Haha, someone looking from a distance might have called the cops reporting a burglary Steps! I thought the same thing when I was down in the garage with the blue UV glow going on and off.
I'm guessing there are three types of glow:
- lumo (luminescence)
- UV
- fluorescence.
I'm not a technical expert, but having fished with lumo flies at Lake Okataina in the pitch black and slayed the trout, I know it can be deadly in the dark and low light. I think it's a big factor for deep fishing in salt water (hence the glow sticks and lumo tubes etc for hapuku) and Sam Mossman used to write about lumo sinkers for shallow water straylining.
I consider lumo to be the straight glow, which often lasts after turning off the torch - as you reported. That doesn't need a UV torch to be effective. For squidding, Stripstrike put me on to a very powerful head lamp which is much, much more effective than my UV torch for creating the glow. Interestingly, a lot of top night flyfishers use old-school camera flashes to light up their lumo flies.
I found the UV torch lit up some softies, but the glow didn't last when turned off. So true UV that seems to attract fish in daylight.
And the ones which fluoresced also died out after the torch went off. So ditto re daytime effectiveness.
The manufacturers don't seem to impregnate the baitfish colours with UV as it's normally a shallow water scenario, and probably dying flutter movement/large eyes/flash of alarm, are bigger strike factors?
It's down deeper in the murk that UV etc comes into its own.