Welcome to July. It's hot out and it is fantastic fishing. Now, the fish have their feedbag on. They only got one thing in mind and that is eating. And so, it can be a dynamite time to be out fishing. Let's start off with fishing deep. Now, you know, the fish, a lot of them, a good population of them will go deep, but it's not just going to be deep. There's got to still be something for them to relate to just like they do when they're shallow. So, take your depth finder around and take some time cruising around looking for objects on the bottom, things that the bass can relate to. These can be scattered boulders, stumps, standing timber, reefs, creek channels, creek bends. It could be bridge pilings, dock pilings, you know, a variety of things, even deep weed lines. Something the bass can relate to that's in addition to the structure. If you find a hump with a clump of weeds on it, for example, or a nice long point in the deeper water and it's got some scattered boulders on it, that's money, man. That's money. Cover combined with structure, that's what you want to do. If you only just find a stretch of bank that's just steep and there's nothing there, you know, if there's other cover available nearby, I'd probably skip that bank. Just something to keep in mind.
Now, how to fish it. Well, the first thing to do is crankbaits. Fish it fast. So crankbaits, I would break these out this time of year is when the bite really gets good. The key thing with that is you want the crankbait to dive deeper than the depth you're fishing. So, say you're fishing in 20 feet of water, you want a crankbait that dives deeper than that. Why? Well, you want it to bang off the bottom every once in a while. You want it to ricochet off, dart in one direction or another, or dig into the bottom and it just starts vibrating around. That erratic action is what's going to trigger strikes. Now, if you don't have a crankbait that dives that deep, don't despair. You can still impart action on your own. Say your crankbait only dives down to 15-feet deep, you can certainly crank it out there and reel it back in at a steady retrieve and you can still catch fish that way. But what you might want to do is see if you can impart a little bit of erratic action to it. And what I mean by that is it is going to be a stop-and-go retrieve. Just pause it for a second or two and then resume that speed. Or sometimes when you're reeling along, just give it a little pop with your rod all of a sudden, just jerk it pretty hard and boom, and then reel it up and then get going again. If you do bang it into something, you can just keep reeling. Or if you bang into something, you can suddenly change direction and reel it really fast. Or maybe you want to mimic a baitfish that's stunned, and so you bang it into something, pause it for a second, let the crankbait float up a little bit and then resume cranking it. All these things are just giving a little bit of erratic action and that's all it takes to get a bass to bite. So, practice that with your crankbaits.
For colors, you know, they're dealing with either baitfish or crawdads. So perch, bluegill is predominant everywhere in the lake. So, definitely bluegill. If your lake or river has shad in it, then obviously you want that color too. Crawdad patterns will work very well, especially if you're digging it along the bottom. Any kind of a brown-type color like a sculpin or goby, those also are good colors to pick. That's about it. Don't go too crazy. If you've got some smallmouth or spotted bass in your area, then you might want to get a chrome with black back or a chrome with blue back color as well. But that's about it, don't want to get too crazy with it.
And crankbaits, you can crankbait all day long and catch a bunch of fish that way. Now, if the bite's down a little bit, then you can slow down and you can take large plastics, Texas-rig plastics. I like to put them on a football jig or a round ball jig or dragging behind a Carolina rig. But basically that is a large-size plastic, full-size Strike King brush hog, for example. All right, big one. Those are like 7 inches long or 8-inch to 12-inch worm. You know, something bulky, something that's got some mass to it that puts off a lot of vibration in the water. Those work really well this time of year. You just drag it on the bottom with occasionally pausing and you can catch a lot of fish that way. Now, if the bite is really off, then just downsize. Go to a split shot rig, which is basically the baby sister of a Carolina rig, but now you're using 6-pound line and an 1/8-ounce weight. And smaller baits like 3-inch and 4-inch baits, put a grub behind it or a tube or a small 4-inch Finesse worm. And again, drag it on the bottom. Just because it's Finesse doesn't mean you have to go super-slow. You do slow down a little bit, but you just, you know, throw it out there and lift up and drop it down and then give it a little pause while the bait settles back down and then lift up on the rod and reel up on the line and let it drop back down. And that bait kind of flutters up and flutters back down slowly. You don't have to take an excessive amount of time to work an area with a split shot. You can cover pretty good, a pretty good amount of water. So, if you do come across one of those areas I just told you about, say you find a rock pile that's got some weeds on it now and you catch a few bass off of it with a split shot, that's when you break out the drop shot. Use the same lure as I just mentioned, but now with a drop shot, you can vertically fish them, just get on one spot and methodically fish the snot out of that area and pick off as many fish as possible. Because typically in this time of year, in July, bass are grouping up together. So, if you catch one fish, there's bound to be several others in that same area. So, make sure you work it. Don't just catch a fish and keep on moving. You might miss out on a bunch of other fish.
Another lure to use if the crankbait bite isn't going on, is take a 4-inch or 5-inch paddle tail swimbait and put it on an underspin. Yeah. I know a lot of you guys that fish underspins, you do it during the winter time, then you put them away for the rest of the year until winter comes back. Uh-uh, this time of year, the underspin can be very productive. So, think of it this way. A lot of bass are in the same areas in the summertime as they are in the winter. You just have to vary your tactics a little bit, but a lot of the same baits and rigs will work in both seasons. And this, what you do with a little paddle tail and underspin, is two ways to fish it. One is you cast out and you count down 1001, 1002 and so on. Say you get to 10, reel it back at a steady pace. If you don't get bit, then count it down to 11 on your next cast. And on your next cast, go to 12 and so on until you get bit. What you're looking for are those roaming, nomadic bass, some of them are suspending that are going after baitfish, balls of baitfish that tend to be moving around. And so, the bass are up further in the water column and they can be caught. You may be in 40 feet of water, but they'll bite at 10. So, this is a very effective lure in catching those bass.
Another way to use this lure, and it really, you know, plays into the hands of bank anglers and shore anglers, throw it out there, let it get on the bottom, and lift it up and slowly reel it. Your goal here is to keep it about 8 inches off the bottom, all the way back to you. And I say it's good for bank anglers because, you know, the bank slopes. And so you're reeling up, it's coming up as you're reeling it in. Well, you can keep it right there just off the bottom. A lot easier to do from the bank and shore line than you can in a boat. So you guys got a distinct advantage here, and this is a great lure to use if you're fishing from the shore. And you're going to catch a lot of bass that are down there on the bottom going after, you know, gobies and sculpin and crawdads and foraging around down there. This comes by them and they can't stand it, they got to bite it. So that's the different ways I would fish the bottom.
Now another way, of course, is shallow water. There's going to be plenty of bass up shallow, and you can do that all day long. If you like fishing shallow, do have at it. Provided, again, you got to have cover and you got to have the forage. Those two have to exist for the bass to be up. So cover, it can be submerged or emergent weeds like lily pads or hydrilla, flooded bushes. You're going to lay-down, stump fields, scattered rock fields, manmade structure like docks, riprap, bridge pilings and bridges. And outside weed lines also is another good area. Those areas, typically if they're near deeper water, that's going to be a hot spot. That's going to be an area you're going to want to fish pretty thoroughly.
How do you fish it? Well, I like to break out a Senko. That's like, you know, a weightless stickbait. That is the premier bait for this time of year. You just Texas-rig it weightless and you can fish it through all the things I just mentioned. You can also skip it under docks. You can skip it under overhangs. Anywhere it's shady, that's where you want to get that bait because a lot of bass will get up in that shade ready to ambush any prey coming by. So, you just put it right in their face that way by skipping it up into them.
You can use other plastics too. So, I like to use a Rage Tail Rage Bug because it has a profile of a baitfish. And like I said before, bass are feeding on baitfish. I put on a 3/8-ounce bullet sinker. I Texas-rig it, peg the sinker. And now you can go in these weeds, these flooded bushes and trees and flip and pitch to your heart's delight. Find those openings in those weed fields and plop it down in there. Fishing along docks. And you can even skip it under docks too. You can get it in all different areas and you can catch a lot of fish on this bait. So definitely have that at the ready. Brush hogs work very well, so do any kind of, you know, worms. The traditional ribbon tail worm works really well, so you can use that. Particularly on the outside weed lines, it works really well.
If you find matted vegetation, there's two ways to go after that. You can use a hollow body frog, throw it up on top, work it across the top and aim for those openings, those pockets in that matted vegetation. Bring it up to that, drop it in that open area and just let it rest. And a lot of times, the bass comes up and nails it when it happens. Look for those irregularities in those big fields because sometimes it's daunting. It's a giant mass of floating vegetation. It's like, where do I begin? Look for irregularities. Look for openings, pockets. That can be changes of bottom depth underneath. Or maybe there's a boulder there, something that breaks that up. Or you might find some weeds mixed in somewhere, some cattails or something, tules. Throw in those areas where there's a mix of different weeds and that's your concentration areas that have a high propensity to hold bass.
Another way to fish those mats of vegetation is to pitch and flip. Use again that beaver, but now take the weight and up it. You want 1/2 ounce to 1 1/2 ounce. And here, you throw it up in the air and let it come back down. And that heavy weight's going to punch a hole in that matted vegetation and that bait will fall right behind it. And because it's compact and doesn't have a lot of appendages, it doesn't get hung up on that matted vegetation. It slides right through to a hungry bass underneath. That's a very effective way. It's called punching, is that technique. And that's a very effective way of catching a lot of bass that are up underneath the matted vegetation.
Now, another fun way to catch shallow bass is with topwater lures. Oh, my goodness. July is so much fun because topwater baits are it. This is it, man. This is showtime. It's time to break out the topwater baits, particularly in a low-light situation, be that early morning, later in the evening, or maybe it's a cloudy day, or you've got some wind and chop in the water that breaks up that light penetration into the water. Whatever it may be, that's when you want to break out that topwater bait.
Now, I like to fish several of them, you know, buzzbaits particularly. Bring it across submerged vegetation like milfoil. The bass will be down in there and you can call them and draw them out from inside that milfoil. Bring it along docks, along bridge pilings, over the outside edges of weed lines. Those are very productive areas to be throwing a buzzbait. You can also throw a walk-the-dog action walking lure like a Zara Spook or a Sammy. And you can work them back at different speeds. You can go slow and sashay it or as fast just almost like a snake. You're bringing it back so quick in all speeds in between. So, vary your speeds and your cadence with those baits to figure out what the bass want.
Poppers and chuggers. It's another type of lure that I really like to throw because you can work an area very slowly, particularly let's say, docks. You know the bass are under docks, but maybe they're not as willing to come out and bite. You can sit there and work a popper in place almost and just drive them mad till they finally bite it. It can really entice them. You're looking like an injured baitfish here and they don't flounder around and move very quickly when they're injured or disoriented or when they're dying. So, a slow presentation with a popper could be just the ticket for catching those elusive bass.
And then finally, I like to use prop baits. These are bait-like baits that have a prop either just on the tail or on the front and back. And these can be worked in a variety of different ways. You can work them very slowly, quick little twitches to create a little bit of commotion and gurgling on the surface, to winding them back at full speed. And they just spraying and spitting water as you do it. And anything in between. There's no wrong way to fish them, but they do create a bit of a commotion. So, I feel they're better when there's a little bit of ripple in the water or a little bit of wind blowing or the water's dingy and it's early morning and the bass don't have as much visibility. I think those prop baits work really well during that condition.
So, those are a bunch of different ways you can catch bass during this time of year. I hope that helps. For more tips and tricks like this, visit bassresource.com.
