Hi everyone. Earlier this summer I said I'd try repainting an old lure so it would swim belly up. My painting skills aren't so great so it cost me a six pack to have an artsy friend paint a big perch color fat rap and a blue 3 inch shad rap. He did an excellent job matching the original colors and look but only upside down.

At the first campsite I happened to see a bass sitting close to shore. I cast past it and when the shad rap got close to it, it started to back up! I thought that was a bad sign but it had caught 1 northern already so I stopped retrieving and let the lure float motionless for a while. I thought it looked very real. Just like a dead minnow in a bucket. I waited forever maybe 15 seconds, gave it a twitch and Mr. Bass nailed it with a flying leap. It would have been a frying leap but he missed. Either way he was not to be denied, and tasted wonderful.

They looked really weird swimming up to the canoe, but they both caught fish. It's hard to say if they worked any better than the stock paint job would have, but they worked pretty well on bass and northern. Northerns ended my experiment on the second day but I'll try again next year. If anyone happened to find either of these two lures floating belly-up this summer, they were mine, use them with good luck, and by all means let me know how they worked for you.

Posted by owen on October 26, 2000 at 18:06