to glow or not to glow...

[CrappieJohn]

This past spring I fiddled with whether I could find a benefit to using glow heads for crappies pre-spawn to spawn. While this was in no way a scientific test to determine the preferences of the crappies where I fish, it did shed some light on when these glow heads really do shine (no pun intended).

Immediately at and after ice out the fish were scattered throughout the water column and head color seemed more the issue than whether they shined or not. Water color and clarity stayed fairly consistant for a number of days before the turn-over started up and clouded it, but until that occurred the chartreuse head was by far and away the best producer for me regardless of what plastic I was using. When the water took color and lost it's nice clarity the black and purple heads began to reign. These observations were made during stable weather. Cold fronts brought on a different pattern altogether though.

With the lop-sided weather patterns we had for spring, the revolving door cold fronts tended to put the fish in a real funk much of the time. Going deep and being reluctant to hit was commonplace for the crappies. Normally I would have simply gone to the dark head under these circumstances, but it seemed this year to be unusually tough to get them to cooperate, even when down-sizing. So I tried this "glow" stuff and it worked on far more occasions than not. The interesting thing was that it mattered little what the plastic color was. Apparently trying to balance the colors wasn't an important part of the equation.

So what color did the best? Plain old glow. I tried blue glow, red glow, green glow,chartreuse glow and purple glow along side the common eerie colored plain glow and it was the winner hands down. Under the ice in the same lake, in the same general area and fishing basically the same color of water showed the red glow and the purple glow to be charmers. Not so on the open water. It may have something to do with not having that shaded cap of ice limiting the natural light at the depths where I was getting the fish.

What I found was that the glow will often times out fish a fluorescent color, or even a solid dark color, if the fish have been forced deep due to the weather or if the water has dirtied from hard rains or excessive run-off. The key for me was deeper water. Shallower fish would not touch a glow jig that had much of any charge to it.

These shallow fish (4 feet or less) were still color specific regardless of water color or clarity which leads me to think that color is very importatant when fishing shallow. But the deeper one went with the jig, especially in the heavier water, the glow seemed to be that much more visible to the fish and that visiblity was of issue whether you'd get the hits or not. And as mentioned, the plastic color was a moot issue. What mattered was their being able to pick up on that little dot of light.

When fishing heavily stained water or when the fish are deep due to cold fronts and seem to have small jaws, try a glow head. Doing so changed my fishing on quite a few days this spring.

[Scenic]

The 1/32 and the 1/16th oz collar less jigs are both available on this site at Tackle City. Or drop me an email if that is not what you are looking for.