Freshwater Fishing

YUM Bait Company is releasing 25 custom YUM Dingers colors that the fish have never seen. Learn more!

Sometimes a wild looking soft plastic color gets the nod, especially during the spawn. The answer for this equation is the new pattern Jello Shot. This delicious looking color features a deep red tint with added dark blue and black flake to cause any wayward bass to stop and stare.

Money is money, right? Right! This baby looks just like freshly minted green money, which is exactly what you will earn if you toss this Dinger in a tournament one Saturday morning this Spring.

Jello Shot and Money are two of 25 YUM Dinger custom colors that have been created by YUM Bait Company and released on Lurenet.com. Custom colors fill situational niches and allow you to show fish something they’ve never seen. The custom soft plastic bait program is beginning with the 5-inch YUM Dinger, YUM’s most popular bait. Rest assured, though, that more fabulous colors in other YUM baits will follow.

Fishing from marinas and other docks provides a great way to consistently catch crappie during the coldest time of the year. Here’s everything you need to know.

You will never hear Chris Edwards call himself a winter crappie dock-fishing expert, but considering this avid outdoorsman’s history with the activity and the container of splashing slabs hanging in the water nearby, there’s no doubt he could.  

Edwards has a lifetime of dock fishing experience across Oklahoma that began in his youth when his parents had a place on Grand Lake O’ The Cherokees. Thereafter, he’s always had a dock somewhere in the state – Texoma, Keystone, Ft. Gibson and Eufaula. He’s made sure of that with one season and one purpose in mind: January to March crappie fishing.

As winter progresses and light penetration under the ice lessens, rattling sounds and glow become extra important for helping fish find your baits and for triggering strikes.

With several inches of snow atop ice that’s more than a foot thick and the fish near the bottom, nearly 30 feet below, there is no sunlight to make a metallic spoon shimmer, and it’s tough for fish to see even the boldest lure color unless a lure is almost touching them.

Predator fish find forage largely by hearing, sensing vibration with their lateral lines and via scent through the heart of winter. Lures that rattle deliver critical sound. Tipping lures with natural bait provides scent. Don’t stop there as you consider ice offerings, though. Lures that glow bring the fish’s sense of sight into the equation and help them find your lure even in the darkest of waters.

Learn the secrets of 3 highly successful anglers who are especially adept and catching crappie and other panfish through the ice.

Although hundreds of miles separate the favored hard-water fishing haunts of avid anglers Nicole Stone, Doug Sikora and Ryan Suffron, it seems the geography is the only distinguishing difference among the three’s passion for catching crappie and other panfish through the ice.

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.

Bandit Lures’ newest walleye lure opens a once-secret strategy to every angler and provides a highly valuable walleye trolling lure, especially during the pre-spawn period.

A lure designed for trolling, but also engineered to suspend in the water column? With trolling being a generally steady approach, it might seem like those concepts contradict one another.

In truth, a suspending lure is critical to innovative strategies used secretly for many years by select walleye anglers in the Great Lakes Region and Zander anglers in Europe. Until now, these anglers had to custom weight their favorite Bandits to suspend, which is a touchy process when lures must remain properly balanced and true running to be effective, and it is not something most anglers would want to take on.

That’s why in-the-know anglers have been begging Bandit for suspending version of their favorite trolling lure and what led to the development of the Bandit Suspending Minnow. Let’s take a closer look.

Learn how crappies, bluegills and perch move as winter progresses and discover the best ice fishing strategies for capitalizing on that understanding.

The progression of winter delivers changes beneath the ice, and as conditions change, fish must move to new spots and alter their behavior. Finding ice fishing success through mid-winter begins with considering the transformation that is taking place and adjusting accordingly with locations and strategies.

Fish Ed and Destination Fish host Jon Thelen spends much of his awake time on the ice throughout winter, whether scouting, filming or testing lures, so he has an outstanding sense of how fish behavior changes as ice season progresses. In Minnesota, where Thelen does the most fishing, changes in panfishing scenarios become noteworthy late in December and early in January.

Bait School Bite Spec

Lure: The Smithwick Devils Horse in Big O Bream

Bait School Bite Spec

Lure: The Bandit 300 in Spicy Craw