some of your Junebug/chart. Small Fry's for this weekend and see how the crappie and yellow perch like em.

Did you buy the tail mold...or just shooting a full chart. bait...and cutting off the tails?

[ctom]

I'm lazy Andrew and just shot the full bait and trimmed the tail sections. Does Jason make a tail-only mold for the 1.75 inch?

Kind'a funny about theose smallies and early fishing. The warden from your area was on the Zumbro with the warden from our area last winter late doing the license check thing. Everyone was on ice except me at my shore spot and they evidently noticed that I was the only one catching anything that morning. Because of that run of open water I mentioned, they had to drive half way around the lake to get to where I was and they made the drive.

Standing there talking to me I managed to catch and release about 20 fish, half of which were smallies up to about 4 pounds. They couldn't believe it. I was fishing a sunken hump that tops out at about four feet deep and the bass were right on the break to deeper water while the crappies were right up on top. Just about every other cast got a fish. I was using a stinger bait that I ordered from Microspoons....and guess what color it was.

[Dave]

Tom, you always seem to amaze me with your color coordination. Outstanding job! 

[ctom]

Dave....as far as I am concerned, this is THE hottest color combination in all of southern Minnesota, followed very closely by blue/chartreuse.....which will be seen here later today maybe.

I buy some vertical jigging spoons for ice fishing, some made by Lindy Tackle and some made by Custom Jigs and Spins. The Lindy product is called the Jigging Frostee Spoon, the other called a Jigging Demon. I buy them in 1/16ounce weights, the smallest made by either company. The jigs I buy are all gold plate. I swap out the hooks for one size larger first thing. The next thing I do is coat one entire side with a transparent purple laquer, two coats, dried between each. The purple/ chartreuse is as close as I can get to gold plated and purple. Thimk I'm not serious about this color combination?

For what it is worth, I tend to start each day, rain,shine, or otherwise, using the purple/chartreuse on one of my three purple hued heads. I generally fish this until mid-morning. After that, the angle of the sun, if its there, changes how the combination works in the water and I then go to the blue/chartresue combination until the afternoon shadows get long again. Then its right back to the purple/chartreuse.

All of the waters in this region can muddy quickly, but the one steadfast characteristic about these waters is the heavy load of tannic acid at times. Spring and fall are peaks for this. The tannic acid gives the water plenty of brown without getting excessively cloudy. For some reason these two color conbinations just click with the water.

I am not a huge bass guy, but I do have a couple rigs set up for laying an assualt on buckets when the crappies go into the spawn. I don't need crappies so bad as to have to catch them when they are vulnerable so I target the bass until they get into their thing a while later, then I pick on post spawn crappies. My go to bait for bass on the top has been a Culprit Pro Frog in Junebug/chartreuse paddles. About all I need do is drop that frog in a hole in the slop cover and it get demolished right now. I retired from Culprit's satff in December so I wouldn't have a conflict of interest in doing this plastics thing myself, but now will likely have to get a frog mold from Jason to make some of these babys up when the hooks on the closet wall show empty.