Time to Change those Tatty Lure Skirts on your Offshore Trolling Lures?

New lure skirts will immediately re-establish your lures' eye-catching attraction, but no matter how convincing they look, they won't catch anything unless the fish know they're there. They need to make their presence known.

Skirted trolling lures achieve this by setting up a long stream of tiny bubbles - the smoke trail.

Most of the smoke trail is created by the lure head - in fact, often it's all of it, with the skirt contributing nothing other than colour and bulk.

While colour may be important - there's certainly more than one school of thought on that issue - there's little doubt that a good smoke trail really does provide the visual stimulation that draws in predatory fish to the lure.

When you're changing your lure skirts then, don't just go for colour - look for texture on the surface of the skirt.

Check out these replacement skirts.

So anything the skirts can provide to add to the smoke trail is a valuable contribution indeed.

All those little nodules and indentations work on the water and produce vibrations and bubbles. Every little helps!

And talking of changing skirts, here's how it's done:~

First, cut off the old one, show appreciation where appreciation is due, then discard it without further display of emotion, and ...

Cut off the nose of the new skirt (if it had one) such that it can just be stretched over the head of the lure, then ...

Turn the skirt inside out and insert the lure head, front-end first into the skirt leaving just a smidgen of the lure head visible, next ...

Bind the skirt with light line, nipping it tight in the necked section of the lure head - drop of superglue on the whipping will do no harm - and finally ...