ARTIFICIAL BAITS 93 



aroused. Most casters probably have noticed how the 

 minnows scurry away from their plug when it is being 

 retrieved, and the fish often see this too and attack the 

 bait because it, obviously, is a marauder raiding the 

 food supply. 



A fish sees a bait in the air because most of them 

 feed from the air as well as from the water, he hears 

 the splash and sees the flash of the enamel and spinners, 

 and he proceeds at once to the attack. Color has an 

 influence on fish, too. The reason a fish will savage- 

 ly attack one color one day and not look at it another 

 is something that has never been explained and very 

 probably never will be. 



You know what happens when the fair summer 

 boarder with a red parasol crosses the domain of the 

 mean, horrid, old gentleman cow. Well, just that 

 happens when a highly colored plug crosses the baili- 

 wick of a testy-tempered fish! 



We are told that the idea of the casting plug had 

 its origin in this way: Once upon a time a fisherman 

 was seated in his boat on a small Michigan lake, cuss- 

 ing his luck. He had worked hard and the rewards 

 were small. He decided to quit for the day, and light- 

 ing his last cigarette, he hurled the gaudily colored 

 box far out into the lake. It no sooner struck the 

 water when it went sailing skyward. Not being of 

 the comic newspaper type of angler, who carries his 

 bait in a jug, he was more than surprised, and pinched 

 himself to see if he was dreaming. No, there it went 

 sailing skyward again. He investigated and found 



