electronic lures

[bronzepike]

hey larry how do you feel about electronic lures such as LEDs placed inside of them and all that. Personally i think they are not "fair game" for the fish but what is your opinion?

[dahlberg]

not sure what "fair" is, but also not sure if the led light makes that big a difference! The fish still must choose to bite!
best
L

[aka anglinarcher]

Hope you guys don't mind if I chime in on this. First, Larry, is soooooo right, the fish must first chose to bite, so what is fair? More important to me is does it work at all.

For many years you could paint your lure with glow in the dark paint. Some paint would shine for a few minutes, some more, some faint, some bright, but the point is that LED, Krypton, or glow in the dark, the technology has been around in some form for a very long time. If it was so great, you would think that every lure out there would be lighted or glow - they are not.

Next, in some cases it is clearly a benefit. For example, we have a run of Steelhead in the Columbia/Snake Rivers that are fished at night with lighted lures. I find that glow in the dark lures work just as well as the incandescent or LED lures, but it is clear that the lighted lures do make a huge difference for the Steelhead. I know that fishing with lighted lures is also a huge benefit at night for squid. I have had some limited, and I do mean limited, success with lighted lures, mostly very dim lighted lures and jigs, for trout.

On the flip side, I have NEVER caught a single BASS, crappie, Bluegill, or Walleye on a lighted lure at night or in very low light. Now some of the jigs were glow in the dark, but I seemed to do better at night with the non-glowing lures.

So, with that experience in mind, it almost seem to be a disadvantage to use lighted lures, LED or otherwise for some species and in some cases.

If I was to make personal guidelines for when to use them, I would use them in dark water, or at night, and use only the faintest of lighted lures. It has appeared to me that too much light is a bad thing. On the other hand, that is my experience, I am by no means an expert on the use of light on lures.

[dahlberg]

Several years ago a leading Minnesota walleye expert and fisheries biologist named dick Sternberg did a test with glow in the dark lures and walleyes.
He found that a tiny, tiny bit of phosphorescence helped, but more than that was a definite turn- off.

Conversely, the guys who win the Eelpout contest in Walker every year use high vis, total glow in the dark jigs!

Other than salmonids in the dark and swordfish, the best success I've had, and where the difference was observable, was adding a single strand of glow in the dark flashabou to my jig while ice fishing (for perch especially). I add the strand by inserting it in the open loop of my terminal knot before I tighten it.
You can actually watch the fish react to it on your depthfinder as they sometimes move up ten feet or more to check it out as it's falling slowly towards the bottom.
I think they see it from farther away and respond out of curiosity. Upon encountering it, they sense the grub, waxie, minnow or what ever you're using and that's when the decision to eat or not is made.
best
L