I'm a sucker for new 'must have' lure colours, always searching for the absolute secret weapon. I've read and collected lots of articles on colour, including the stuff about what fish see at depth (i.e. our orange at 50m deep isn't orange to our eyes, but who knows what the fish see).

Obviously orange/red colours exist in nature with fish - gurnard, snapper etc. But they tend to be blended with silvers, or in some cases, camouflage spots, stripes etc that are designed to deceive eyes. As we know, snapper over sand tend to be lighter in colour than those in the rocky shallows.

I'm fascinated by the supposed properties of UV and lumo (glow in the dark), which some lures have, including your jigs with lumo stripes. Nuclear Chicken softbaits (in Gulp and Z Man) both glow a lot under a blue/UV torch. And they also have a quite distinct two-tone effect, which I've seen some experts say is more effective than straight colours - maybe because most fish or prawns or crabs are not of uniform colours.

I know orange is an absolute favourite of Far North snapper charter legend Rob Parker - but in the 40m depths of Great Exhibition Bay, where his clients get most of the huge snaps he puts them on to, bright orange softbaits wouldn't be bright orange. They'd just be a shade of grey.

But because you'd be daft to ignore his success, I went with orange up there, and the only two 20lb+ snapper, and one lost that was well over but got sharked, I've caught to date were on Atomic Sunrise (2) and Coral Trout (1). I got big fish on other colours, but not the donkeys. Coincidence?

Obviously your 5m deep spots in the Firth, orange would be orange if the water is clear-ish. 

But does it matter if the lure is bright UV orange with gold flecks (Atomic Sunrise) or with blue glitter (Coral Trout)??

Red (which is one of two Nuclear Chicken colours) disappears first in the colour spectrum.

Has the rise of orange coincided with the prevalence of introduced pest prawns/shrimps?

Then there are the other factors with lures of movement, shape and scent (the latter not being a factor for your jigs, but obviously a potential factor with softbaits). In some situations - such as anchovy season - it seems sensible to choose a lure that looks (in shape and colour) like the prey the fish are keyed in on, and a lure that flutters like an injured bait fish.

But if blind fishing - e.g. in wash or over sand when sign has been located - I think most of us naturally usually start with a colour that's worked for us before, and that bias means we never really get to do scientifically sound research into colour effectiveness.

The Z Man colour Electric Chicken (light limey green and light pink) is loved by some people overseas (Aust, and US) but I don't know of anyone who puts it on first as their go to.

If you ask 20 good anglers what their favourite colours are, there would be a lot of correlation, I think. Oranges, pinks, motor oil, yellow/brown, coppery/new penny, and natural baitfish.

We all know the saying about chartreuse, but it's hard to see a correlation in nature - UNLESS what fish see in the stripe of, say, a jack mackerel, herring, or koheru - is actually very close to chartreuse 10m down in dappled UV and refractive light?

I watched a vid with a top Whangaparaoa angler saying Bruised Banana looks like the jack macks the big snapper feed on, but I thought "what a load of crap". They look nothing like a jack mack, but the magic of the yellow and brown (grey at depth) is inescapable.

Outside of snorkelling in the tropics, I've never seen a small fish that's orange with white/lumo stripes, like your favourite micro jigs.

I've got an excellent salt water fly tying book from a guy based in Florida who has done a lot of research and photography into what squid, bait fish etc look like underwater - particularly when alarmed. He observed squid often flashing a fluoro pink/orange stripe when alarmed, and he incorporates a narrow fluoro pink stripe in his flies. He also mentions how bait fish are often almost invisible except for their black/silver eyes. Which is why he emphasises those - and why I like to use jig heads with visible eyes if I can. 

Bait fish often put off myriad colours - pinks, gold etc, from their silver sides, depending on the colour of the sky and the tint of the sun (pinkish or golden at dawn).

I recently saw a video on spearfisho Ollie Craig's YouTube channel, where he used throw flashers - basically plastic tubes covered in reflective silver tape - that spin and wriggle as they sank. Fish came charging in from all directions - triggered by the vibration and flash of presumably distressed fish = food. I thought, man, how could I use those in the boat - dropped on a handline while I fish?

Some people believe fish grab lures more out of curiosity, or territorial behaviour, or to kill off another fish's offspring during spawning, than because they think they are a prawn, crab or bully.

When I noticed a couple of really nice snaps I caught in the Tamaki Strait had been feeding on small flounder, I got some perfect softbait imitations from the US - olive brown backs, cream bellies, you'd mistake them for the real thing. I put them on next time I went out, thinking I'd discovered the equivalent of splitting the atom. But I didn't get a bite. Maybe they just looked like rubber blobs to the fish - not behaving anything like the real thing.

In the end, what I do is go with what I'm confident with, as I hate fishing without confidence. 

One day, when I reach some kind of jedi maturity, I might try an experiment of switching lure colours every 10 minutes (god knows, I've got enough in my lure box to do that for a couple of days on end!) but I've got a way to go before I get to that point  

I remember a winter's day slow jigging out of Tutukaka in 40-50 metres. It was overcast and the water looked black. My mate was catching fish after fish on black jigs. Didn't make any sense to me. In retrospect, I wonder if the fish could sense something was there via their lateral line and were snapping at it without really seeing much. No scent was used.

As the seasons change, so does the bait fish, with all the anchovies i  am hearing about in the Gulf, i would be using my Kaveman hornet in lumo/ silver colour, that jig is deadly when anchovy schools are here. The other one is the brown/ gold colour.

Early season(spring) pink seems the best but from late spring onwards, orange seems a better colour.

Just my 2c worth