Part 1
The water is gray and unrevealing. Cool air brushes face and fingers. Trees are just beginning to emit faint green wavelengths. The sky is cloudy, threatening rain. The water temperature is 48°F, and the air is about 54°F. Largemouths are on the prowl, making up for energy deficits created throughout winter. The dogwoods won’t bloom for almost a month. Fecund and round with eggs, female largemouths attain apex in the curve that follows their weight over the entire year.
“The lure” for largemouths from early spring until the spawn and again during early postspawn is a suspending minnowbait. Worked correctly, it entices big females that bypass jigs, plastics, even live bait. A suspending jerkbait is not a dock bait. Or a tree bait. Or a precise weedline bait. It isn’t meant to target specific spots or objects. (Not that it can’t, but other things work better.) Suspending jerkbaits are coverage baits. Distance baits. In fact, long-distance baits. Tools best used to address scattered fish on flats. Ergo, 10-pound braided line is the right choice for delivery——strong enough but thin enough to cover gaping gulfs of distance far better than a much thicker 10-pound monofilament.
Braids pull jerks deeper than mono. Usually that’s a plus. However, small jerks almost demand monofilament. Objects at rest tend to stay at rest. Larger jerkbaits require more force to move them from a motionless, standing start. Gel-spun polythylene braids have very little stretch. Most of the force exerted on one end of the braid is transferred to the other end. Monofilament stretches and absorbs some of that force. A jerkbait sitting still under 5 feet of water 80 feet away from the angler will react one way on braid, another on mono with the same amount of force applied. With mono, subtle rod action may not move a suspending bait at all. Yet, the barest twitch is transferred to the bait with braided line. Which is important because, for early-season largemouth bass, small twitches, long pauses, and subtle actions trigger most of the strikes.
Small jerkbaits run shallower, leaving more line out of the water or close to the surface. At closer range and offering less resistance, small jerks can be overpowered with braid, sometimes turning over or spinning. When distance and small baits are both required, I continue to use braid, but I scale way back on the amount of force applied to the bait. As a general rule, however, small suspending baits just work better on monofilament, No matter which size, fluorocarbon leaders are important in spring because the lure may need to sit still for long periods of time. Fluorocarbon is harder for fish to see and it sinks, helping keep lures down. In order to tie a 10-foot, 10-pound test fluorocarbon leader to a braided line, the braid should be coated or the knots won’t hold.
I use Berkley FireLine, and I tie a spider hitch at the end of it, creating a 10-inch loop that can be doubled together and tied as one line, to better duplicate the thickness of the fluorocarbon. I use 10-pound Ande, Raven, and Toray fluorocarbons. Su btle presentations rule most of the time. While many believe that suspending baits appeal only to aggressive bass, they turn more neutral fish than any other hardbait. Worked correctly, jerkbaits will overcome reluctance.
Making it work requires some skill at tuning, presenting and maintaining a suspending arsenal of baits. Tuning Smithwick Suspending Rogues and Rapala Husky Jerks are my top choices for early bucketmouths. These are not premium baits, which tend to maximize erratic action. That’s fine in late spring, all summer, and into fall, but not so good in early spring. These two standard baits require more force to “walk the dog.” Hard to overwork Husky Jerks and Rogues. And premium baits require a steel-wire leader, otherwise pike will be displaying them as facial jewelry all over the lake at your expense. Matzuo Prism Shads, Lucky Craft Pointers, Yo-Zuri Twitchin’ Minnows, Strike King Wild Shiners, and many others comprise the list of tools in this category. A variety of c haracteristics divides these baits with regard to action, running depth, buoyancy, size, and weight. Work them beside the boat to see how differently each reacts to the same rod motion. I endorse them all. Variety is the spice of life.
Sometimes a bait that slowly rises catches far more bass than one that suspends perfectly. That bait also works better in extreme shallows, where it can float away from weeds and wood. (Develop a slow hand with a soft touch and you can tickle these things through some nasty stuff.) Sometimes the bait that suspends perfectly is best. Variety is key. Generally, however, suspending baits trigger best when they rest horizontally during a pause in water temperatures under 56°F. To tune a bait for buoyancy requires Larvae Lace or a few Storm SuspenDots. Larvae Lace, a thin lead “tape” that fly fishermen use to create aerodynamic sinkers on their leaders, can be wrapped around the shank of the front or middle treble to level a bait that rises too fast. This adds action to the bait, too. Storm SuspenDots are little lead stickers with adhesive on one side. Use them to level a bait by placing one Dot or a half Dot right on the seam. Attach to the underside of the nose of a bait that rides nose up, or to the tail of a bait that hovers nose down. Be careful to center Dots precisely on the seam or centerline of the belly, to keep the bait in perfect balance.
Some say SuspenDots kill action by weighing down the body of the bait, but that isn’t always bad. Adding precisely enough SuspenDots or Larvae Lace to a jerkbait that floats can make it neutrally buoyant. Neutral buoyancy is critical when hunting either largemouths or smallmouths in spring, especially during prespawn. Most days, these sensitive baits work better when they suspend perfectly for long periods in cold water. Wild side-to-side action is rarely a plus when the water is 45°F or anywhere in that vicinity. The best action is no action in late winter or early spring. To consistently score big, making long casts, pull the bait immediately down to its running depth and pause it for 20 seconds to two minutes. After each long pause pull the lure forward slowly, about 8 inches at a time. Pull just fast enough to make the lure work side-to-side, then stop. Keep the line semi-taut.
Most strikes occur during the pause, and feel like minor temors walking up the braided line. The tell-tale shock of a strike is slightly more perceptible than wave action on your line some days. On other days, bass may jerk the rod right out of your hand, but don’t count on it. You might twitch the bait with two gentle downward snaps of the rod tip rather than pull it tediously forward, but move it no more than a foot. In clear, cold water, smallmouths and largemouths tend to slowly approach a perfectly suspending bait and stare at it. If it moves too quickly, they approach no further. If it jumps too suddenly out of a pause, they turn away. During prespawn, suspending baits tri gger strikes with a shudder, a nod, or a pathetic, almost imperceptible twitch, as opposed to a constant snap-snap-snap. The key in cold water is neutral buoyancy. The bait has to stay down without being manipulated for several minutes. Adding precisely the right amount of weight, sometimes trimming SuspenDots in half or tweaking the amount of lead added to the shank of a treble, can be critical. Rogues and Husky Jerks are notorious for floating slightly right out of the box. When a jerk is manipulated in cold water, it triggers more strikes with less flash, less action, less roll, less movement, less of everything.
Adding scent is important in cold water, too. As the weather warms, add more action to the bait by pinching the eye with a plier. Squeeze the eye (line tie) coming out of the nose of the fait, flattening the loop slightly into an oval, and bend it downward slightly. This adds more erratic action. Of course, you can simply choose baits that are more active right out of the box, like a Lucky Craft Pointer or Rapala X-Rap.
Next week: Location and Fine Points of Presentation.