Learned something about color and soft plastics

I took my sister-in-law out on a local lake hoping to put us on fish - any species. Last Saturday I took a friend out and I only caught a few bass and one crappie. Today I decided to watch my sidefinder sonar and concentrate on small shallow schools using downsized lures and jigheads. It worked!

We started out with 1 3/4" minnow type soft plastics rigged on 1/24 oz jigs. Yellow perch started hitting in 4-5'. White perch joined the fun a little later and then I found some 11" crappie in 5-6'. Once we found that fish were hitting in 50 degree water, I experimented with a 2 3/4" black body/chartreuse tail minnow and cast around the boat in 5' because we were surrounded by panfish. The color worked great - the first time used for this lure design. Then I switched to all black. The hits weren't as often as the combo color and resulted in more pecks that strikes. Went back to the combo color and got far more aggressive strikes and hookups.

What a perfect fall day to fish: a breeze, 60 degree air temp, partly cloudy sky.

That sounds like a load of fun. The wife and i walked to a point, fished from the bank and caught five channel cats, a couple of white bass and a couple of bream. She loves to out fish me. LOL

Playing the color game works good when they're finicky. Glad it worked for you. Now you know why we all carry 47 different combinations.

Actually I have only three colors that I have total confidence in: green pumpkin with chartreuse and black flakes, pearl or white and brown pumpkin with gold and black flakes. All colors are somewhat translucent to show off the flakes and solid white for it's brightness.

All I really wanted the answers to was, will crappies hit an all black soft plastic minnow or will they hit a black body with a chartreuse and gold flake tail better? I learned that the combo was hit more aggressively and more often but I'm not sure why (though it may be on par with by my confidence colors due to lure action).