| Winter Jerk-Bait Fishing | |
|
by Phil Williams
Mid-America Bass
It was, as soon as we set the trolling motor in the water we started catching good fish. The odd thing was this water was 50 degrees, way warmer than I would have thought you should be using suspended baits. But what the heck, we're tearing them up, so we stayed with it. I don't think you could have fished anything else as the eyelet's were freezing so bad when you retrieved fast, due to the increased amount of water passing through them. You had to pick the ice out of them on every cast as it was but when you tried to retrieve a Crank-Bait they would freeze solid halfway to the boat.
A jig may have taken some fish, but I always say, "when something works, don't fix it," and the Jerk-Bait was working. We went to several other spots that we always fish on the Jerk-Bait pattern and they all had 50-degree water and all had good fish. We ended up with a good limit and learned that the water doesn't have to be below 45 degrees, which was around my previous cut off for good Jerk-Bait fishing.
I've had a ton of questions lately through the "Contact Us" page of my web site lately about how to fish a Jerk-Bait and how much to weight it. The answer is, there is no one answer. It is all relative to the fish's activity level, location and water conditions. Let's assume you have relatively clear water so the fish can see your bait and sight feed rather than using their lateral line to locate food. If the fish are in say 10 feet or less of water or are willing to come up to that level to get your bait I like to perfectly suspend my bait. This allows me to put the bait at the depth they want it and leave it there with very little effort. I think any time you can catch them on a suspended bait, that is the best way to go.
You can fish it painfully slow or jerk the heck out of it and change the depth very little. Cold water and lateral line feeding is not the ideal situation for Jerk-Bait fishing. On the other hand, if you can find shallow, active fish in dirty water, you can really clean their clocks. Most shallow fish in cold, dirty, water will be fairly active as they are there for one reason, to eat. Their strike zone may not be very big and they may not move very fast to run down a bait but if you find them they're not as hard to catch as you may think. This situation requires you keep the bait moving much more than you normally would. If they can't see it they'll have to find it somehow and the lateral line is their only other option.
Next page > Part 3 - Why Weight a Jerkbait > Page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
