It's June, one of the best months of the year for bass fishing. Why? First of all, bass are very active this time of year. A lot of them are recovering from the spawn, and they're feeding up heavily. Other ones are getting their summer pattern, and they're chowing down on the available baitfish and all the fry and minnows. There's abundant forage out there and the bass are just gorging on it. It's also a good time to fish during this time of the year because they're in every range of the water column. They can be really shallow, just recovering from the spawn or maybe they're raiding bluegill beds, and they can also be deep. And it's really up to you. This time of year is, like, however you want to fish. Typically, you can go and do it and catch fish.
So if you're a shallow guy, there's about four baits that really rise to the top that work really well this time of year in the shallow water, starting with a soft plastic stick bait. These, like a Senko, YUM Dinger, that type of thing, you can fish them pretty much anywhere, especially if you rig a Texas rig weightless. You can skip them under docks. Anywhere there's shade, so under docks or overhangs, it works very, very well, or if they're even in the weeds or any kind of cover, brush piles, laydowns, that type of thing, you can cast it up and around these areas and not worry about getting hung up and just let that lure do its thing. Let it drop on a slack line. Don't reel it in and work it very hard. Just let it fall. And as it falls, it does the job, and the fish will come out and grab it and take off and run off with it. It's so much fun to fish this way. And the areas where you can fish are basically limitless. A wacky style is another way you can rig it and catch a lot. That's a very popular way of rigging them, and it's because it works. That's with a hook right through the middle, and you can catch a lot of fish that way.
Another lure that works really well this time of year, some people might be surprised by it, but a hollow body frog. And the reason I say this, there's a lot of people that might be surprised, is because most people think a hollow body frog is only for matted vegetation, which happens to occur later in the summer when the weeds start to mat over. No, no, no, no. I start using frogs when the water temperature gets to about 55 degrees. Okay, they work very well in open water as well or scattered vegetation or across lily pad fields or anywhere where the bass can get into cover, like, again, laydowns, weeds, any type of flooded bushes. You can throw a hollow body frog around. They don't get hung up because the way the hooks are designed on them, they don't get hung up on anything. And you can work it around this thicker cover, and you can draw fish out from that. And, boy, it's a lot of fun.
You can do it all day long too, which is that's the fun part here in June. The bass will stay up there in the shallows in that cover, and you can catch them all day long on a hollow body frog. The key is when they bite, don't set the hook right away. You see this explosion. Wait until you feel the fish tugging back on you, then you set the hook. If you set the hook before, then you're likely going to have this frog coming back at your face. There's no fish attached. It's not fun. So hollow body frog is one.
Another one is jigs. Jigs work year-round, of course, and it's no different in June. Jigs work very well around thicker cover, especially shallow cover where it's flooded bushes, brush piles, timber, any kind of laydowns. Anything like that where the bass can get up into this time of year and ambush baitfish coming by is a really good area to be throwing a jig. And just like a quarter-ounce, a three-eighth-ounce jig with a craw trailer on it, standard browns and green colors work very, very well. You pitch them and flip them into this cover where the fish may be hanging out. A lot of times, right after the spawn, that's where they go immediately. They don't go to deep water right away. They're spawning, recovering, and feeding on available forage, and they go into this cover during this time of year. And you got to go and dig them out with jigs.
Texas-rigged creature baits, for that matter, work just as well. You can fish brush hogs and beaver-style baits. I mean, there's so many different creature-type baits out there. There's a whole litany of them, and they all work very well. Green pumpkin is the main color to throw. Watermelon seed is another one. Throw it on a three-eighth-ounce bullet sinker Texas rig, and you can pitch it into this heavy cover where the bass are hanging out or in the weeds or on weed edges and not get hung up. And a lot of times, what happens is the bass are very aggressive, they're going to hit it during the fall. So be ready for that hit. Don't wait for the bait to hit the bottom. Sometimes the bass already has it by then, and the only way you can tell is by watching the line. See if that line twitches and moves away or docks to one direction. And you didn't do that. You know, if a bass got it, he runs off with it, bass is causing that. So reel up that slack, boom, pop them. You got yourself a fish. So those are four very productive baits to use in the shallow in June.
If you like to fish deep, well, deep is relative, right? If you're in Florida, four feet is deep. But for the rest of us mere mortals who don't live in Florida, deep is usually about 15 feet or deeper. And now you're fishing structure more than you are any kind of weeds. So points, humps, ledges, ridges, creek channels, channel swings that come up to the bank, those are the type of things you'd be targeting, and there's several baits that work very well for this. One of them is crankbait. Crankbait works exceptionally well. I probe the depths with these deeper diving crankbaits using shad, bluegill, or perch pattern crankbaits.
Now, if you've got a lot of wind involved, I like to throw a little bit of crawdad in there as well, because crawdads, the wind gets all the organic material going, and that brings the crawdads out to feed. And so you'll see more crawdads out during that time. So a crawdad pattern of crankbait can work very well when the wind is up. But you cover these points, and especially if you've got some scattered boulders or stumps on these pieces of cover that I just mentioned, even better, something to hold the fish, or you've got a patch of grass on top of a hump. And you can fish around the edge of it or bring a Rat-L-Trap across the top of those weeds. And it can be a heck of a lot of fun.
Football head jigs is another bait that works very, very well. Here, you crawl it along the bottom imitating a crawdad. Football head jigs, as you bring them along the bottom, they kind of wobble back and forth. So put a craw trailer on the back and you've got yourself a perfect craw imitator. Use the browns and the green hues. And again, work those same areas I just mentioned. You can work them either just crawling it, dragging it on the bottom, or with short hops. Make it look like a little crawdad that's hopping along the bottom. They do that sometimes, especially in the warmer months. They flick their tails and they move across the bottom that way. So little quick hops like that can also entice a strike.
And what would I be saying when I'm covering all these things if I did not mention finesse tactics? Especially in deeper water, you can use a split-shot rig. You can fish a split-shot rig almost as fast as a crankbait. A lot of people think finesse means slow. But with a split-shot rig, you can cover a lot of water with a smaller bait. So, like, a three-inch grub is very, very effective. It's one of the original ways we used to fish split-shot rigs back in the '80s. You cover these points and drop-offs and all these other areas I mentioned. You cast out, get it down there, and just do a steady reel. And it doesn't have to be on the bottom. It just has to be near the bottom. But a slow, steady reel, working that grub all the way back works very well.
A tube is also a great way. It kind of imitates a crawdad. And you can lift and drop, lift and drop, slowly lift it, slowly drop it, and cover water that way. You don't have to let it sit and bake like you would a drop shot. A drop shot is more for targeting specific areas. If you've been working these faster-moving baits across the hump and you get bit three or four times and the bite dies off, now you go to a drop shot and you can work that specific hump slowly and cover every single inch of that hump with a finesse worm or a tube or something like that, a small creature bait, three-inch, maybe a minnow, something like that on a drop shot, and just gently work it and twitch the rod tip a little bit, let it sit and hang out, and let it sit and hang out. And entice those fish that aren't aggressive. You've picked off the aggressive ones with those faster-moving baits. Now get the less aggressive ones with the drop shot. And at the end of the day, you can catch a whole plethora of fish off one piece of structure, be it a point or anything else, by using that approach in deeper water.
So June can be a heck of a lot of fun because you have all these different ways to catch fish, and most of them all work in any given time. So go out there, have a blast, and I hope these tips help. For more tips and tricks like this, visit bassresource.com.
