Alan Clemons

Crawfish-imitating soft plastic lures are incredibly versatile and imitate highly favored bass forage. We’ll look at the advantage of five top rigging techniques.

Soft plastic crawfish are among the best lures for catching big bass, whether you’re on a massive reservoir targeting largemouths or a small stream chasing smallmouths. Even spotted bass love crayfish. Everything does, it seems, which is what makes them so effective with so many different techniques.

Crawfish lures come in a wide variety of sizes, colors and designs. You can get tiny craws for small jigheads to throw on wadable streams and catch a zillion hungry bass, or you can get some monstrous craw imitations to fish around wood and vegetation for big brutes. If a soft plastic crawfish can even get to the bottom of a top smallmouth fishery, such as on one of the Great Lakes, it won’t take long for a bronzeback to nosh on it.

Spring can be an unpredictable time for bass fishing, but the big bass action can be outstanding. Here’s how to pick the proper crankbait to maximize your success.

Catching bass on crankbaits in spring is one of the most fun and successful techniques when fish are on the move. Whether bass are in transition to shallow water, amid the spawn, or hanging around cover to feed, throwing the best crankbaits for spring bass fishing will keep your line tight.

Crankbaits come in a variety of sizes and shapes to mimic baitfish, bluegills, perch and crayfish. The shape and size of the crankbait’s bill will help it stay shallow or dive to specific depths. The bill’s shape might also help it deflect more easily off wood or rock cover and may impart different action to the bait during the retrieve. A crankbait is designed with specific degrees of angle to the bill, body shape, position of the hooks, eye-screw and split ring for the line, and how water flows over it during the retrieve.

Square-bills excel at calling bass out of shallow cover of many types. Learn how to maximize production with these outstanding bass lures.

The square-bill is a work of art when properly presented. Fat and wobbly on a steady retrieve and rolling off any cover it hits, it’s visually appealing to the angler if visible in clear water. More importantly, it is visually appealing to bass of all sizes in clear, stained or muddy water.

Perhaps in the early days of angling with artificial lures, someone carved a bait that resembled a square-bill crankbait. It presumably would’ve had a metal lip attached.

Fred Young created what became the Big O crankbait in the 1960s at his home in East Tennessee. That famous hand-carved balsa wood bait was light, buoyant and had a unique wiggle-wobble anglers and fish loved. Young’s creations spawned generations of bass anglers and a new method of fishing. Crankbaits were already popular, but Young’s bait, manufactured from plastic by Cotton Cordell, gave new life for anglers fishing around shallow wood and rock cover.

Simple lizards sometimes get forgotten for modern plastic shapes, but to overlook the sheer bass-catching power of a lizard can be a major mistake.

Bass anglers began fishing with soft rubber worms about 70 years ago, before technology, design and innovation spurred new materials and creations. Softer plastics soon made their way into the market as did replicas of crayfish, minnows and the plain but popular lizard.

Spring bass fishing with lizards is a combination akin to peas and carrots. They’re a natural pair. Spring is when lizards and salamanders get active, with the latter most prominent around inlets, creeks and shallow areas, where bass like to spawn, which makes salamanders top enemies of bass.