Fishing Tips

You read that title correctly. The BOOYAH Covert Series spinnerbait has some new options for when things go “dark.” The new Night Time Series Covert has been added to the line for night fishing or when water gets extremely muddy.

When asking Jason Christie why this addition had to be made to the line, he jokingly said, “to fish at night…”, but after some laughs, he gave me some real knowledge of why this lure had to join the ranks with the other highly successful Covert series models.

With so many excellent lure options, picking the best lure can be challenging. These five lures will handle a host of commons early season bass fishing situations.

Spring is a great time to be on the water fishing for bass, but in ways it almost seems too good. Every spot seems like it should hold fish, and many lures seem like they ought to produce. While just casting your favorite lure close to whatever looks good sometimes produces bass, the truth is that bass follow predictable patterns during early spring, and intentional consideration of those patterns can help you catch far more fish.

We talked with veteran bass angler and lure designer Frank Scalish about early spring strategies and the key lures that keep him catching bass from the time the fish start moving from winter holding areas until they are on their beds.

There is no other lure more synonymous with big bass in the pre-spawn then the suspending jerk bait, and arguably even more so the Smithwick Suspending Rogue in its many varieties and styles! A suspending jerk bait mimics a dying minnow to a tee by giving off struggling movement coupled with dramatic pauses which big bass can’t resist.

In this short blog we are going to give you some helpful tips on how to effectively choose and use the right suspending jerk bait for your type of fishery.

Choosing the right float and rig allows for targeted presentations that produce excellent catches of sea trout and other inshore saltwater species.

“It’s the old time way to fish for trout around here. What everyone use to do,” Chris Holleman said as we stood side by side on the back deck of his boat, watching pole floats drift slowly away from us.

“And it’s a great way to catch fish,” he added with a smile as his float shot under and he set the hook into a sea trout.

Float fishing with large slip-style floats like Thill Big Fish Sliders and Weighted Pole Floats, allows you present live bait just off the bottom, where trout like to feed, and to effectively work areas to locate schools of fish. It produces well year ‘round but is especially effective during winter, when spotted sea trout (also commonly called speckled trout) tend to congregate in deeper holes in tidal creeks, rivers and canals.

Very small jigs can make a very large difference for winter crappie fishing, whether you fish through the ice or fish open water. Learn how.

With a sub-zero forecast for a mid-winter Sunday, services were cancelled at Chris Edwards’ church. So what did he do? He went fishing, of course, and that turned out to be an excellent decision. Using double rig of Electric Chicken Itty Bit Swim’Rs on 1/48-ounce heads, the Broken Arrow, Oklahoma angler caught more than 100 crappie that day.

Winter crappie fishing offers definite challenges. Chilled fish won’t expend much energy to feed, and they can be pretty picky. Edwards has learned, however, that by downsizing jigheads and baits and using decidedly subtle presentations, he can continue to enjoy excellent crappie action through the coldest part of winter.

Landlocked stripers can be a pretty difficult puzzle to figure out in the heart of winter, but if you play your cards right you can stumble on some of the most fun bites of the year! By play your cards right I mean chucking the YUM Flash Mob Jr as much as possible, it seems to put the best cards in your favor during the coldest times of year. It is certainly the large part of the how in how to catch the most stripers.

Most anglers luck into a striper every few trips while bass fishing in the winter, but you can increase those odds with a few helpful tips. These tips all have to do with location, proper equipment, and style of fishing.

Learn to locate crappie-holding cover and the best techniques for making those fish bite.

Crappie are interesting little fish who bundle up tightly around cover in the coldest parts of the year, making them easy to locate using your graph. But how do you fish for crappie vertically? From technique to equipment, I’ll tell you how, with four helpful steps from start to finish in this blog!

1. Locating cover

This is by far the most important part of learning how to fish for crappie vertically and seems pretty simple. But, it’s not! Crappie tend to look for certain types of cover, be it free standing timber you can visibly see, or brush that has been placed in depth zones by other fishermen. The easiest finds are obvious trees sticking out of the water in the right depths. Typically, crappie dwell in the 10-20 foot range in the winter, so finding timber that exists in that zone can be very productive. The hardest kind of timber to find is sunken timber or brush piles. For these you need to use the electronics on your boat. Preferably structure scan, but regular sonar can find brush piles as well. The best places to check for sunken brush are off the edges of points, flats, or near boat docks. Identifying crappie on top of the brush is not always the easiest task, but they can be differentiated from most other fish. Crappie tend to bunch up tall on top of the brush or around it, so there will be several small dots tightly packed together.

Heavy metal jigging lures, including spoons and blade baits are among the best lures for catching bass in cold water – IF you know the right techniques!

There is a lot of fishless water in the winter. -Frank Scalish

Sounds like a gloomy outlook, but it’s not. In fact, the opposite is true, and understanding this aspect of winter bass fishing is key to tapping into what can be some of the fastest fishing action of the year. It also explains why Scalish really likes jigging spoons and blade baits, like a Heddon Sonar, during winter.

“Fishless water is a bad thing if that’s where you’re trying to fish,” said Scalish, a legendary Ohio angler and lure painter and former nationally touring bass pro. “But where you find them, you find a bunch of them, and the fishing can be really good!”

Winter bass often relate to shad and hold tight to bottom structure, and spoons and blade baits work wonderfully for winter bass fishing because you can work that zone precisely and imitate shad that are winter chilled or even dying in the cold water.