If you’ve been in a tackle shop lately, you are seeing red. It’s not that you are ticked at the inflated prices; you are literally seeing a lot of products that are painted, coated or created to be red in color.

There’s nothing wrong with that. I love the color red. I’m also one of the people the marketing folks at fishing line, reel, rod and lure companies have in their sights. I’m a living testament to the maxim: Fishing lures are made to catch fishermen, not fish. I’ve been caught thousands of times! Few of my lures have caught thousands of fish.

So, what’s with the red? Originally, lures came painted to look like perfect imitations of the minnows or other food that gamefish normally eat. But if all the lures were perfect imitations, what would prompt the fisherman to buy Brand X instead of Brand Y?

Enter the Brand X marketing department. “Paint a splotch of red on the lure,” they said. “The little bit of red paint won’t cost much, and it will catch the eyes of fishermen. It will make our lure different from Brand Y lures.”

Marketing people know how to market products, but there must be a grain of truth; otherwise, skeptics, even fishermen skeptics, will likely see through the ruse. So, when the fishing lure company decided to splash a spot of red on their lure to make it stick out from among the others on the tackle shop shelves, there had to be a reason.

Blood!

One thing fish have in common with most other creatures in the world is they have red blood. And it’s an easy sell to convince people that fish, like other predators, seek out the weakest, dumbest or easiest to catch prey, rather than going for the fastest, smartest or hardest-to-catch specimens. So, paint a bit of red on the side of a lure, call it blood, and the wily predator fish an angler is trying to catch will instantly figure out that the lure (or prey) is bleeding, obviously damaged in some way, and is an easy meal.

The red paint ploy worked. But it didn’t take long for Brand Y lures to figure out they were losing market share to the Brand X “bleeding” lures. So now, almost every lure has a red splotch on it somewhere.

“Fishermen don’t just buy lures,” thought some marketing department genius. If putting some red on lures made them better sellers, why not put some red on other stuff—like line, swivels and hooks? So, they did, and it did help them sell more tackle. Did it help their customers catch more fish?

I know some guys who absolutely swear by red hooks, and others who spool up regularly with blood red fishing line. These guys go whole hog with the blood or bleeding-bait theory. They use red hooks, red line and red reels, fastened to red fishing rods, while wearing red hats. They catch plenty of fish and look red-hot doing it. If this describes you when you’re fishing, you are in good company.

Will all that red gear actually help you catch more fish? Many anglers say yes, and some take it to the extreme. Remember, however, deep and red don’t mix.

I learned the made-up name ROY G. BIV in high school science class. It’s an acronym to help remember the colors of light that human eyes (and fish eyes, to some extent) can see: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo and Violet.

Then, in a college limnology class (a fancy word for studying water), I learned that water is a color filter. When light passes through water, some of the colors are absorbed—the ROY parts much faster than the BIV colors—and red light is the first to be filtered out.

Here’s a brief explanation of how seeing in color works. Let’s say the sun is shining on a green leaf. The chlorophyll that makes the plant green absorbs all the ROY and BIV colors, but it reflects the G (or green), so we see the leaf is green. But if the light were to first pass through a filter that removed the G part of the spectrum, what would happen? There would be no green light to reflect, the other colors would still be absorbed, and the leaf would appear to be black.

It only takes about 10 feet of water to filter out the red light part of the spectrum. That’s a lesson I learned on a long-ago trip to Florida’s Weeki Wachee Springs. The park’s Mermaid Show has been ongoing for 75 years. In one part of the show, one of the mermaid-suited swimmers performs up close to the glass in her red costume, then swims 10 feet away from the glass and her red suit fades to black.

The lesson is, when fishing with a lure, line, hook, snap swivel or anything else in water deeper than 10 feet or so, the red light part of the spectrum is gone. Just like the “black” mermaid suit, whatever red tackle being used might as well be painted black.

Shallow-water anglers, feel free to continue to party-on with your red lines, lures, rods, hats and hooks. If that’s what it takes to put another fish or two on your stringer, I’m all for it. For anglers who fish for fish that live deeper than 10 feet, go ahead and use red line or lures as well. Red is a “feel-good” color, and who doesn’t want to feel good when holding a fishing rod? But realize that you are playing to the marketing department of the companies selling you your gear. In short, you are seeing red, but the fish aren’t!

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