How to Force Bass to Bite a Crankbait

All right, I want to talk about the three most effective crankbait retrieves — not the kind you cast and just wind out and that's the normal retrieve everybody uses.

I'm talking about three other retrieves that can be very, very productive.

First of all, starting with burning it.

Burning it means, I mean you throw it out there and you're bringing it back as fast as you can. This is typically associated with lipless crankbaits like Rat-L-Traps and you do it in the springtime. You cover a lot of flats.

That way you can cover a lot of water and when you get bit, you can slow down and you can work that area even more methodically and pick up more bites. So it works as a great search technique.

But don't limit it to lipless crankbaits.

You can do it with square bills. You can even do it with a deeper diving — I've done it with crankbaits that dive down to 10 foot, 12 foot deep — just bringing it back quick and banging it off rocks or anything on the bottom.

Just something blasting through the strike zone of that bass and hitting things erratically… it just fires them up.

And sometimes, when the bass — their bite is really slow and they're not very aggressive and you're using light line finesse techniques and fishing really slow trying to eke that bite out… sometimes just go in the opposite direction.

Grab a deep diving crankbait and just rip that thing through — making all kinds of noise and commotion — and it triggers them into biting.

It's just forces… what I call force feeding them.

You make them eat it.

That instinctive bite is what you're playing off of. If something's winging by them at 90 miles an hour, they don't have much time to think about it. They either have to hit it or let it go forever.

So sometimes that's a way of just working it, making them bite or like I said — covering a lot of water, finding the fish, and then you can slow down and work it a little bit more methodically and catch a lot more bass in that area.

Another type of retrieve is the stop-and-go retrieve.

This is pretty cool.

Sometimes the bass… I've had people ask me this: what do you do if you got the bass following it but they won't bite it? Sometimes you just give it a pause.

And suddenly that bass is following it… that thing is now right in their face.

And they either got to dodge to avoid it, or they got to eat it. They have to react to it.

And a lot of times they bite it because they're already interested in it. Why else would they be following it?

So you just give it that quick pause.

You don't have to make a long pause — just a quick one or two, three-second pause… bam… and they'll smack it.

And it also works when you're going along docks or you're going along structure — maybe a laydown log, some scattered boulders out there, or maybe patches of grass.

You can bring it up to that piece of structure or cover, pause it before you get to it, and then bring it by it and pause it again.

And if there's a bass lying in wait, sometimes that erratic movement — that change in direction or change in speed — is all it takes for them to bite it.

One thing to keep in mind is the sink rate of your crankbait when you're doing that.

Take your crankbait, put it in front of you and just drop it in the water and give it a good one-to-five-second count and get an idea of how many feet it falls per second.

Typical crankbaits fall at a rate about 1 to 1.5 feet per second most of the time.

And once you know that, when you pause it — say for example you're in 10 feet of water — you don't want to pause it for too long or it'll land on the bottom.

But if you're fishing a deeper point, then you can let it fall longer because you have longer depth to fall and you can count it down. You can get it down there.

So keep that in mind. You can play around with different structure and depth to count it down and use that pause/stop-and-go technique to your advantage.

Another type of retrieve is the yo-yo retrieve.

The yo-yo works really well for suspended bass, but it can work in shallow as well.

And here you're bringing it up with the rod tip and bringing it back down as you're reeling it back in — sometimes giving it a pause to help it go back down.

But the bait isn't going straight across anymore.

It's changing directions… changing speed… changing attitude.

And that change is often what triggers a bite.

And when those bass are suspended out, you don't have anything to deflect off of — it's just kind of open water.

So for example, they're hanging out over a point. You can use this yo-yo technique to bring it up through that school and drop it back down through that school.

Sometimes the bass want it when it's coming up. Sometimes they want it when it's coming down. Or that pause.

And if you can incorporate a pause — almost a stop-and-go — with a yo-yo technique… hey, look… guess what I'm saying here?

Think about it: you can combine these.

They're not exclusive to each other.

If you can do a yo-yo technique and put a stop-and-go in there, you can now get it to go to deeper depths… or yo-yo it deeper, deeper, deeper… or bring it back up. You can start doing that.

And if there are suspended fish over something, you can usually get it above them, below them, or right through them doing that technique.

I'm telling you guys: these three techniques — especially when you start to combine them together — can really be effective.

And you can catch a lot more fish and get a lot more bites on crankbaits than you are now.

I promise you.

Try them out. You're going to have success.

Hope that helps.

For more tips and tricks like this, visit bassresource.com.