What is the first thing you notice when you walk into a tackle store? For me, it is the amazing variety of shapes, sizes, and colors of fishing lures. The colors in particular stand out to me.

    My first memory of seeing tackle on the shelf was when my father took me shopping at a Gibson’s department store back in the early 1980’s. I was fascinated by the variety of colors available in the store’s massive fishing section.

    At that time, I was very interested in bass fishing because I discovered the rice canal down the street had lots of them. I just had a birthday and wanted to beef up my bass fishing arsenal with the money gifts I received.

    By the time I left Gibson’s, I had enough soft plastics and spinner baits to dazzle Bill Dance. Dolly Parton’s “coat of many colors” was drab next to the contents of my tackle box. It was downright gaudy.

    Over the course of a month, I spent dozens of hours throwing my new lures at the bass in the canal with little success. Sure, I got a few small ones here and there, but I was disappointed that none of my new lures helped much in my quest to catch a lunker.

    I would fish with one color for a few minutes then switch to another. If that didn’t work, I would tie on a different kind of lure and start a new round of color swapping. I spent more time changing lures than I did working them.

    In hindsight, I should have picked a couple of varieties and stuck with them. Nowadays, my freshwater tackle box contains soft plastics in junebug and watermelon, and spinners in white and chartreuse. In my saltwater box, virtually all of the plastics are glow and chartreuse, and the hard baits are chrome and bone colored.

    In my quest to deliver the best outdoors information to my readers, I experiment with lures of many colors and have varying degrees of success with them. However, when it comes to my personal fishing time, I use these colors almost exclusively.

    I know that if I go fishing on Big Lake or Lower Laguna Madre, chartreuse and glow soft plastics get the job done for flounder, speckled trout, and redfish. I have caught hundreds of fish on those colors, and am very confident in them.

    The funny thing is, I can be fishing with a friend or a guide who uses different colors and we both catch fish. Once, while fishing with a friend, I was using chartreuse and he an avocado color, so I decided we should switch out and see what happened. I felt awkward fishing his color, as did he with mine. We both ended up catching very few fish.

    While fishing for sturgeon in Oregon in the summer of 2001, I spoke with a walleye guide who uses only one color. He said clients often question his intelligence when the fishing gets slow, but that switching out lures is fruitless for him.

    “I do this for a living,” he said.

    “And I know that this lure produces time and again. I have confidence in it, and from the moment my clients get in the boat, I tell them there is only one lure that works day in and day out for me. Sometimes they look at me funny, but most of the time, they concur.”

    There is no question that certain areas and water conditions warrant different approaches to fishing. Water clarity is a major factor, which is why lure colors on the Upper and Middle coasts differ greatly from those fished in the Florida Keys.

    Despite what some might claim, we really have no idea what triggers fish to bite a specific lure. We know the fish obviously think it is some sort of prey item, but how many tequila sunrise-colored worms have you seen? I don’t know about you, but in my neck of the lake, they are about as common as mullet with white bodies and red heads.