Easy Ways to Customize Soft Lures with Dye, Rattles and More

Soft accents: Clever modifications can grab more attention from big fish.

December 16, 2024 By David A. Brown

Likes, follows, shares, subscriptions—social media’s all about attracting and maintaining attention. Bass fishing’s not so different, especially in terms of soft bait accents. Seems like every year brings a nifty new rig or a clever modification of a time-honored go-to. But even if you’re not some ultra-creative rigging wiz, we’ve rounded up a handful of enhancement strategies that’ll improve anyone’s performance.

Dyeing For Attention

Dipping dyes, aerosol sprays and dye marking pens—often enhanced with fish-attracting scent—will bolster your bait’s appeal and increase its chances of catching someone’s eye.

Chartreuse is most common for a couple of reasons. For one thing, it’s a high-vis color that stands out in Florida’s dark, tannic waters, as well as wind-stirred shallows. Moreover, a lot of bluegill sport varying shades of chartreuse on their tails. Bass are reactive creatures and when they spot something that looks like a fleeing bream, it’s chomp time.

Fishing lures dipped in dye and scent on boat deck. — Soft bait dyes are available for adding custom colors. Scent, too, in this case.

Orange also sees a lot of play. Again, it’s a color that stands out in scenarios or lower visibility, but bluegill often sport a pumpkin-like belly that’s easily spotted.

Bassmaster Elite pro Mark Menendez, who has fished Florida waters for more than 20 years, helped develop blue, chartreuse, orange, and red dipping dyes for Dyeing2Fish. The red has a crawfish scent; the other three come in garlic or crawfish formulas. All were formulated for user-defined saturation control.

“I developed the dye such that the angler can choose how vivid they need the color,” Menendez said. “The longer it’s held in the dye, the brighter the color.”

Example: Menendez finds that adding a bold chartreuse tip to his finesse worm offers the pop he needs to convince hesitant cold-weather bass in higher clarity. Conversely, when summer finds more stained water and higher metabolisms, he’ll dial down the intensity and use just enough dye to grab attention.

Menendez offers this insight: Adding red dye to a green pumpkin bait produces a dark, mottled look that fits well in most Florida lakes. For precision, he uses a Q-tip to apply the dye to various spots on the bait.

Here’s a point that plays upon nature’s unavoidable cannibalism. Use that permanent marker to add a black edge to your swimbait tails. Fingerling bass typically display prominent dark edges along their caudal fin and big bass are notorious for gobbling baby bass.

Rattle Response

Some days, a rattling lipless bait or topwater will outperform a silent one. The same goes for soft plastics. Some, like the Gene Larew Biffle Bug, include a designated rattle chamber for optional noisemakers, while others with solid bodies require forced rattle insertion. In either case, a little shaky-shake can work wonders in summer and winter’s temperature extremes.

Tiny finesse worms leave little room for such enhancement, but the average stick worm, ribbontail, swimming worm, creature bait, craw, fluke, or swimbait, has enough mass to hold a rattle chamber. Simply align the narrow nose end with the insertion point, pinch the bait between thumb and forefinger and use your other thumb to guide the rattle into place.

Z-Man offers a handy tool that was designed for its patented ElaZtech material, but also works with standard soft baits. Comprising a surgical steel grade needle protected by a silicone needle guard, the tool includes 10 glass rattles. With a rattle placed inside the hollow needle and the point inserted into the soft plastic, the Rattle-Snaker’s pushrod loads the rattle into the cavity.

Blades and feathers can help anytime the bite’s tough, but these accents prove especially helpful during shad spawns, or during fall schooling when you need your bait to stand out amid the natural buffet. A spinner blade adds flash and thump to stick worms for swimming presentations and Neko rigging. Models range from screw-in designs to anchor style inserts like LUNKERHUNT’s Accessory Rigging System Blades. LUNKERHUNT also offers A.R.S. Feathers to add a lifelike appearance to the bait’s backside.

One of the most interesting bait enhancers to come along of late, Floatzilla makes a line of flotation capsules that screw into your soft plastic for added buoyancy. The flagship Floatzilla Tail lifts the back end of a shaky head or a Carolina rig bait, while the Floatzilla Wacky Connect puts that lift in the middle of your wacky worm.