UV paints/colours

some very interesting points raised here and thanks guys for the mental stimulation. 

Ok Mike 

that's the question, doc. just what are the fish really seeing? does anyone really know? and how does one know just what to believe, because how can they even prove their findings?
I know also that they say fiah use their UV sight for feeding. so that means it's an attractant. if that is true, then worrying that a line is more visible wouldn't necessarily be bad, it could actually be attracting them.
I would be super-interested to hear your views on UV.

the two spools on the inside are:

the left spool is this. it's what i have on my rod that is glowing.

here are my culprits.

k, this just popped into my head.
I never before thought of what "fluorocarbon" stands for. does the "fluoro" stand for fluorescent?? that makes sense then I suppose. never really thought of it that way.
the one of mine that glows crazy is "spiderwire" and its colour is labelled as "Fl. Clear Blue". but it's a mono, not a fluoro.
but my stren 100% fluoro doesn't glow. neither does my maxima ultragreen.
but my trilene glows also, yet it is orange in colour to the eye, but glows green just like the spiderwire.

so it doesn't seem like it's the fluoro lines glowing. it must be an additive for line tint. weird that they don't totally advertise it as being extremely visible though.

I am going to go test some of my other lures(not ones ive made) that are proven producers.
I tested my flys earlier today, and was pretty surprised at how they looked as well. my three go-to flys, two are actually crazy under UV, they don't look anything like what I thought they appeared as. and the other is completely void of any UV properties.
but I know with my collection of rapalas, I have a few that are true UV models, but they have never done anything.

i'm sure most everyone is aware of this, but I will just mention it for people who may read this but don't know.
glow and uv aren't the same.
glowing is phosphorescence. it's seen with no light at all, although it initially needs light to activate it's phosphors.
UV requires sunlight to appear. it is activated by the ultraviolet rays, which we cannot see. but a UV light can be used to mimic it's appearance for us. but a UV lure will not glow in darkness, they require the sun's rays.

I have combined both in some of my painting. I haven't done enough fishing at night to truly test the glow lures, but they have definitely out-produced non-ones at deep depths where light is lacking. jigging for lake trout, cod, and halibut have all been more productive for me using glow lures.

And i just figured out why some of my eyes are glowing. Alot of my lures, i made the eyes myself. early ones were made out of buttons, then i would add a dab of black nail polish in the center, then a big drop of epoxy onto it, to give it roundness. And then i moved on to making them from hole-punched CDs, i read that one on here. Same, i would add a drop of black for a pupil, then a big drop of epoxy for roundness. Well, now i have found that the epoxy actually glows like mad, and thats why some of those eyes are also.

Yes, thats exactly what i am now thinking. Otherwise, i would have had to have stopped the boat right on top of that fish pretty much, and started letting line out right above it as well. I am thinking the line attracted it in, and it then located the fly at the end from that.

i caught one of my better rainbows last year with that line. i'm running a length of it on my fly rod in place of a leader. i run fry patterns on my lake that has the salmon run up into it in the fall to spawn up the creek inflows. in the spring, masses of fry wash out into the lake, where they live for two years before making their journey to the ocean. so the spring is awesome for rainbow trout, because they are gorging themselves on the massive bait-balls of fry that have been flushed into the lake. so i troll a fry pattern and target the swarms of fry that you can see. drag the line through the fry, and it usually tears off with a trout on the end.

That's crazy, I'd better get hold of a UV light and check my lines.......

here was something that really surprised the heck out of me. looking at how my lures looked with UV light, and this jumped out at me. I was pretty shocked. we want our line to be as invisible as possible. so my eyes became saucers when the light hit this one.

that top lure has a hook and swivel still attached. there's a piece of line still on the swivel, where it was cut off the rod. looks normal enough in that picture. then the UV light hit it and.....

and then when I was checking them out with UV light, I found something strange. I wasn't aware that epoxy has UV. some of my lures, I have used epoxy to coat the cups and holes. I was quite shocked to see that a lure I painted to be the actual, true colours that it is, then was changed due to, not the paint, but the epoxy. and it couldn't have been a more drastic change. the black cup, in actuality glows like crazy.