You know in the winter time jerk baits are great bait to fish and a great place to fish them is places like your main lake banks, your bridge pilings, especially if those areas are near spawning flats. The bass tend to congregate in those areas. As the winter progresses and the water temperature gets below 47° then they transition more to those steep banks almost drop offs and those deep bridge pilings. And you know, suspending jerkbaits work really well during the winter time because they just sit there and park and they sit right in front of the bass. Problem is, most of them don't get any deeper than say 10-12 foot deep and when the water temperature gets that cold, they're now in 15-20 foot or even deeper. How do you get a jerk bait down to them because they work so well? Well.
There's a couple of ways you can do it. First of all, well, you can get a sinking jerkbait, right? I mean, here's a couple from Rapala, right? It's just they sink. I mean, very simple and effective way to get a jerkbait down to them is to fish a sinking jerkbait. So you can get those. As a matter of fact, this is kind of cool. They they come in. In in these jointed versions too. See that jointed minnow. Not a lot of guys fish these so the bass don't see them very often. So those are good little tip to use. But that's one way to get a jerkbait down there.
Another is you can weight down your existing suspending jerkbaits. You probably have those that have been so effective this year. So a couple ways you can weigh them down. One is you can use Suspend Dots. It's a little lead strips or lead dots that you with adhesive backing to them. You stick them on the underbelly of your bait. I would put them more towards the front so you can keep that angle down position. But you can just keep adding those little dots until you get enough of a sink rate to get the bait down there, very effective.
Another way is to go one size up on your hooks. I would go with Gamakatsu round bend hooks. Start with the front hook. And if that's not enough to weight it down to start syncing that bait, then go with the back cook, and if that still isn't enough, go with the middle hook. Keep in mind these weighting systems, it changes with the water temperature because the water density changes. So if you had it all figured out exactly the way you want to a week or a month ago and then you come back out, better check it again because it may have changed. You may have to adjust that weight a little bit to get it to sink the way you want to.
Another cool way to get them down there, though, is one that's not employed very often, but is to use the Carolina rig. Yeah, it's just kind of a secret among jerkbait fishermen is to use a Carolina rig. Now, stay with me for a second. I know it's sounds really unorthodox. First of all, you don't want, you know, a deep diving jerkbait like this with a big lip on it because all you're going to do is plow it into the ground. And because it's a suspending bait, it's not going to come back up. And it's a sure far away of losing, you know, some expensive crank, expensive jerk baits.
So instead what you want to use is like an original floating Rapala. Right, little jerk bait like this size #11 works just great. They float and they shallow diver, real shallow diver. So what you do is you tie it. On your Carolina rig, on the last part of the Carolina rig, from the weight to the bait, use monofilament line because monofilament floats and you tie that jerk bait to it. And then all you do is you give subtle jerks instead of the normal jerk jerk, or you know, yank yank, give it a more of a subtle jerk because you don't want to dive too much, and then it'll float back up. And then you give a little bit of a subtle jerk and it'll come down and float back up. You can reach virtually any depth and fish it effectively. This way, with a jerkbait.
And now a friend of mine, he and I discovered this. Years ago, back when the Aquaview first came out. So when is that? Mid 90s? Early 90s? And what we wanted to do is we wanted to see how fish attacked baits. And so just as an experiment, we tied 2 foot length of fishing line to the end of an Aquaview and tied a crankbait to the back of it. And we quickly realized you don't want that deep diving crankbait. And we ended up using that exact bait, the Rapala. A little jerk bait and trolled it behind the Aquaview so you could actually see it in the camera and bass would come up and annihilate that thing. They'd blast it.
And one of the things we found really interesting, by the way, is just a side note. But a lot of times the fish would come up alongside of it and look at it. Before deciding to hit it. They'd look at them, back up, and then hit it from behind. It's really interesting way. We never thought that they'd actually attack it that way, but you know, we learned that way is like, hey, guess what? We could probably use a Carolina rig to get the bait down there and fish in 45, fifty, 55 feet of water using this method. And sure enough, it worked. And it turns out there's anglers across the country that do this too. They just kind of keep it behind, you know, behind the scenes and quiet. So now you know that little trick, but there's a variety of ways to get those baits down there in the deeper zones. And you can catch a lot of fish that way.
All right, so how to fish them? If you're using the non-Carolina rig, the way to do it is you give it a couple jerks and then pause and you actually fish it a little bit faster than you would a suspending crankbait because it is sinking. So you have a time limit for one so. You give it maybe a three second to five second pause before your next jerk. Now, if you're fishing over something where the fish are suspended, say a rock pile or a hump or a creek ledge and you find fish that are suspended, you might maybe park it maybe up to 10 seconds before twitching it again. But typically it's fairly quick. And those bass, if they want to get a lure, they can move as fast as they want to to get it OK. They, they're not like they can't, oh, I'm cold. I'm a can't move very fast. No, they that can go as fast as they want to and they'll, they'll hit your lure if they want to. So 3 to 5 seconds between jerks is perfectly fine.
As for gear, one of the things that you want to use is a spinning outfit typically. Unless you really feel uncomfortable using those, I guess you could use bait casting, but typically I'm using 10 LB line which is easier to cast on spinning gear and these baits are pretty light so and they're easier to cast on spinning gear. One of the key changes I make is using fluorocarbon line. Fluorocarbon sinks and so it's going to help get that bait down there and keep it sinking. If you use monofilament, it actually floats. So that's going to prevent it from sinking. So and same with braid braids got some buoyancy to it and that's going to prevent it from getting from sinking as well. So used fluorocarbon line instead.
Your rod, 7 foot one to seven foot four length is all you really need. You don't need a super long rod for this. Make sure that it's a medium power. Fast action or it could be. You know, medium heavy power rod, but a moderate action, something like that. It's got some limber bend to it. So when you do hook that fish, you know, it’s got this tiny, tiny little treble hooks on it and so that bend in the rod is going to help keep that fish pinned. If you have too strong of a rod, it can rip the hooks out of the fish's mouth. So I'm a moderate power rod, really moderate power. Fast action is what it would be my go to, my recommendation for fishing those jerk baits.
As for for colors. Well, I would recommend having two different types of colors. One would be like a natural color and the other would be a more flamboyant color. Say for example these two. These are suspending jerkbaits, but. You know, you have like your shad color here, your bait fish and then here this is a clown color. But you can also use say fire tiger or something like that and make sure you have one color of each tied on at least because there's definite days where the bass are going to prefer one over the other and. It's not a hard rule, but generally speaking. The clearer the water or the calmer the conditions or if the sun is out. Or all of the above. The natural colors tend to work a little bit better than the bright colors, but I've seen days where they still prefer the the clown or the fire tiger, so just make sure you have a few of those handy ready to try it out.
And that's basically it. Sinking jerkbaits can be a dynamite way to catch fish, especially when all the other anglers are fishing suspending jerkbaits. So give that a try this winter and you're going to catch a bunch of fish.
Hope that helps. For more tips and tricks like this, visit bassresource.com.
