A collection of Crank Baits.

I recently got a great purchase from eBay. It was a hardcover book called “The Best of BASSMaster”. It is a collection of articles from BASSMaster Magazine covering the years 1968 to 1980. For a beginning Bass Fisherman, the articles are great and this is one of the best that I’ve read so far. It’s from a larger article called “The ‘Crank Bait System’” written by Bill Phillips. I would tell you the year but that information is not available. Here is the article in it’s entirety.

Should the art of lure painting imitate life? Do naturlized baits help you catch fish?

the answer from one bassin’ biologist who dedicates about 200 days a year to uderstanding why bass bite, is an unequivocal…”probably not.”

Bill Phillips of Auburn university in Alabama, who is working toward a Ph.D in fisheries biology, is also the 36-year-old president of Angling Research Associates, an independent research firm for the tackle industry.

According to his tests:

“Under most conditions, the natural lures failed to compete favorably with really good, contrasty color patterns like bone/orange or yellow/black, especially in greenish-tinted, productive waters.

“The catch per hour rate for the baby bass and rainbow trout patterns on Rebel Deep Maxi-R lures, for example, were 0.4 and 0.3 fish, respectivley, while the bone/orange belly Deep Maxi-R produced 1.2 fish per hour.”

“There were, however, notable excetions to this rule. For example, in clear water lakes where a sizable portion of the bass population is made upof spotted or Kuntucky bass, naturals outproduced all other color patterns. Crawfish-like Deep Mini-Rs were especially effective, yeilding 1.25 fish per hour, as were shad-imitation Natural Ike, which caught 1.1 fish per hour.”

But Philips says it’s the paint, rather than the paint job, that’d the key.

“Quite often, the poorest imitations were among the best,” according to Angling Research Associates’ field testers. “For instance, Natural Ike’s crawfish pattern is not convincing at all — whoever heard of a crawfish shaped like a fish? But the pattern produced fish on numerous occasions for our field agents, apparently because it was basically a light patern of contrasty colorswhich stand out against the aquatic backgroound.” Philips reports.

And, he says, one of the best looking imitations — the bluegill — was the poorest performer.

“Two-and-a-half-inch long bluegillsaren’t dark blue, green and orange, the wai bait manufaturers usuallyt pait them,” Phillips explains. “They’re pale yellow and silvery, with light olive backs. But the worst fault of the natural bream baits is that they do not contrast with the background. Bass can’t see them.”

The problem with natural-finish luresis that they emphasize the one most important defense a prey fish posesses — protective coloration.

Baby bass, crappie, shad and crawfishare colored the way they are to keep preditors, such as big bassfrom seeing them, biologist Bill Phillips points out.

“So why copy the item least likely to be seen?” Philips asks. “To sell lures, for one thing. And because the lures are certainly beautiful to the human eye, if not the bass’ eye, most of us will buy them.”

After reading this article I have decided that as Bass Fishermen, we need to make the choice for ourselves as to what works. From what I can see Bass do like Crank Baits.

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