Pat Brown

Okay so - I really want to catch more bass this winter. I’m really, really bad at catching bass once the water gets below 50 degrees consistently. As it plummets - I tend to make out like gangbusters on crankbaits and chatter baits and frogs and buzzbaits and jerkbaits and then something about that water being below 50 seems to really upset the shad and shiners and the whole food chain seems to make these big migrations. I’m fairly certain if I can figure out where the food chain migrated to I’d have a lot better luck with the famed dead sticking technique - which has worked very very well for me - WHEN THERES BASS AROUND. I talked to a local fishery biologist via email and he said warm pockets of water form on the bottom of the lake and you get inverted thermoclines and bass will hug the bottom in these hot spots and the shad stay near them to survive all winter - in my lakes the bottoms are flat - it’s like everything is just carpeting the bottom and hanging on until the temperature above their heads rises a degree or something - it’s confusing. I’m somewhat aware that in the winter time bite windows can shrink down a lot. Is deadsticking in the wintertime gonna catch bass that aren’t feeding? Like if I’m dead sticking a drop shot worm where I am very confident there should be fish - will they hit if the shad aren’t moving around? I want to get better at locating these warm deep pockets of water so I can be more productive fishing slowly during moments when I can make a cast or two. Really want to understand fishing slow for inactive bass in colder water and I feel like location is probably what I struggle with the most! Any wisdom or experience you can share to help would be awesome and probably awesome for anyone who struggles when it gets really cold but water is still wet. Thanks!

For what it’s worth - off the topic or not - I think the discussion here is pertinent to the OP and can stimulate good critical thinking for any angler pondering color selection for more than a few seconds a day. He got lots of direct answers also - I think it was a good thread and discussion @Lottabass !

@casts_by_fly - it is often the smallest fish that teach the biggest fish long before they are ever inclined to take a swipe at our lure. I fully agree with the findings of this study and essentially - when bass are schooling and hunting they’re near impossible to catch around here - precisely because all it takes is ONE measly dink being afraid of a vision 110 and the whole 50 fish school will completely avoid it. When they’re aggressive and protective and in a more individualistic mode around their beds, leading up to spawning, while spawning and after they spawn, I feel we have our best shot at tricking a large one with an artificial lure, albeit still a tall order most of the time. I think for the most part, we catch the dumb fish even when we catch a bigger smarter fish - the really smart ones of all sizes probably almost never get caught. Different fish have different personalities etc.

okay let’s take this further, Dr Pavlov - what if the one with the string immediately delivers a nice 12V shock the minute the dog bites - or better yet - the one with the string has hooks in it and the dog gets hooks stuck in its mouth - won’t be long before the dog is afraid of you, experiments, meat, string and every other thing that doesn’t align with its biological destiny to eat and procreate the way God intended. A virgin bass may indeed go for the one that lands closest and has a string etc but they learn/become conditioned/whatever you would like to call it - fairly fast when your experiment is not conducted in an academic theoretical vacuum.

Call it conditioning call it learning call it instinct call it whatever you want - bass are much tougher to catch once they’ve been fished for a lot by a diversity of presentations. This phenomenon is much less pronounced for other freshwater and saltwater game species which can easily be caught on the bait that just caught them as they swim away. A bass doesn’t even need to be caught to become conditioned to your lure and your presentation. It can determine its fakeness from a distance visually, it can determine its fakeness by observing its school mates biting or being caught, it can directly feel that it’s fake the hard way ~ biting - but once it determines your bait is fake - it might as well be a leaf floating on the surface to a largemouth bass. Does that make it smart? Hard to say - but it ain’t the size of the brain but the kinda neuromechanical magic that’s happening behind the curtain that keeps the lights on for these critters it would appear and it works just dandy.

Attributing success to color is usually false equivalence but confidence is king, so if I was you, I’d just throw a black and blue A-rig. You won’t know til you try and nobody’s success or failure here can accurately predict exactly what will happen for you. Most of catching fish on any bait is timing and location followed by depth and speed of retrieve followed by action and profile and then I put color in the final tier of importance for the most part.

There are so many ponds around here like that I’ve lost count. I just daydream about them when I drive by and file them under what could’ve been forever. alternate plan - pretend you’re part of Florida department of environmental quality and tell her there’s some sort of bloom you need to carefully monitor for the next few years for local safety. 😂

I definitely prefer a matte jerkbait in the cold - seems to outfish a glossy one 10:1

To me it is a big deal when you can really do this! It’s hard but you learn or ya don’t catch much. I try to be “expectation-less” and often times figure things out much faster when I *listen* to the lake instead of imposing my narrative on what fish should be doing. But I still find these days to be useful lessons and often times success is something I can replicate even a year later etc. It pays to be spontaneous and present but it also pays to have experience and a good memory in bass fishing sometimes.

I am a big fan if the siebert weedless Ned head shaken around cover and on flats in shallow areas reeling it pretty fast to keep it high with a jr fluke or smaller spunk shad on the back 👍 they are as weedless as a shaky head and basically come through anything a shaky head would come through.

Was gonna say something along these lines to be honest. The church attendees must be wearing Dior. 😆

I’m having a conversation in PM with @Joedodge about this topic and I’m gonna borrow something I wrote there for this thread because I think it clarifies my POV: My experience is that if they really like a lure like a LOT LOT - *usually* all you need to do is change the profile or action or fall rate or color or size (etc) a little bit this way or that way to either be more bold/ wild/natural/etc and you can usually catch them for a few years on a bait, but eventually you might run into a situation where a population of fish that you’re constantly hammering on has learned that skirts are bad and doesn’t bite things with skirts anymore, which can be very confusing if you fish a lot of baits with skirts, etc. Sometimes I feel like a switch from silicon to living rubber frog skirt or switching from full length legs to very trimmed legs or switching to a giant frog or a tiny frog or changing retrieve cadence (or often some combination of the above!) can immediately shift from “where are the fish” to “they’re hitting the frog but not committing” to “they’re on a wild frog bite today”. You ALWAYS gotta listen to the fish when playing this game of elimination of unproductive patterns. But there are times when they just know something twitching from side to side is gonna get them and they are completely conditioned to that action and you’ve got to do something else, etc. I find it kind of amusing that people say that the whopper popper and the buzz bait are interchangeable because to me they’re completely different actions and profiles and target different parts of the water column (people forget a buzzbait is sub surface!) and even different sound profiles, so they really are different in a lot of ways except for the fact that they churn up the water on the surface to our eyes. I think sometimes you can wear them out on a buzzbait and turn around and catch more on a buzzbait when they stop eating it or vice versa - they’re pretty doggone different to a fish from what I can tell around here. BUT if I know they like a buzz bait and a whopper popper, but won’t eat EITHER anymore that’s when I start to get weird 😎👍 and fish things like a square bill just under the surface real slow and twitchy or a swim jig under the surface or a floating worm or something that presents a bait SIMILARLY but completely differently if that makes sense. What you really have to learn to ask yourself is “what part of the water column are they eating my bait?” To ME - that’s kind of where you get these overlapping things happening sometimes more than anything. You need enough alternatives in every category to show them something different that you’re good at fishing. Sometimes it’s better to be creative than versatile. It’s ALWAYS better to be a little different from things that have caught them many times but target the same general part of the water column at roughly the same speed. You know they want a buzz bait, you know they want a whopper plopper, you know they want a buzz toad, but they won’t eat any of those things anymore because of a tournament last week or because of you last year and you don’t have any more lures in your tacklebox so you start buzzing a mag speed worm and catch a seven pounder, etc. Thinking outside the box with stuff, you already have is guaranteed to show them something different rather than trying to buy the latest lure and hoping they haven’t seen it! Hope that better explains the methods to my madness! 🤣🤣🤣👍👍👍

They absolutely will prefer one thing over another for reasons that don’t make any sense to me and all I can figure is conditioning and fishing pressure alter what fish will bite and you have to kind of alter with them or you will be fishless around here. I learned being a jerkbait/jig/lipless/frog fisherman that profile and action and color and retrieve are all very important a lot of the time. I really wish - in my quest for simplicity - that one bait in each general category would suffice but it just ain’t so around here AND you better believe if you wreck them in 2025 on a bait - in 2026 - it will work less good for you on the same water (around here) I kinda like to “know what I like” and when I see something that’s what I like but a little different from what I’ve shown the fish - I’m very intrigued and tempted to try it. Case in point - 1/2 oz red eye shad is very good - so it makes sense that I’d try the 1/4 oz model in places my 1/2 oz isn’t working as well anymore and suddenly start catching them well for a spell. Little changes in bait action or profile can wildly shift success rates any given day around here.

I’m learning every year and so are the fish so it’s a fun game of cat and mouse.

same. Both the hard and the soft ones.

Well last year I qualified for the local tri city lakes big bass bash on Christmas Eve with a 7.3 on a jig and managed to not even finish last place out of the 12 qualifiers managing a 4.3 on tournament day on a jerkbait in the first 20 minutes. This year I qualified nice and early with an 8.5 also on the jig and I’m hoping that I can finish better this spring than 7th place and I’d love to requalify as early as January or February as long as our water is soft! Managed to finally get that YouTube channel up and running at the very end of the year with a lot of help from my incredibly talented wife! Next year I’d love to post more on YouTube and educate and entertain more folks while preserving memories and fun! I’d be tickled pink if I could manage another double digit bass. I’d really like my first pond double digit and I’d be tickled absolutely purple if it was on a frog! I’d be absolutely smashed if I could manage a new PB (>11.3) this coming year! If I could manage a lake record at one of my local spots I’d eat my hat! This past year I used what I had to great effect and learned more of the arcane arts of tackle prep and rod repair and reel maintenance and bait modification and was able to eek a lot out of what I had laying around (hoarded 🤣🤣🤣👍👍👍) Next year I want to continue the trend of using what works and not messing with what doesn’t in my endless quest to simplify and refine my bass fishing tactics and gear selection. Have fun - make memories. Putting Meagan and Jake on new PBs would be amazing! Continue to learn and grow and expand my knowledge of bass and how they relate to baitfish and panfish and crawfish and weather and conditions so that I can stinking catch one every now and again with all the stinking hammers on every lake now! 🤣👍❤️

Mike that fish is awesome and she absolutely is! Florida bass operate on a much different clock than most of the country historically but I caught one like that here in NC on Christmas Eve last year and I’m starting to think they drop eggs much earlier in the spring and later in the fall than we tend to ascribe to them. also really nice to see @Team9nine on them again with a giant and pop @NorCal Bassin' on a donkey too! Hoping this week the fish adjust and start to bite for me again - they been acting pretty silly with the 40 degree rain and sub freezing nights and it may be a second before I adjust with them to where ever it is they went!

Never caught a single largemouth on one but I have been fishing ultralight tackle this winter a lot so far and may give them a go when the jig minnow isn’t working.

I’d happily fish against any of yall here in Greensboro - we can all listen to muted bass laughter together while we confidently fish our very best! 👍🤣 Kristine is incredible! We have been following her for years and always enjoy any time she posts.

I have heard it said that it’s a “Florida bait” but also I catch fish everywhere with them and the water is very clear and it’s day time and I’m halfway in between Canada and Florida…. It’s a bait that gets bites! I haven’t found color to matter too much with worms but redbug and green pumpkin always seem to get bigger fish when I happen to be throwing them - but any of the watermelon or green pumpkin speed worms can be doctored with spike it markers to look more like something in the water they’re eating. i think the long slender profile with the subtle visual cue of the tail randomly flickering is pretty hard to resist for a bass in any region.

yeah the green pumpkin and redbug are my best colors but I also like the watermelon seed/red/candy variations and the June bug and black!

Ah yes being burned by fishing history is something that still happens to me! I try my best to fish the moment also - definitely helps to catch the big ones when you slow down and fish each cast with confidence and let your hunches guide you rather than past history etc! Thanks for the reminder - gotta find them where they are right NOW! 🙂👍

You’re in my prayers - keep fighting the good fight and try to keep living as much as possible.

I like the magnum because it is better with heavier hooks and I can throw it weightless on a bait caster with heavy line. It is a better top water than the regular size and it works better when I bite it down and re rig it after a fish than the smaller one. Also it has caught me piles of fish over 6 lbs including an 11 lber this year lol The magnum size still catches me tons of dinks and nice 2-4 lbers but it definitely has a giant attracting quality regardless of how you rig it.

Honestly, your situation is deeply relatable for me. I had never thrown a bait caster in my entire life when I got into largemouth bass in 2020 and honestly, I wasn’t even that great at throwing a spinning rod in terms of the accuracy and stealth required to consistently catch Bass so I had a lot of work cut out for me. I think the fact that you’re an expert at casting with spinning rods will translate really nicely and you’ll be casting bait casters proficiently in no time! Just having the ability to make multiple presentations quickly, and also the ability to winch on them in heavy cover is really nice and the ability to thumb the spool to slow the bait down has become something I lean heavily on also. I think you’re at the point in your fishing where you enjoy casting, and even though you have an advantage right now with the spinning rod, your innate abilities will reveal to you very quickly the joys and advantages afforded by a bait caster in your capable hands. Like King said you’re an angler with no real flaws or faults in your game so the only thing we have left to critique is your gear! 😜😂 You’re way past the point where we could offer you any sort of constructive criticism about casting or looking for fish or anything like that! I’m really excited to hear about your adventures working with new tools in your arsenal next year and I think that you will take to it like a fish to water…..🐟😎👍