# Visibility.



## captken (Feb 24, 2008)

Color visibility tip. 10/14/2016

Top water plugs like the Zara Spook, especially those in natural colors, sometimes get lost in ripples, shadows and glare. Actually, I’d expect natural colors to be more difficult to see as bait fish have evolved to be less visible to decrease predation. As I age (and I am now pretty dang old) I loose sight of my lure more and more often. I decided to do a little on-line research to find the optimum color for the top and front of my favorite top water lures. Here is what I found out and have loosely quoted below.

Sensitivity in daylight vs. darkness.

In daylight our eyes are most sensitive to green light at a wave length of about 550 nanno microns (nm) and slightly less sensitive to yellow light. They are approximately half as sensitive to orange light and about one tenth as sensitive to red and violet light. Interesting! To take it a step further, our military uses green or yellow/green in heads-up displays in our aircraft and then “Optic yellow” is the color of high viz tennis balls.

I think that most fish seldom get much of a look at the top of our top water lures so a hideously unnatural color shouldn’t bother them a bit. From our perspective, though, we should be able to find a hot yellow green lure quick in most conditions.

A one afternoon a couple of years ago I realized I couldn’t see a black popping bug in the shadows of trees and overhanging brush so I switched to a white bug that showed up fine. Unfortunately, the Bass preferred black that evening. As I have mentioned before, I take notes. I was reading through my notes a while later and decided to tie a more visible black Bass popper. Here is the resulting popper. I cut a small disk of yellow foam and glued it to the front of my popper.


I’m headed to the shop to make a Zara more visible to me. I’ll take a photo or two and add to this tip.


Many years ago before squid skirts were readily visible, I added strips of fluorescent "Flagging Tape" to ballyhoo and Bonita strips to make them easier to see from the cockpit and bridge.


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