Go With A Beaver-Style Bait In July (How-To!)

You know, there are all kinds of soft plastic creature baits on the market, and it is difficult to choose which ones to use in July, but I'll tell you what, the one you've got to have with you and rigged on all the time in July is a beaver-style bait. Why? Well, beaver-style baits have got a profile that kind of resembles a baitfish, and also they have those rear appendages, which when you crawl it on the bottom, kind of resemble a crawdad. Bass right now, all they're doing is feeding. It's all about eating right now. And what's on their menu? Baitfish and crawdads. So a beaver-style bait fits right in those categories. So you got to have them rigged on.

Now, there's a whole bunch out there, and a bunch of manufacturers make them for this very reason, they're very popular but the ones that really bubble up to the top have the same three characteristics. One of them is that the body is wider than it is thick. So that enables it to glide a bit. Now, it's not like glide, glide, glide, but when you throw it in the water, instead of going straight down, it may kind of go off at an angle. So it kind of parachutes down, glides a little bit. So it kind of looks like it's swimming through the water.

Another characteristic that they all share is these appendages. Now, there's two different types of appendages. One of them is a flat-type appendage, and that really enhances that glide characteristic I just spoke about. The other kind have these real thin curly tail-type appendages. Some of them with little flanges on the end of them. What those do is they kind of flap around as it's going through the water. And it looks like it's swimming. And even when it's lying at rest at the bottom, those appendages are moving a little bit, especially those rear ones, which again contribute to that crawdad-like appearance.

And then finally, they all, the good ones, have some kind of scent, either scent in them or maybe a salt impregnation, something like that. Now, it's debatable whether scent or salt actually entices a bass to bite, but most people agree that it enables the bass to hold on longer once they do bite. And that enables the angler to detect the strike, gives them a little more time to set the hook. So having that scent is actually always a good thing to have.

The other thing that these bites come in is a lot of different sizes. They come in the real small sizes, which is great for finesse applications in clear water. You can fish them shallow or deep in a variety of different colors and all the way up to the really large magnum size, which works great when the water's muddied up, the visibility is down. You can use these large sizes. They put off a good profile, a lot of vibration, and displace a lot of water, which enables the bass to find them with their lateral lines, and then this large profile gives them something to hone in on in those dingy conditions. So there's a bunch of different choices within those type of baits.

In July, you have your choice. You can fish shallow or you can fish deep, you're going to find bass in both. So let's start with shallow. Shallow fishing, man, this time of year, there's abundant coverage, mostly in the form of weeds and all kinds of vegetation. You have submergent and emergent vegetation. You have hydrilla, milfoil. Putting these on a Texas rig with a bullet sinker enables this bait, it'll glide and pull through the weeds with relative ease without picking up a whole lot of weeds. So it works really well with putting it between holes and openings in the weeds, along the weed edges. Work it through lily pad fields, or maiden cane and cattails, and other type of emergent vegetation.

During this time of year, some of the weeds will start to grow up to the top and start to mat over and you're going to get this canopy of vegetation and the bass will sit up underneath there. You can use a beaver-style bait for two different ways attacking this. One is throw it up on top of the canopy and work it across the top, kind of skitter it across the top, and then drop it into openings where there's hungry bass waiting underneath. Another is to punch it through the canopy. And this is where the beaver-style bait really works really well because you use a half-ounce to one-and-a-half-ounce bullet sinker and you have the bait right behind it. Well, it's kind of an arrow shape to it. You throw the bait up in the air, it comes careening down, boom, the sinker leads it. It punches the hole and that beaver-style bait just goes right behind it through that hole to the waiting bass underneath. So that's an excellent bait for punching the vegetation.

Now, you also have flooded trees, bushes, brush piles, things like that. And you can, again, flip and pitch into all that, too. And this is an excellent flipping and pitching bait because, look, when you're, especially woody cover if you've got a plastic bait that's got a lot of little appendages on it, like a worm or a lizard, something's got really long appendages. Those can wrap up around the twigs and branches of woody cover and you're just going to rip them right off. They're going to get stuck or hung up and you pull on it, you know, you rip the tail off of it. You know, it's not very conducive to flipping and pitching that type of cover, but a beaver-style bait works excellent for that. It doesn't hang up like that.

When you're throwing it in all this vegetation you got to heavy up a bit. So get ready. Use at least a medium heavy, but a heavy power rod, 7 foot 2 to 7 foot 4. Use 40 to 50 pound braided line and you want a flipping hook on it. A flipping hook is typically a thicker gauge wire. I like to use an extra wide gap, three odd hook on these beaver-style baits, and use a three-eighth-ounce tungsten weight. I like to use green pumpkin color weight and I peg it because I want that weight to pull that beaver wherever it is. I don't want that weight to disappear, and then your bait's sitting up here. You got to get it to where the bass are. And so I peg it so I can get it where those bass are lurking.

Now you may not have vegetation all around your lake. That's fine. You can still use these in areas where you don't have vegetation. Places where, like, manmade structures like docks and breakwaters and riprap, you know, stuff like that, that may not have vegetation on it, but you can still use these baits. A lot of times what I'll do is, I'll lighten up a little bit on the weight. Sometimes I'll even go to spinning gear because I want to skip it underneath the docks. If you're good with skipping with a bait caster, you can do it that way too. But skipping it under docks, skipping it under overhanging trees, dock pylons and bridge pylons, things like that can be very, very effective with this style of bait. Flats that've got scattered boulders and scattered stumps, things like that. Again, pretty much everywhere that's got cover, the bass can be up on it and this beaver-style of bait works very effectively and all that.

Now, if you want to fish deep, typically, you're not around any kind of vegetation. So this changes a little bit the way you fish it. You can fish it behind a Carolina rig or a split shot rig for one and get it down there, usually, a 3 inch works. If the bite is really off, I go to a real small size, a mini size, particularly if it's a clear water, and put it behind the split shot rig and that works very effectively. Just crawl it along the bottom. But you can also put it on a football jig or a shaky head and work a long tapering point that goes into a creek. You can work creek channels, ledges. You can work areas where the channel swings in close to the bank. Steeper banks, wherever they may be, tend to produce better this time of year. So the steeper the drip bank or the steeper the drop off in deeper water usually works really well.

Humps and rock piles, if they've got some vegetation on or around them, that works even better. The key thing with all these deeper structure is to find some cover on them. That's the main thing. So you find these pieces of structure, and then if it's got some rocks on them or logs, stumps, weeds, even concrete pilings or either kind of a manmade debris that may be there. Anything like that, extra size boulders, big size boulders, whatever, something that the bass can relate to. It's just like when they're shallow. They're relating to all this cover. They do that down deep just because there's structure there doesn't mean they'll be there. But if there's cover along with that structure, that's the hot spot that you want to go after.

I won a tournament one year, I was fishing. I just fished points, main lake points, but it was in a reservoir, and there was a line of old weeds. It was the old weed line from the reservoir before it was filled up and it was about 25 feet deep. It was the remnants of all these bushes and weeds that were there. And I just went from point, to point, to point, fishing that with beaver-style baits and they were there and loaded the boat with them. So just look for that type of cover in deeper water and you'll score big time. So beaver-style baits, got to have them during July. I hope that helps. For more tips and tricks like this, visit bassresource.com.