Bait School Bite Spec
Lure: The Norman Speed N in Jelly Craw
When: Early Spring/Winter
Where: Highland Reservoirs, River Systems (Lake Guntersville, Alabama River)
Jelly Craw, built to provoke bites out of bass feeding up for the spawn! Bright reds, purples, pinks and all the famous tints of award winning crankbaits for pre spawn fishing.
Learn the secrets of a lifelong Jacksonville angler and veteran guide and how he uses minnow-imitating lures for redfish, spotted seatrout, snook, striped bass and more.
Every successful angler I have had the pleasure of fishing with seems to have a niche – something that angler is exceptionally good at doing. Some have multiple niches. From what I have witnessed, it is usually working a particular lure or style of lure in a specific manner. It’s often a relatively simple technique, once mastered, but it often involves some very fine details, and those details make the angler stand out from others.
Much of my fishing success and success I have enjoyed guiding clients on inshore waters in Jacksonville, Florida occurs while fishing shallow-running minnow-imitating lures. Keys for me include keeping lures in the right depths, retrieving them properly and presenting them with the right tackle.
Over the years I have found a variety of different shallow runners that get the job done for me. Probably 60 percent of my fishing success is with shallow-water crankbaits, and I use them extensively for spotted seatrout, redfish, striped bass, largemouth bass, snook and more.
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.
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.
Baits that light up the night do more than just look spooky. Learn to increase your catch rates with glow-in-the-dark or illuminated lures.
Glow baits are cool. Simple as that. And when they light the night, there’s an undeniably spooky quality that goes with October.
Novel appeal only goes so far with fishing lures, though. Functionality is far more important. Thankfully, lures that hold a glow or are otherwise illuminated offer practical benefit. Namely, when used in the right situations, they help you catch more fish.
Glow offerings come in a broad range of sizes and in baits designed to work all parts of the water column and for many kinds of fish. Popular applications include night-fishing, ice fishing and working dirty water, but opportunities don’t end there.
Casting natural offerings to drift in the current is a highly effective way to catch trout. Learn the tricks to this time-proven approach.
Trout fishing has its share of stereotypes, with one being that trout fishing always means fly-fishing. Another is that trout fishing with bait only means sitting beside a heavily stocked lake or a big pool with bait on the bottom to collect trout for a stringer.
While that certainly is a popular way to catch trout and a fine way to spend a day, anglers who prefer to work streams more actively – moving, casting and making active presentations – should not overlook the virtue of using natural offerings. Drifting bait is a fun and highly effective way to tap into outstanding action in a trout stream.
Fishing a Biffle Bug on a HardHead is a year-round strategy for Tommy Biffle and a critical part of his gameplan. We talked with Biffle about the technique he developed in 2010 and has been refining ever since.
“Maybe I should have thrown this in that tournament,” Tommy Biffle said to me as he unhooked the fourth bass he had caught in as many casts with a Biffle Bug on a prototype swiveling jighead that he had never thrown before. He had shown me the design a few minutes earlier and mentioned that he’d had one rigged at Smith Mountain Lake, where the Bassmaster Tour had just been, but hadn’t picked it up. He’d instead been flipping and pitching Texas-rigged Biffle Bugs and had finished solidly in the money but not in contention to win.
Less than two months after that day with Biffle, in June 2010, he won the Bassmaster Elite Series Sooner Run on Fort Gibson Lake with the same combination and introduced the fishing world to the Gene Larew Biffle HardHead. Two weeks after that, he used the same approach to win a PAA event on Tennessee’s Cherokee Lake, cementing the HardHead/Biffle Bug combo’s place in the bass fishing scene.
For Biffle, this combination immediately became a mainstay in his overall approach, and that has never changed. In fact, its place has grown. He fishes this combination year ‘round in a huge range of situations for largemouths, smallmouths and spotted bass, from the Great Lakes to Florida and coast to coast. He always has at least one rigged. It’s usually on his front deck and often in his hand.
Drifting allows you to cover water and find feeding fish and is extremely effective for catching catfish during summer. Learn the approach of a Santee Cooper catfish guide.
“That’s the kind we want,” Capt. Brett Mitchell said with a confident smile as the stout rod I was holding bent hard and the line peeled off a tight drag. Several minutes later his assertion was affirmed as a fat blue catfish came into sight and eventually got within reach of Mitchell’s big net. Putting a 27-pound catfish is a good start to any day.
“Drag a bait around here, and you you’re going to catch catfish,” said Mitchell, who operates Fishing with Brett on South Carolina’s Santee Cooper lakes. Mitchell also guides for bass and stripers and fishes a variety of ways, but his primary summer approach is to drift the open waters of Lake Moultrie – the Lower Lake in the Santee Cooper system – for catfish.
Mitchell catches occasional channel and flathead catfish, but blue cats are the main attraction, and any time a rod bows on the Santee Cooper lakes, the fish at the terminal end might weigh 6 pounds or 60 pounds.
Don’t buy into summer doldrums talk. Late summer offers some of the best jigging spoon action of the year, with a range of presentations prompting excellent fish-catching action.
First a disclaimer: If you don’t like multi-species fishing and always need to know what’s at the end of your line, the summer spoon bite might not be for you. While you can target stripers, white bass or hybrids based on waterways and locations and typically will catch more of the target species than fish of other kinds, it’s not uncommon to catch 10 species in a day with a summer spoon-fishing approach, and any fish that wallops a spoon could turn out to be a 1-pound crappie or a 50-pound flathead.
That noted, jigging spoons provide spectacular opportunities to catch the “true bass” species (stripers, white bass and striper/white bass hybrids) during late summer, when these fish are chasing big schools of shad and herring in open water. Jigging spoons “match the hatch” very effectively and have built-in versatility that makes them solid matches for most summer scenarios with these species.
