by Bruce Middleton, April 23, 2006
Depth is the key to spring time crank baits…
Early in the spring when bass first begin to move into the slightly warmer shallows, when it is still cold out, but the sun has warmed up the sand, gravel or rocky bottoms, the temperatures in these small shallows rises by a few degrees. It only takes a couple of days of warm weather to accomplish this and the bass will move in and stay, leaving the deep water for the rest of the year.
You can catch these early bass on top water lures just about as easily as you can catch them on any other lure at this time. A floating minnow worked slowly and twitched every now and then is an excellent way to attract them. Understand that there will not be a lot of bass in this early shallow water so you will have to cover a lot of water in order to find the fish that have moved in. As time goes by, more and more bass will be moving in, so your odds of catching them increases every time you go out.
One key to early spring bass fishing is speed control. When you think you are going too slow, go a little bit slower. These bass are not very active yet. They have followed the baitfish into the shallows, the baitfish are always the first to arrive. While baitfish are the mainstay of a bass’s diet, at this time of year they don’t actively chase them, they ambush them or sneak up on them. They prefer a slow moving meal and since they are still partly in a winter mode they can get by on a little less food. The lower water temperatures keep their metabolisms down. These are the reasons you fish very slowly for them.
During spring cold fronts, and there are a lot of those, some bass may move out of the shallows and on to the main lake flats that are 10 to 15 feet deep. During these times, searching for bass becomes your priority. Fortunately, weed growth is just starting and is usually not a problem so you can use a very wide array of lures for searching with. Jerk baits, rattle traps, suspending jerk baits, lipless crank baits and spinner baits worked around the mouths of channels, or the mouths of bays, points and side pockets off the main lake are all good places to work. Any place that might have a deep-water channel leading into or out of it to a shallower body of water or where bass spawn.
A #7 husky jerk may look small but it can be cast a country mile, let it set for a long time and then twitch it. Let it set for a minute or two and twitch it again. Repeat. This small crank bait, minnow shaped, and non-aggressive approach is perfect for the shallows. Other finesse approaches include a split shot worm rig or a tube, small wacky rigged worm, bitsy crank bait or the ever-popular jig and pig. Small is always better at this time of year. The bass are finicky and lethargic. They are also spread out and finding them is a matter of hit and miss. Patience is the name of the game at this early stage of the game.
Large flats in 10 to 12 feet of water just off the spawning areas, in summer will turn into huge weed beds. We know that these huge weed beds can hold up to 80% of a lakes bass populations. In the early spring when the first green shoots of vegetation appear and in lily pad fields when their first green shots appear, they attract huge numbers of bass. Bass and green vegetation go together like peanut butter and jelly. This is the best time fish these flats. Crank baits and suspending crank baits shine at this time of year. They can be worked right down next to the bottom or the tops of the weeds as they grow. This is where the bass live and where they will live until die back in the late fall. Again, slow and steady is the approach to use. While the bass will be shallow they will also be spooky. Wacky style worms are a real tool to be used in the weeds at this time. With their horizontal, slow fall and erratic movement every time you twitch the bait, it gets the attention of any bass in the area. Bass will come to it instead of the other way around.
Keep the boat well away from the area you’re fishing and make long casts to the targets you have in mind. Also keep the trolling motor set as low as you can in these shallow waters. Hitting the bottom not only stirs up mud and debris it also sends out crashing explosions of noise and vibrations, scarring of any bass in the area. Run the trolling motor at its lowest possible setting, this way, should it hit something, you send out the least possible noise and you do the least possible damage to the motor itself.
At the right time of the year and water, the right crank bait, the weed beds are exactly where you want to be. When bass are feeding on blue gills, it’s time to get out the crank baits. For weed fishing, the crank bait to use must be wide-bodied, buoyant and have a lot of wobble to its action. Of all the different lip designs, body styles and actions, these are the best for these conditions.
Crank baits have a unique triggering ability that jig and pig, plastic and other lures just don’t possess. The speed, vibration and flash of a crank bait can send out waves of sound and strobes of light to attract bass from great distances. Bouncing over rocks, digging into the bottom like a crawfish or ripping through the weeds it can be used to generate reaction strikes. Cranking works when other options fail. It’s amazing how a lure with two sets of treble hooks can be glide through weeds and brush without getting hung up or getting into trouble. Of course, knowing the design and how the crank bait works has a lot to do with it.
Matching your crank bait to the conditions you’re fishing is critical. In spring when the weeds are just coming up, bass are attracted to anything green. It’s like a magnet for them. Find the first green in spring and you will find bass. This new green growth will be short and you can use a DT series crank bait to run right down to the tops of that greenery no matter the depth. In summer you can run a DT series over the tops of weed beds in the 1 to 4 foot zone with great confidence or go deeper around the edges of the beds to seek out those bass lurking around the outsides in ambush of baitfish. In fall, as the weeds begin to die back and the bass begin to move out of the weeds, a DT is perfect for searching deeper water.
You need to be versatile with your lure selection, changing many times a day sometimes to suit the ever-changing conditions you encounter as you troll around the lake. A point, for instance, will have deep water on both sides of it and probably weeds on the top that you will have to adjust for as you fish this type of structure. No single lure can cover it all, although some like a spinner bait are better at it than others. Having several rods, rigged with several different depth diving crank baits will make easy work of it though. Should you only have one or two rods, the use of a snap is recommended. Not a snap swivel, just a snap as the swivel picks up too much grass and weeds that has to be cleaned off after each cast and interferes with crank bait. Like wise you should always tie to the ring of the lure and never to the lure itself. Tying to the lure impedes or retards the action of the crank bait and that is no good.
Out in open water, just off points and flats and other structures, baitfish school up just below the surface. These suspended schools have large numbers of bass surrounding them, waiting and watching. And when they get hunger they ease up, gulp down a minnow or two and silently slip back down below the school again. A DT-4 or DT-6 is a perfect lure to cast out and run right threw the school of baitfish and back out again. Bass attack any baitfish that is unaware or gets too far away from the school. The DT series mimics the baitfish perfectly and by matching the series to the depth of the school, you end up with the exact lure at the exact depth for taking big bass.
A medium heavy rod is recommended along with 15-pound test fluorocarbon line. Fluorocarbon line is invisible in the water, is low stretch and high abrasion resistant. This makes it a perfect all-round fishing line. More so than monofilament or braided even if it does cost a little more. It has too many good qualities and hardly any bad qualities not to use it on a regular basis.
It is also becoming more and more common to catch bass right up next to the boat while crank bait fishing. This is because, as the bass follows the bait, deciding to strike or not, the crank bait suddenly moves up as you go to bring it up and out of the water. This sudden change in direction causes a reaction strike right next to the boat. It also shows that any up and down action added to the movement of a lure imitates the erratic action of a fleeing baitfish. This erratic action triggers active feeding bass into striking. This is an important fact. Any up and down action imparted into a lure or bait during a retrieve will give that bait or lure an erratic motion that causes a reaction strike from bass. It is a key triggering mechanism. Use this information to your advantage.
It’s best with crank baits to start out with just a few of them, some small lipped crank baits, some medium lipped crank baits and a couple of larger cranks with big lips on them. Don’t get caught up in the colors or patterns or this has great eyes or anything else. First learn how these first few crank baits work, which ones go through weeds well and which ones don’t. Which ones wiggle and which ones wobble and how they feel when you retrieve them. Flat-sided cranks tend to wiggle and wide-bodied ones tend to wobble. Flat-sided cranks are good to fair in grass because they keep the hooks in tight against the body. Some crank body shapes tuck the hooks back behind the body so they don’t stick out and get tangled in the weeds. Flat-sided cranks give off more flash than round-sided cranks. Round-sided cranks are meant to be fished slowly with a long wide wobble. Cranks with a short square lip get hung up in wood less than any other lip design. These and about a thousand other facts are going to have to be learned by you to be a great crank bait fisherman, but it all starts out with just a handful of lures, say 10 to 15 tops.
When you’re out on a lake and it’s one of those days when you can’t beg, borrow or steal a bite, bring out the crank baits and start working them and learn everything you can about them. Nothing beats time on the water. How do the feel, how deep do they dive, what do they look like when they go fast and slow? Learn! Never get stuck with a hundred crank baits like so many anglers do, and then not have clue as to each one does and when is the best time to use and what are the best conditions to use it in. You should know every characteristic of every crank bait in your tackle box, when to use and why. Then you can get into colors and patterns and fancy eyes and so on but not until then.
The depth that a crank bait runs is determined by the shape of the bill. The longer the bill is the deeper the crank bait will dive. Also the wider the plastic bill is the deeper the crank will dive. And finally, the angle at which the plastic lip is set in relation to the crank bait will determine how deep the bait will dive. If the lip is angled at a 45-degree angle down away from the body of the lure the crank will be a shallow diver. If the lip is angled down from the body by say 15 to 25 degrees, this will be a medium diving crank bait and if the lip comes straight out of the crank bait it will be a deep diver. So the deepest diving crank bait will have a large long, wide lip that comes straight out of the crank and a shallow diver will have a short small lip that is angled steeply downward.
Small to medium sized crank baits made of balsa wood with short square bills are often referred to as a 4 wheel drive lures. That’s because it’s almost impossible to get them stuck. They bounce off of tree limbs and can be ripped through grass with ease. The bill is designed to lift the back end of the lure straight up until the lip is parallel with the limb. Then it slides off, by the time the back end comes down again it is well past the limb. Being made of balsa, it also floats very quickly and if left alone, it will quickly float up and out of trouble all on its own.
Remember that one spot you fish may call for one lure and one technique and another spot may call for some other lure and technique. Never go fishing with some preconceived idea that one lure or one bait is going to do it all for you. You need a wide variety of lures and baits to cover all contingencies, and you need to know how to use them. This is especially true of crank baits. There are so many of them and they all fish differently and with different types of presentations. For instance, a citruse color may the hot color that day where the day before it was a perch color. You have to know each one works, where it works, when to use it, when not to use it, what type of presentations to use or not to use with it and when its time to change to a different lure or bait. Remember too that speed is the most important factor when using a crank bait. Cold water calls for suspending crank baits and slow retrieves. Warm water calls for a faster retrieve. Either way it must look alive, therefore it must be erratic in movement and never just cast out and reeled straight back. Always vary the retrieve whether your going dead slow or ripping fast.
Remember too that if you find a great place where your have taken several bass in a rather small area with crank baits, go back through the same area with a jig or other plastic baits to try and catch other inactive bass in the same area that are not in the mood to chase a fast moving bait. A slower presentation may just the ticket to take several more bass from this same area. Always fish a good spot until finally there are no bass left that will bite, but come back to it in an hour or two and repeat your tactics. A hot spot will replenish itself if left alone for a while. These hot spot replenishment areas are called gold mines.
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