So many decisions about what lures you need in your fishing box and which ones to tie onto the end of your line are based on bad information! One of the reasons that a handful of fishermen are exceptionally talented at catching fish on lures is that they take the time to actually think about lure selection, rather than just tie on the first lure that comes to hand. Do these guys take advice from fishing columns in the local paper? No! They think for themselves, identify a lure that will work and make an intelligent choice.
Fishing Lures: Avoid Mistakes When Choosing Lures To Buy Or Use
By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Greg_Vinall]Greg Vinall
It is obvious to anyone who has done any amount of lure fishing you’re never going to be incredibly successful if you are not able to choose the right lure for the right occasion. What is much less obvious is how to go about choosing just one lure to tie on your line from the millions of colors, shapes, sizes and models of lures that will be put before you in the tackle store. For the lure maker, this can be even more of a challenge, since your choice are limited only by your imagination, although it does mean that you can make a lure that is custom designed for your specific needs.
The decision-making doesn’t stop once you’ve made your purchase, either! When you finally get out on the water with a boxful of beautiful wooden lures, how do you decide which one to tie on first? The thing that I find really interesting is that the vast majority of lure fishing enthusiasts seem to forget the key considerations when it comes to lure choice. Instead, they concentrate on much less important factors that they believe to be the difference between a fishless day and one to remember. The decision about what lure to choose seems to be based on:
* What the salesman who will profit from their purchase is telling them
* What some stranger on the fishing channel or writer for a fishing magazine says is the hottest lure at the time (one manufactured by his sponsor, for instance?)
* What lure he caught fish on last week. Or last month. Or maybe even last season (in a lake on the other side of the country)
* And lastly, a greatly over exaggerated idea of how important lure color is to fish. Generally this idea is also fed by fishing buddies, salesmen and fishing personalities.
A few other factors get weighed into the decision making process, such as cost (especially if there is the possibility of losing a few lures), casting ability, size of fish etc
My point is that just following the crowds is a lazy approach to selecting lures, and like anything that’s lazy it will be reflected in the number and quality of fish you catch. Great lure fishermen tend to put all the hype aside and analyse what is happening in the fishes domain. What baitfish are the fish hunting, and for what reason? What lure looks most similar to the bait that they may be eating right now? In my view, the absolute first point that you ought to consider when choosing a wooden lure for a specific use is the size and shape of the lure body.
Why are lure body size and shape so important?
When you think about it, it’s obvious! Fish frequently become obsessed with a certain food item, especially when that item is available in large quantities. At those times they often gorge themselves on one food item to the exclusion of everything else that swims past. When they are hitting tightly packed bait balls, they often become very selective and only eat baitfish of a particular size or shape.
Examples of this are the sharks that you often see feeding on tiny baitfish, even though there are bigger fish around (also feeding on the baitfish) that would be easier to catch and more filling. Or trout that are feeding on mayflies and reject any beetle, damsel fly or earthworm that comes within range in favour of mayflies.
Are you hearing me say that lure size and shape are of greater importance when you are selecting a lure than color? I’ll say it again! In my experience, the size and shape of a lure plays a far bigger role in determining how many fish you will catch than the color. For starters, we all know that almost all fish tend to hit a lure from beneath. But from that angle it is almost impossible to make out color. If your lure has a similar silhouette to the bait it has a far greater probability of being taken, irrespective of color. That doesn’t mean that color isn’t important – it’s just not as important as most lure enthusiasts like to believe.
Now, what about those days when the bait aren’t balled up and the fish aren’t feeding so aggressively? There is no easy solution for those days. You need a little local knowledge about the bait species likely to be present, then all you can do is keep changing lures until you find one that works on the day.
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Dr Greg Vinall is a professional aquatic scientist and an avid maker of wooden fishing lures for three decades.
Greg teaches other fishermen and lure makers the art of making custom wooden fishing lures through his [http://makewoodenlures.com]website and ebooks.
If you enjoyed the information provided in this article you can join Greg’s [http://makewoodenlures.com]free email service to receive similar articles every week, or surf his website and blog for a ton of free lure making information.
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Article Source: [http://EzineArticles.com/?Fishing-Lures:-Avoid-Mistakes-When-Choosing-Lures-To-Buy-Or-Use&id=6132460] Fishing Lures: Avoid Mistakes When Choosing Lures To Buy Or Use
