White lures

[ronje]

Am looking for comment about the effectiveness (or otherwise) of white lures from fishermen who have used them.

[ronje]

Cat got our tongues?

Never tried a white lure?

[Sullo]

Cat got our tongues?

Never tried a white lure?

I have heaps of white plastics , 9 times out of 10 that's what I put on. Not a lot of straight white hard bodies to choose from but been using a white Yo_Zuri fingerling, getting plenty of fish the last couple of trips

[ronje]

Thanks, Sullo.

Is that a fluro lure?

I've found that white lures have accounted for more barra than any other colour over the years (for me). White plastics are what I used on the Roper R. A lot of fishermen have also told me that.

Just about ALL fishermen claim that gold bombers are the most successful.

Trouble was that nobody could make a supportable technical suggestion why those two colours worked as well as they did.

Were these claims just more fishing myth or was there some scientific/technical basis to support them?

That was my starting point 12 years ago. Confirm the myths or debunk them (not just about white and gold lures).

Most of the fishing myths (there are plenty of them) could be easily debunked on technical grounds.

The more I looked into the technical/scientific approach to fishing, the clearer things became.

I reckon that I've worked out the technical reasons why white and/or gold lures work so well. Next post

[ronje]

White Lures

Is there anything special about white lures?

Well, because white isnt a natural colour on earth, we have to manufacture white using paint or light mixers. Our manufactured white paint has the 7 original colours in the mix.

What were those basic colours again? Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet (from the rainbow).

From school: Richard Of York Got Boozed In Vienna.

And remember our 3 water type colour penetration results?

Screenshot (336).png

Lets go lure fishing.

We arrive at our fishing spot and look at the water. If we decide that its type 1 water, we know that the best penetration colour is white circle 1. Ditto with white circles 2 and 3 for headland, impoundment or estuary water.

So what is our choice of the lure colour that will best penetrate that type of water?

The type 1 white circle is mainly blue with a fair bit of green and only a smidgin of red. Like so:

Screenshot (359).png

And the best lure colour is….buggered if I know what it’s called but let’s rummage thru our lure box to see if we’ve got anything remotely like it.

What about type 2 water?

Well, its mainly a mixture of green and yellow (white circle 2) and again, a little more red.

What have we got this time?

Screenshot (360).png

We recognise that colour, don’t we? Its chartreuse.

Back to the lure box ‘cos we remember that we bought one of those last month.

What about type 3 water?

Best penetration colours are red, orange with a dash of yellow but no blue.

Screenshot (363).png

Haven’t we seen that somewhere before? Back into the lure box we go. The lid on this lure box (which is full of different coloured lures for us to select from) gets a hammering doesn’t it.

Take note that the lure colour we select is based on the different types of water and the visibility variations are endless.

THAT’S why the coloured “ups and downs” on the 3 different water types exist. To cater for the water visibility variations. Move the visibility marker and the peak penetration colour changes.

Bit complicated don’t you think? Good thing that we carry the laptop around when fishing isn’t it?

But what about the US Dept of Navy in 1968? Their lives depended on getting it right. They didn’t have a laptop. Nor did John Kirk or Maayke Stomp or NOAA in the years following.

If you look at the RGB colour mixer method, you need to have a starting point for the mixer sliders. Basically, you need to be “half a scientist” to work out what colour to rummage through the lures for.

Geez, we only want to go fishing!

So..is there an easier and better way to arrive at a lure colour than using the laptop/RGB Mixer methods?

Yes, there is and it takes the mystery, confusion and technical knowledge base needed out of the equation.

The above merely tells you partially what that technical knowledge base actually consists of so u can understand things a bit better (if u want to).

If u don't then just use a white lure and next time I'll tell you why "the water does the work" automatically [/b]

[Edo]

love my white curly tail grubs for barra near where i live, light green goes alright too.
Edo

[ronje]

Thanks Edo.

Is the light green colour chartreuse by any chance?

You still in Mackay area anywhere near one of the dams?

[ronje]

Lure colour selection

What follows may seem a bit heavy for fishermen to grasp/understand but that’s not the intention.

It’s merely the process involved in describing how a particular outcome is achieved (the use of white lures).

Towards the end of the article there’ll be a reference to the desired outcome and it’s that outcome that’s of interest to fishermen.
…………………………………………………..

Currently how do we fishermen work out what lure colour we are going to try out first?

We look at the water type (type 1, 2 or 3) and (from our knowledge of those 3 diagrams), we pick one that we think will work based on those coloured diagrams and off we go.

We can use our fishing laptop and our knowledge of what happens to colours in different types of water to assist. Not to mention our knowledge base of being “half a scientist” as our starting point.

All we need to ensure is that there’s enough room on the boat for the laptop considering all the other fishing paraphernalia like sidescreen sonar, live imaging sonar, GPS, our fish decoys, esky AND fishing tackle (especially lures). Heaps of lures.

With a bit of luck, there might even be room for us. At least there’ll be a storage space savings on lifejacket requirements is there’s no room for people.

Geez, successful fishing is getting mighty complicated not to mention expensive.

How can we simplify it in respect of these lures?

We know many things already about how lures interact with fish.

What we’ve been unsure of is how lure colour interacts with barramundi vision despite all of the advice given to us by the gurus, experts, lure makers and the “years of experience” brigade.

We’d be surprised about how often 30 years or experience translates to 1 year of experience 30 times over in the fishing world.

One thing that we should have learned by now is what a huge impact water has on the passage of light through it. That can be water in liquid form OR water in vapour form.

Our experiences with rainbows has allowed us to actually see the effect of water droplets in the sky that split up the light into its 7 fundamental component forms.

Remember Richard Of York Got Boozed In Vienna? (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet).

Why does light appear in that sequence of colours? Because of the different physical properties of coloured light (their wavelengths/colour).

Red has the longest wavelength to Violet which has the shortest wavelength therefore each colour is affected differently by the liquid water. The TYPE of water (1,2 or 3) affects different wavelengths in different ways.

Hence those diagrams trying to show how.

What if we took lure colour choice out of our hands by picking one mixture of colours and simply let the filtering effect of the liquid water do its thing automatically?

Automatically filter out the different wavelengths/colours until the last wavelength/colour remaining down at the limit of visibility is the one that best penetrates THAT particular type of water.

Meaning that colour has the longest and best exposure to barra vision. Easy peasy?

One problem is that we don’t know what the magic colour mixture is. Do we?

We sure do.

Its white because it's the only colour (even if it is manufactured) with a mixture of 7 fundamental colours.

Each of the 7 fundamental colours is of a single wavelength/colour in it's own right and once its filtered out, there’s no colour left.

What remains then? No light which means BLACKNESS descends on our lure at that “filtered” limit of visibility.

However, at the limit of visibility, THAT remaining wavelength/colour is the one that best penetrates that particular type of water (1,2 or 3).

Just remember that white (not being a natural single colour) is a mixture of colours that WE have to “manufacture” due to the filtering effect of contaminants in our atmosphere.

And what “contaminant” does the most filtering to turn our sun (a white star) emitting white light into earth’s sunlight colour?

Water in the form of vapour.

Rainbows come about by the existence of water droplets. On the other hand, water vapour has a more drastic effect.

To put it simply, we put a lure with 7 different wavelengths/colour components into the water and the “automatic filtering” process reduces the wavelengths/colours one by one down to blackness at the limit of visibility.

…………………………………..

Outcome.

Why white lures work so well.

Now, another misunderstood subject of fishing is visibility. Remember the term above “limit of visibility”?

How many “crystal clear” water references have we all come across?

Many, many times and 99% of it is misunderstanding.

We’ll work out visibility easily next time without the need for laptops or scientists.

I'll bet it's not what a lot of fishermen think it is.

[Edo]

Hey Ronje, yeah mate still in mackay, more of a pale green as opposed to a true chartrues colour.
I am about 35 minutes away from kinchant but i fish the gooseponds which are approx 800m from my house. havent caught anything bigger than an 80 model in there but still good fun.
Edo

[Matt Flynn]

Usually did well with the very light pink colour, almost white, in soft plastics.

[ronje]

When the river ran around the floodplain via the lagoons here, the lure to use in that murkier water was light pink.

Ken Richardson of Richo's lures always made his lures light pink and white and they worked.

"Everybody" (including me) swore by Ken's lures but nobody could say why. Even Ken.

It was only after the lagoons settled (along with the water sediment) and I becamea regular lagoon fisho, that I worked out that lures needed to be white but I still didn't know why either. As the sediment load in the lagoon water settled, pink made no difference. Just white.

Took about 4 years of research on what water did to light colours to find out why.

At least those lagoons acted as a good experimental site where conditions were stable to allow meaningful comparisons over months.

All of the characteristics had been researched scientifically for food production reasons (or military purposes) but nobody applied that research to fishing.

The data sat on food production research shelves and military classification shelves gathering dust for many years until I started looking for (and finding) results.

[hobbsy]

I remember reading something about an albeino barra being rare to catch as it being so "white' enhanced its odds of being eaten by predators.

So I guess white should be a succcessful colour.

[ronje]

Perhaps now we know why, Hobbsy.

Be good if u recall where you heard that story. I have'nt heard it.

[ronje]

Bit hard to follow the white light/orange sun AND that white isn't a natural colour on earth story?

Maybe this diagram will help a bit.

Screenshot (409).png

Contaminants in the atmosphere (mainly water vapour) filter the short wavelength colours (blue and some green).

The "filtering" process actually involves scattering of the short wavelength colours (blue and some green) into the atmosphere in all directions where it's again scattered by more contaminants with some in the direction of earth's surface where it replaces the "blackness of space".

THAT gives us the colour of the sky during day..........BLUE. . Its not royal blue as it mixes with some of the green that's also been scattered to give us SKY BLUE.

At night (no sun) the sky goes back to black except for reflections of the sun's light from other bodies in space.....stars on a black background.

THAT orange yellow colour is our starting point of what then goes into the water to be reflected from our lure.

Make a bit more sense?

[ronje]

Now we know that the colour of the light that enters the water is a yellow/orange/gold colour (sunlight).

So lets throw our white lure into some fairly clear inshore/headland/impoundment water. Type 2 water.

What happens now.

We know that our white lure will reflect any colour that reaches it. That's because white is a mixture of ALL 7 colours.

It's a pity that the white light from the sun (a mixture of ALL 7 colours) doesn't reach down to the lure. It would reflect white colour.

However, the atmospheric contaminants have turned the sunlight into yellow/orange/gold colour.

So what colour will be reflected from our white lure to any barramundi in the vicinity?

White lure.png

That's right. The yellow/orange/gold sunlight. Simple laws of physics. Not even rocket science.

Hey, wait a minute. Has our white lure "changed colour"?

It sure has effectively changed the colour of our white lure as far as any nearby lurking barramundi can see.

What's more it's done it AUTOMATICALLY for us.

How convenient and we don't have to do anything except use a white lure.[/b]

Starting to catch on about white lures yet?

What if we tossed that same white lure into some murky estuary water

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