November Bass Fishing Techniques

This video is about the best ways to fish for bass in November, starting with swimbaits. Swimbaits can be killer this time of year because, you know, the bass are feeding up on baitfish and swimbaits resemble a baitfish. The key thing is in the fall, baitfish tend to be a little bit smaller in size. So, you want to use a 2.5-inch to 3.5-inch boot tail kind of swimbait. Put it on an 1/8 ounce to 1/4 ounce, like, a ball head jig will work really well. And you can fish those in a whole variety of depths and at different speeds. The thing is, they've got an open hook, right? So you don't want to fish those in weeds or in areas where there's a lot of wood because you're going to get hung up. So they're kind of made for the open water areas.

This is great because in November, this is when the fish typically are in that transition period from fall to winter. So they'll be on main lake points, they'll be on humps, ledges, ridge, steeps. Look at those steep banks, those things. You can just let the bait flutter down. You can fish it pretty much at any depth and you can match the activity level of the fish. You can fish it fast, fish it slow. A little tip is you might want to use an underspin jig as the water gets colder. Using an underspin will give it that little flash of a baitfish and a little more attractant and you might be able to catch a few more fish that way.

The next technique is using an Alabama rig or A-rig. Again, we're looking at baitfish and the baitfish ball up and they school up, and what better resembles that than an Alabama rig. Again, you're going back to those swimbaits using that 2.5-inch to 3.5-inch swimbaits. That's a good starting point with .8-ounce jig heads on your Alabama rig. Start there. And again, these are kind of hard to throw, but start there and throw it in those same areas that I mentioned before, those transition areas. This is where if you're really good with your electronics, you can find baitfish and balls of baitfish, you know, the bass are nearby and that's a great place to throw the Alabama rig. Now, you can size up. You can go with heavier jig heads. You can go with larger swimbaits if the forage demands it, if you have larger forage or if you need to really get it down deep and that's where the fish are, you need to heavy up a little bit. So, just be ready to experiment and change out some of those baits.

The key thing is you got to look at your state regulations. Not all states allow you to have hooks on every single one of those baits. Some of them have only two or maybe three. Fortunately, there's a lot of different manufacturers out there make different versions of the A-rig and sometimes, you can even swap out the wires to where some of the baits won't have hooks but others will and you can adhere to your state regulations. So, be careful about that. Make sure you have the right bait for your state rigs.

And lastly, you can't be out on the water this time of year without an arsenal of crankbaits. Again, the bass are feeding on baitfish and what's the best way to imitate a baitfish but with crankbaits. So, you need to have a variety of them to match the situation that you're in from shallow to deep. So we'll start shallow. You want to get a lipless vibrating crankbait like a Wameku Shad from SPRO. Half-ounce shad works really good for this. You may downsize to 1/4 ounce if you need to. But those sink and so, you can fish them in 1 to 5 feet of water, bounce them off of rocks along riprap, that sort of thing, or burn them near the surface if they're still chasing shad this time of year. Again, shad color, so those chrome colors and blues with the blue backs, any kind of shad color works really well. Going to the crawdad colors too, start to work really well in November here. As a matter of fact, that applies to all these crankbaits I'm mentioning. So Wameku Shad is one of them. You want to stay shallow, go with a square bill crankbait. Again, bounce it off of things, rocks, stumps, logs, those type of things. Square bills work really well for that.

So going a little bit deeper, you want a crankbait that can reach that 6 to 8-foot range. So, a SPRO RkCrawler 50 works really well for that. That hunts right in that area. It's got the perfect action and that smaller bait size profile that's perfect for this time of year. That, you want to use. And then as you go a little bit deeper, get something like a Little John 60, which gets up to maybe about 15-feet deep or so, and even deeper, a Little John 90, which can go up to 25-feet deep. These are those flat-sided crankbaits. They've got a real tight wiggle, really good in cold water, and can get down there deep to where the fish are. They've got really strong bills so you can deflect them off of things or just let it dig off the bottom if you need to. But something to give it that erratic hunting action, that is what triggers bites.

So with those crankbaits, you're going to cover the whole water column and be ready for just about anything. And with all the baits I just mentioned, you're going to have yourself an excellent November.