Nearly every angler has observed how some days fish will readily attack a lure painted a certain color but will snub a similar lure of a different color. If we ask the simple question, “Why?” we’ll get a not-so-simple answer. There are at least four reasons fish will bite a lure of a certain color or colors on a particular day—and to complicate things, sometimes these reasons overlap.
The sun may be sunglasses bright on the lake, but it’s still early dawn under the waves.
Take a look in the tackle box of most Great Lakes fishermen and you will see a rainbow of colors. Actually, you’ll see more than a rainbow of colors because there will be colors present never seen in the prismatic display of a rainbow. Obviously, fish can see color quite well and anglers soon learn the color or colors painted on a lure makes a difference in how fish react to them. They may react in many ways but the one that counts is when the lure color helps to get the fish to bite the lure.
Nearly every angler has observed how some days fish will readily attack a lure painted a certain color but will snub a similar lure of a different color. If we ask the simple question, “Why?” we’ll get a not-so-simple answer. There are at least four reasons fish will bite a lure of a certain color or colors on a particular day—and to complicate things, sometimes these reasons overlap.
SUNLIGHT PENETRATION
Sure, fish can see colors but what and how they see depends on light penetrating into the water and how much light is present. For sure, a lure of any color isn’t visible in the absence of light.
For humans, night ends about 45 minutes before sunrise on a clear morn-ing. That’s the “dawn’s early light” referred to in the Star Spangled Banner. To a fish, dawn comes significantly later. For them, the dawn’s early light doesn’t start much before actual sunrise. Prior to that, the depths are dark as a cave. Even on perfectly sunny days, the depths only gradually get light enough to see colors vividly, even after dawn.
That’s not how you or I see and it’s hard to imagine underwater would be much different. But it is. Most sunny days, I’ll be putting on my sunglasses only minutes after the sun pops above the distant horizon. If fish wore sunglasses, they wouldn’t need them for a couple of hours.
In low light or no light situations, going with fluorescent and/or glow-in-the-dark lures will put more fish on the line.
Sure, as the sky brightens overhead, some of that light penetrates down into the depths of the lake, but that’s diffused light, not direct sunbeams. Every angler understands how the sun’s glare off the surface of the water can almost double the amount of light shining into their eyes. That bright glare bouncing off the water is sunbeams that are not penetrating into the depths.
A few minutes after dawn almost all the sunrays hitting the water’s surface reflect back into the atmosphere. An hour after dawn, some of the sunlight is penetrating into the depths, but most of the light is still reflecting. Not until the sun is high in the sky does the maximum amount of light penetrate into the depths. There are multiple reasons why fishing for many species of fish often experiences a midday slump, the biggest reason for most is light penetration into the lake and how that makes the lures and bait fishermen are using appear to the fish.
BITE THE BRIGHT
In most of the Great Lakes, through much of the fishing season water clarity (or the lack of it) isn’t of much concern. Still, there are occasions when Great Lakes fish are congregated in somewhat turbid conditions. Early season brown trout anglers often fish stream and river outflows where early season stream water is often muddy or stained from rain or run off from melt-ing snow flowing across wet soils. The fish are there mostly because the water is warmer there than in the open lake and they feel more comfortable, but their vi-sion is impaired. Some of the earliest action of the season comes in southern Lake Michigan from south Chicago, through Indiana and on up into Michigan. Clean, clear water is rare in these areas early on. Spring storms are often nor’easters pushing ocean-like waves diagonally down the lake to crash ashore along the Wisconsin shore often enough and long enough to set up a nearshore current, carrying gray silt from Wisconsin’s clay-soil shorelines, southward, past Chicago, sweeping around through Indiana and eventually curling out into the lake somewhere north of St. Joseph, Michigan. Most of the southern Lake Michigan’s early action occurs in water where water clarity more than two or three feet is considered good. Just any ol’ color of lure won’t work. Much of the water in western Lake Erie is less than 30 feet deep, no doubt the aftermath of major rivers like the Detroit, Maumee and Sandusky—along with several other smaller streams—depositing thousands of tons of silt and sand on the lakebed for thousands of years. Strong storms from the north, or more so those with an eastern component to the gales, can stir up the silt on the lake’s bed to the point Lake Erie’s water becomes as brown as the water you see in big rivers at flood stage. I’m sure storms and runoff clouds the waters elsewhere in the Great Lakes as well at times.
Hundreds of thousands of cohos and steelhead have fallen for hot-red ThinFins in dirty water or in the open lake. They just like that color.
When cloudy, muddy water makes it hard for fish to see, using brightly colored lures makes sense and nothing looks brighter in the water or out than fluorescent colors like chartreuse, lime green, orange or hot-red on their lures. These bright colored lures are easy to see and are likely to elicit more strikes simply because the fish can spot them in the off-colored water.
There’s an exception to this in highly turbid water. Fluorescent pigments “work” when photons of energy from the sun strikes the fluorescent paint on a lure and the atoms in the paint become “excited” and produce various colors of light. As long as there is light “energy” present, a fluorescent lure will glow and actually, in low light, the glowing lure actually looks brighter. However, in turbid waters, sunlight may not penetrate all that deep. Determining exactly how deep sunlight will penetrate requires special gauges and complex mathematical formulas, but in the “chalky” water in southern Lake Michigan, sunlight may not go deeper than 20 feet. In the café au lait looking water after a Lake Erie storm, the light may not go deeper than 10 feet.
What’s important to know is that when the last bit of light is absorbed by the water and the suspended solids in the water, a fluorescent painted lure ceases fluorescing. Lures of any color, fluorescent or not, become invisible to fish. Chrome or reflective finish lures become invisible. Black lures become invisible. If fish had eyelids, it would be like they are swimming around with their eyes shut.
That’s the reason fish that often feed in low or no light situations have learned to locate food using both sound and scent. Keep that in mind when fishing in low light times or limited light situations. Lures with rattles or lures pasted with a bit of Gulp Gel or other scent could produce an extra bite or two.
Sunrise for humans is nearly midnight dark for fish.
However, a better approach when fishing in dark water is going with glow-in-the dark (G-I-D) lures. Whether the G-I-D pigment is painted on or molded into the plastic makes no difference. It works just the same. Think of a G-I-D lure as a rechargeable battery. You charge it up by exposing it to light. Any light will do, the brighter the better. Sunlight is great since it has UV light in it or just douse the light with a UV flashlight. UV rays produce a deeper, faster charge.
Once the lure is charged, it slowly dis-charges by producing light. In turbid water the glow may not be seen by fish from a great distance, but at least when the fish gets close, it can see the lure and strike it. One might think, “Don’t the fish think it’s weird seeing a G-I-D lure in low or total darkness?”
I’m sure it is, but no less weird than a fish biting a bright fluorescent chartreuse or fire-tiger colored lure on a sunny day. Perhaps there are smart, old fish that never bite weirdly bright lures. Fortunately, there are many more fish in the lakes willing to bite a lure which is easy to see.
MATCHING THE HATCH
That’s what fly fishermen call it when they tie on artificial insects designed to mimic the predominant kind of bug the trout or other fish are eating naturally. In the Great Lakes the same premise sometimes works but it’s less poetic since it’s really match-ing the prevailing forage instead of what is hatching. Actually, matching the hatch for salmon, trout and walleyes is not so much picking spoons, plugs or flies that are silver or chrome to match the smelt or alewives the fish are eating, so much as matching the size of the forage. Sure, I’ve caught plenty of salmon on “silver bullets”—chrome plated J-Plugs and walleyes on predominantly chrome Bandits or Flicker Minnows; but often, on the days those are the hot ticket, it’s a bright, sunny day, the water is relatively clear and the flash off of those lures makes them highly visible.
A UV flashlight will charge G-I-D lures as fast as any light source except direct sunlight.
In my experience, matching the hatch for Great Lakes predators is apt to be more “matching the size.” On the years when there are a lot of one- and two-year-old alewives, small spoons and trolling flies, four-inches or smaller may be the lures that get the most bites for salmon and trout. When most of the alewives are relative giants, I load up my lines with magnum spoons and upsized other lures.
In eastern Lake Erie where rainbow shiners are an important forage fish, four-inch stickbaits (give or take a few millimeters) mimic the size and shape of the shiners. Once an angler gets the size right it’s time to find the color that is triggering strikes to be on the way to a full cooler.
OPPOSITE ATTRACTION
Sometimes, nearly the opposite game needs to be played. Don’t match the hatch. When fishing around massive schools of baitfish, a winning ploy is to use a lure which looks different enough to attract attention away from the thousands of real minnows in the school. A silvery, alewife-imitating spoon might go untouched but replacing it with a purple, green or a hi-vis color can garner plenty of strikes because the salmon easily notice the different looking minnow and home in on it rather than just randomly picking their next meal out of the crowd.
Another “opposites attract” strategy is to use a lure which is larger than the pre-vailing forage. An old maxim is “big-fish, big lure” has some merit, but it’s not just big fish that can be caught on super-sized lures. How many times have you pulled a big spoon or lure and found a perch or a baby salmon hooked to it? “The lure is as big as the fish!”
That usually doesn’t happen on bright, mostly calm days and in crystal clear water. In those conditions the fish are getting a good look at the lure and it looks like a lure and they can judge its size. In stained water or in the alternating sunlight and shadow that beams into the depths on choppy days the fish are only glimpsing the lure in the strobe-like light conditions. They are striking at the flash of light or momentary sight of the lure color. Go big or go home—empty handed.
A gaudy spoon fished near schools of silvery alewives attracted the attention of this king salmon.
TASTY COLORS
Some colors seem to excite fish and goad them into biting. I often look at a steelhead or a coho salmon with a bright, mostly fluorescent red spoon or crankbait stuck in their lips and wonder, “What were you thinking?”
If this happened in the early spring when the fish are stacked in the dirty water outflow from a tributary stream, I could chalk it up just to the bright color making the lure easy to see. But a steely or coho snapping at a hot-red lure happens just as often in the crystal-clear waters far from shore in mid-summer. The only explanation is a hot-red lure just looks tasty to these species of fish. Why? I don’t know. There’s certainly nothing swimming around in the Great Lakes which are fluorescent red, so it’s not a preference borne of experience, but show a steely a bright red spoon or hot red plug and it’s yours—most of the time.
Cohos are similarly attracted to the bright fluorescent red colors, but kings and lake trout often prefer a different hues. Lime green is one of the better colors for kings and lakers day-in, day-out, but the largest kings I’ve ever boated have come on silver/blue lures.
When targeting brown trout, I always have some predominantly chartreuse colored spoons or plugs in the water, partially because of visibility—I target brown trout most often nearshore in the early spring—but I do think a chartreuse colored minnow just looks tasty to the browns. If it suits them, it certainly makes my day more interesting. I’m not sure walleyes have a favorite color or one they shy away from, for that matter. I’ve caught walleyes jigging with black or unpainted jigs and with bright, fluorescent orange or chartreuse heads. Gold is a favorite color for many. Still, each one I jig up has me asking, is it the jig head or the minnow or worm on the hook that duped them?
When I’m trolling for walleyes it’s different. Then, I think it’s a matter of visibility. I learned a simple pattern years ago when modern walleye fishing in Lake Erie was just being discovered and it still put’s limits in my cooler. In low light, as in early mornings or overcast days, I get more bites on fluorescent painted lures. Firetiger is always a good choice. As the day brightens and the sunlight starts penetrating into the depths, switching to shiny metallic hues will keep the morning bite going. I know it’s sacrilegious to many, but I’ve often caught walleye on a firetiger painted lure I didn’t remember to switch out an hour or so after sunrise, unhook the fish and then change out the lure. That firetiger Flicker Minnow was in my starting line-up at dawn, but it gets benched in the bright sun.
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