I have pretty decent luck using the pro blue color pattern for walleye/sauger, but I've also done well on crappies with the color. The thing is I am a nut about having transparent, or very nearly so, baits for my panfishing. So I doctored up an old recipe a little to thin it out. After getting the back color where I liked it and had the transparency I wanted I added some gunmetal glitter and blue hi lite to it. The belly color, where used, is a simple thin pearl with gun metal and navy blue .015 flake added, not a lot of either.
http://i941.photobucket.com/albums/a...e6d43aaf52.jpg
I fished an area of the Mississippi River yesterday that holds walleye, sauger, crappie, bluegill, perch, you name it. So Thursday afternoon was spent cooking up some goodies to round out my usual color arsenal, which was sorely lacking in the pro blue color department, and it was a good thing I did. It turned out to be the better of the colors we used. The purple/chartreuse and bluegill/chartreuse got fish, but the pro Blue got more variety. The Hellgrammite mold put out about 8 color patterns to try and for sunfish and crappie it took the cake by fishing it on a plain, no-lead, jig hook under a small float allowing the hook's weight to slowly drop the bug down along bridge pilings. It proved to be a deadly presentation. On a lead head near bottom it got some dandy perch to play. Walleyes and sauger were hard to find yesterday, but we think its just too early in the year for them yet.
The thinned out pro blue is really a productive bait for me, especially in that paddletail where only the back color is used. I'll change from the gun metal glitter is some shots to the bluegill glitter combination I blend up and both versions have just simply been hot this year, but The paddletail box showed one [1] solitary bait in the pro blue when I double checked on Weds evening so making a few more was needed on Thursday so I made up a pile of stuff in that color pattern.
