Bass Fishing Tips

Time: Early Winter

Place: Highland reservoirs

Lure: The Bomber Deep Flat A in Crawnifiscent

When the water starts cooling during late fall and early winter, crankbait bass fishing gets hot. Learn the strategies of two expert anglers.

Thanksgiving leftovers are a memory, and you’re looking ahead to the Christmas holidays. Bass fishing is on the back burner, partly because there’s a serious nip in the air and the water temperature on your home lakes is dropping. The bass are too sluggish to bite anyway. Right?

The reality is that early winter bass fishing can be exceptional, provided you cast the right baits into the right places. This is the time to wind fresh line onto your favorite cranking rod and break out a variety of crankbaits.

For the past seven years Ohioan Frank Scalish, a former Bassmaster Elite Series pro and Bassmaster Classic qualifier, has been fishing earnestly during the cold months to find how specific crankbaits perform in chilly bass waters. He designs baits and colors for several brands offered by Lurenet and is currently focused on Norman and Bomber lures.

All lipless crankbaits look quite similar, but each one carries attributes that work in different situations – or more importantly parts of the country.

In this blog we will go over three key identifiers for choosing the right one based on forage, time of year, and fishing pressure!

Like I mentioned above, almost all lipless crankbaits look similar, but they certainly carry different attributes that fit different situations. Today I will be discussing my three favorite options, the Cotton Cordell Super Spot, BOOYAH Hard Knocker and BOOYAH One Knocker. Each one has some serious intricacies that we will look at and help you become more successful with them!

It’s no longer the talk of the tackle world, but the umbrella rig remains the hottest rig going for bass during the cold-water months.

Baits and rigs come and go.

A flashy new lure floods the market during the bloom of popularity. A few years later, it suffers the fate of fashion, tucked away in a forgotten bait tray.

Such seems the fate of the umbrella rig to many bass anglers who invested heavily in these odd-looking contraptions during the multi-rig heyday but seldom give them a second thought today. 

Not so for Tennessee River guide and bass pro Jimmy Mason, who has never confused fashion with effectiveness.

Late fall, when the mats on grass lakes begin breaking up, is prime time call up big bass with a frog. Read on for expert advice on frog fishing from a veteran bass guide.

“You saw where that was, right?” Jimmy Mason asked, as he reeled his frog quickly away from where a bass had just blasted through the milfoil but missed his bait. “Cast right into the blowhole.”

I followed instructions and happily hit the mark because the bass slurped down my frog almost before it landed. I set the hook hard and then reeled steadily to get the fish turned my way before it dug any deeper in the thick stuff. Soon after I was lip landing 3 1/2 pounds of Lake Guntersville largemouth and another pound or two of vegetation. We kept working the same area and caught three more solid frog bass before returning to search mode.

There are few ways to catch bass that are more fun than casting a BOOYAH Pad Crasher across big mats of vegetation and prompting bass to bust through the grass. Anticipation stays high, especially on a lake like Guntersville, where you know that any bass that explodes on your frog could be a legitimate heavyweight.

Learn winning swim jig strategies for autumn bass fishing from two anglers who have been swimming jigs for many years.

Fall is generally a disjointed time, with bait schools on the move and bass hot on their heels. Action can occur just about anywhere, so anglers need a bait that goes just about anywhere. For such autumn diversity, it’s hard to beat a BOOYAH Mobster swim jig.

“It’s always on my deck because I’m going to throw it around any piece of wood, any dock, any piece of cover that I think the fish may be relating to,” said Oklahoma pro Brent Haggard. “It’s such a huge part of fall fishing, I always have several tied on.”

Chad Warner, Director of Product Development for BOOYAH Bait Company agrees and notes that the swim jig easily earns a spot in his top five fall offerings.

Learn about the Heddon Super Spook Boyo and the important niches it fills for topwater fishing action from many species of gamefish.

“That’s the new Boyo,” said Micah Frazier, a Bassmaster Elite Series pro from Newnan Georgia, as he swung a topwater-caught bass into the boat. It was a cool autumn morning, and we’d been throwing subsurface lures. Frazier had spotted some minnow movement at that surface, prompting him to pick up his Super Spook Boyo rod.

The Super Spook Boyo, new from Heddon Lures, offers elements of new and old. It’s a new size of Super Spook that fills an important niche for many different types of fishing in both freshwater and saltwater settings. However, it uses the time-proven Heddon Spook design and is easy to walk and effective for calling fish to the surface.

With a dozen or so other lure models already in the Heddon Spook family, it almost doesn’t seem like there could have been a place for another Spook. However, the immediate popularity of the Boyo and the ongoing flow of success stories from all over the country leave zero doubt that need for this particular Spook existed.

Don’t get in a rut with swimbait presentations. Utilizing various rigs and techniques can help you catch fish in a vast range of situations.

The YUM Pulse has emerged as one of the most popular swimbaits on the planet for bass. That should be no surprise. Its slender, natural baitfish profile screams “easy meal,” while a subtle roll and pulsing tail combine for an action that’s undeniably enticing. Add a ribbed body to push extra water and hook slot to ensure straight rigging and maximize hook-up percentages, and the Pulse has much in its favor.

The YUM Pulse comes in two sizes, 3.5 and 4.5 inches, and a broad range of colors, making it an excellent fit for many situations. It is also diverse in the ways it can be fished. Anglers too often typecast baits, treating any given one as a one-trick (or maybe, two-trick) pony. To do that with the Pulse is a major mistake because this bait is exceptionally effective when presented with several types of rigs. We’ll look at five of the best.

Even with a common bill shape, different crankbaits have distinctive characteristics. We’ll look at six top square bill crankbaits and the best applications for each.

Not all square bill crankbaits are created equal.

That’s important to keep in mind when you are choosing a lure to tie on this time of year. We’re not talking about performance quality or durability (although those are important considerations). We’re talking about variances in shape, sound, size, swimming action and more that cause different lures in the same category to excel in different situations.

When we speak of square bills, we’re talking about shallow running crankbaits with diving bills that are flat in the front and that have corners, instead of being rounded in front and on the sides. As a category, square bills are considered the best crankbaits for working through shallow cover.