What to aim for when making lures - something to consider
The title of the post should have been, What to consider when choosing lures for those that don't make their own, but the concept is the same.
As I was pouring some lures in my favorite design, it came to me why they work so well on most freshwater fish species: vulnerability / irritability.
I don't care if the material is fin, fur, feather or plastic. The most important factor is that fish see the moving object as vulnerable and less due to hunger, anger or any other human stimuli anglers attribute to a strike.
Unless fish have a means to communicate the reasons they attack something, we can only surmise the why. Their brains are conduits between their senses and muscles and when the eye and other sense organs indicate key factors about an object, those factors decide whether an object is ignored or attacked. Unless I see a feeding frenzy evidenced by surface activity, I always assume fish are suspending either in a school or solo. If so, fish are watchful in a fight or flight mode, ready to encounter whatever enters its strike zone - the area within which something stimulates a reaction.
Many of the lures anglers use for panfish are geared towards smaller sizes. Those for large species are usually, but not always, larger in order to provoke via a visual cue. In fact, most soft plastics used for crappie and other panfish, run less than 3" in length and less than 1/2" top to bottom.
The other factor that contributes to an appearance of vulnerability is lure action. Tail action probably accounts for more catches than even color and the more finesse the action, the greater the stimulus. Fir, feather and curl tail and flat tail plastics are favored my most anglers for a reason: they move at the slowest speed possible and most times appear as ripples or flutter. Along with hair or plastic is the spinner blade - either in-line or wired over a lure. Too little or too much flash is ignored; the right size of a blade twinkles just enough to be noticed, tracked and struck. It's not the thought of what the spinning blade represents, but that it just suddenly appeared and disturbed a fish's inactivity.
In human terms, fish are bullies and/or intolerant of any object that it deems doesn't belong. On the other hand, fish, like humans, are sensitive to and become irritable of objects that irritate. To do so requires the stimulus to stay put for just the right amount of time to tickle a fish's lateral line and be annoying : lure speed matters.
For example, recently I went back to using a stick float attached to a finesse soft plastic rigged on a jig to get strikes in an area I just caught fish. The line under the float was long enough to be at eye level as indicated by how low I let the cast lure go down when catching crappie. I dragged the float 2-3" and stopped, letting the surface ripples produce a lure action fish couldn't ignore, catching more in the school that had stopped hitting the cast lure.
A low lure speed indicates vulnerability and fish assume the object can't move any faster thereby putting the unknown object into the category of an easy target. Fish are after all, missiles that launch themselves toward targeted objects and with superb accuracy. Once targeted, the object may speed up, but no matter - fish easily overcome a lure's speed and open their mouths at just the right moment - even when raising the lure just out of the water!
The sequence is therefore: stimulate/ irritate/ provoke through the use of making an object appear vulnerable. Tail action, lure speed (even at near stop), small lure size/dimensions and other subtle visual factors (tiny flashes or sparkles), all contribute to a lure's success. Of course many anglers choose to believe a lure represents a prey animal recognized by fish, causing it to feed. Could be, but the factors mentioned above must be taken into consideration first and foremost before a predator attacks - for whatever reason one assigns.
