Summer Cold Front? Here’s How to Still Catch Bass

Man, it seems like there's nothing worse than a summer cold front coming through. I mean, it just kills the fishing, right? So let's talk about this. First of all, a front, really what that is, is a leading edge of an incoming weather system. It's a change in the weather, typically from warm weather to cooler weather. Now sometimes you can even see them. You can see this wall of clouds coming at ya, right? You guys got to understand a few things of how a front affects fish.

First of all, as the front's approaching, the winds pick up. It gets a little stormy out. As it goes over, the storm can pick up. It can get a lot of rain, a lot of wind, a lot of lightning. Depending on the severity of the front. It may contain some of that or parts of it. And, as it's passing by, the fishing, actually, can get really good. It sometimes picks up and it could be great fishing. So you just want to go out there and have fun, but be cognizant of the weather, right?

I mean, being out on a boat when it's choppy out or white caps. That might not be a very safe condition to be in. Depending on your boat. If you're from the shore, it's not as bad. At least you're on the shoreline. You don't have to contend with that. But if you've got lightning coming in, then it's game over, man. It doesn't matter if you're in a boat or if you're on the shoreline. Just that's it. Get out of there. Done. You're done for the day. Don't risk a chance of getting hit by lightning just to go fishing.

But other than that, you can usually fish through the passing of a front and it does really well. It's after the front. The day after the front comes through, it's still maybe a little bit turbulent weather. And the fishing still can be okay, but not as good as it was before the front came through. It's really on the second and third day when you have those bluebird-clear skies, the wind dissipates and it can actually be just flat calm, like no wind at all. It's still. That's when the fishing gets really, really tough, okay?

Now, there's some dependencies on this. First of all, how fast a front comes through and how severe it is has a direct effect on this. A fast-moving front that just passes on through the course of a few hours versus one that goes all night long and into the next day. The second one has a more profound effect on it. The more severe the storm is, the more the barometric pressure drops after it goes by, the more the temperature drops. Typically, the cold front means there's cooler air behind it. So it's going to drop. Well, if it drops a lot, 20 degrees or more, then the severity and how brief or long that front is has a direct impact on the fishing itself.

So with those variants in mind, one more thing to consider is it affects shallow bass more than affects deeper bass. And you think about it, for every 30 feet or so of water depth, that's about one atmosphere of pressure. So what that means is the deeper you are, the less affected the fish are by that change in barometric pressure. Also, the deeper the fish are, the less the temperature changes in the water itself, right? It's more stable at deeper levels. So bass that are deeper tend to bite a little bit more than those that are shallow after a front's passed through.

Now, this leads to a misconception. A lot of bass anglers believe that when a front passes through, all the fish that were shallow, boom, vamoose, they are out of here, Jack. They vacate the shallows and they're gone. That's not true. That's not true. It's just because you can't catch fish, or you have a hard time getting a bite in shallow water and you go deeper, you can get maybe a few bites. That doesn't mean all the fish have gone deeper. It just means they're less affected in deeper water than they are shallow. Keep that in mind.

The other thing is if they're in shallow water, what bass do is they will bury up in the thickest, mangled, you know, gnarliest cover they can find and just sit in there and wait it out. They just hunker down. Now, that cover may be a few feet deeper than where they had been before the front passes through. So they might be 4 or 5 feet deeper, let's say. But that's because where the thick cover resides, not because they moved deeper because of the front, per se, if that makes sense to you, okay? So just keep that in mind. The front didn't push them deeper. They moved to the thickest cover they can find, and it may happen to be a little bit deeper.

Oftentimes it's not deeper. Sometimes they go way up in the backs of docks, the darkest parts of docks. They go up in flooded bushes, way up in the gnarly stuff, you know, flooded bush piles, things like that. That may not be at deeper water. They just found that thick cover in the same depth that they were at before. So to get these fish to bite, you have to change your tactics. And that's primarily by getting smaller lures and fishing slower.

If you're fishing shallow, instead of using that full-size jig, downsize to a smaller jig, a quarter-ounce jig, or even a finesse jig. And you don't want a lot of action. So don't use a trailer that moves a lot and wiggles a lot or maybe don't put a creature bait on it that's got all these appendages. Instead, just use a craw trailer that has very little movement, very little action at all, just to give it a little bit of bulk or even don't use a trailer.

Just keep it compact and small. The idea here is you want a very slow fall, but typically these bass in these conditions are not going to bite under, you know, as it's falling. They're going to bite after it sits on the bottom, and you have to sit there and soak it. Throw this jig up in that thick, you know, milfoil, in the hydrilla, into these mangled bushes and flooded trees and stuff. Throw it up in there, let it fall, and then just baste. Just let it sit.

And for us bass anglers, we're not used to that, are we? We like moving. We like casting. And here is a totally different approach. You got to let it sit and then you just, you know, move your rod tip just a little bit and then let it sit again and have patience. And while it's sitting there, dead sticking, not moving, a lot of times that's when it just starts to swim off. You won't feel a bite. You won't feel that tug, tug. You'll just see your line start to swim off because they just gently pick it up and just kind of saunter off. They're not in a big hurry.

So pay attention to your line where it enters the water. That's how you're going to detect the bite most often. And this is characterized by I had two buddies of mine. Both of these were my fishing partners and tournaments at different times of my life. One of them, we were in this cold front condition. They took that small compact jig I told you about. We found some flooded bushes, literally took his flipping stick and just jammed it into the bushes, and free-spooled.

Let the lure drop way down there because there's no other way to get it in there. He was putting it at the core of the bush, the very center of that bush, and dropped it down in there. And sure enough, after waiting for a few minutes, doink, doink, there it was. And of course, we had to use very stout flipping sticks, 50 pound line, you know, real strong gear to wrench them out of that stuff. But that's how we got our fish. We ended up winning the tournament doing that.

And I got a buddy of mine, a real good buddy of mine. He was a groomsman in my wedding. Quite the stick. And he and I are fishing partners for years. Well, one time we were fishing. We weren't partners in this tournament. We were in our own boats. But again, cold front went through and he's the master of the Senko. And how he won, he took the Senko, and he skipped it up under docks, let it settle down and he would sit and eat. Swear to God, he let it wait 8 to 10 minutes before even moving it.

He would just sit there, and he said, "Typically, four or five, six minutes would go by then the line would just swim off." He was doing nothing. He said he literally parked and was munching on a sandwich for all the fish that he caught. And he lapped us. He lapped the whole field. He had more than twice the weight of the second-place finisher. Just by, again, just dead sticking a Senko, skipping way back in the backs of those docks where those fish were under the shadows.

So you have to do that. That's the approach you have to do when you're really shallow. Now, deeper, you still got to do that slow approach. But, you know, downsize your lures, but you can move a little bit more. Again, the fish might be more willing to bite, but this is where finesse tactics really kick into gear. Again, you're fishing the primary stuff that you always do, right? Humps, ridges, points, drop-offs, areas with scattered boulders or stumps, right?

You got to have a cover-on structure for them to hunker into, creeks, creek channels. They might be at the very bottom of a creek channel. Typically, an area that has a steep bank. That's where they'll congregate during this time. Your bank anglers pay attention to that. But what you do here is I like to use tubes, leeches, reapers, that sort of thing, you know, small, compact baits that have no action to them, very little to no action. So get rid of the stuff that's got appendages.

Four inch finesse worms work really well. Stuff that has very little movement to them. That's what you need to do, put it on a split shot rig but here, you're fishing it different. Typically, the split shot rig, you're always moving it. But here, throw it out and just crawl it on the bottom with long pauses in between. You just move it a little bit and stop and wait a while, a couple of minutes, and then crawl it another 8 inches and let it pause for another, you know, several minutes.

Drop shot works really well in this condition because drop shot, you can pinpoint a specific piece of structure and work it thoroughly all the way around it, meticulously and slowly. Here, the drop shot, you know, you've heard me coach you guys this before. Typically, you want the weight to sit on the bottom and always on the bottom. You shake your rod tip a little bit. You want to shake the bait but not the weight. You've heard me say that before.

You just want to stick that weight down there and just move that bait a bit. Here, no, don't do any movement at all. Just leave the rod there and don't even move it. This is where you bank anglers have a distinct advantage because it's impossible to not move when you're on a boat. The wind will move your rod, even if you're anchored. If you've got any kind of wind going on or current, the boat's going to move a little bit.

And you want to keep this perfectly still and not move it at all. You're going to have a little bit of current in the water. You might have a little bit of small waves lapping up on the line, touching it. But even so, even if you don't have that, just trying to hold the rod still, you can't hold your arm perfectly still, your wrist perfectly still for 5 minutes or 10 minutes. You're going to move it. You're going to have some kind of movement.

And that's all it takes to get that bite under these conditions. So if you're from the bank, you can control that a lot better than you would if you're on a moving platform like a boat. But that's what you've got to do when you're fishing deeper water. And when I mean deeper water, I mean, 10 feet or deeper, typically. Now, if you're in Florida, okay, 2-and-a-half-feet is deep. Okay, I get it. But it's deep as relative. So the deeper water is better.

Some lakes, in this condition, deep water is deeper than 25 feet. But that's what you've got to target when this cold front comes through. And keep in mind, again, it's the second and third day is usually the worse. And then fishing starts to pick up against pretty rapidly. And you're back to fishing normal again within several days after a front goes through. So I hope those tips help. For more tips and tricks like this, visit bassresource.com.