Jerkbaits

[Xi Bowhunter]

What are your favorite jerkbaits for fishing this time of the year? I am really into fishing with the rapala x-raps.

Are you using suspending jerks?

[shot'm&hook'm]

You know what I'm useing the LC pointers. I bought a new one It's a LC Stacey King edition I haven't had a chance to use it much yet though! It has a weird motion to it I'm not real crazy about but it might be better in warmer weather! How do those X-Raps work? I been thinking about getting some! and what colors you useing. I've learned right now not to realy jerk them but the real-pause technique works a little beter in this cold water!

[Xi Bowhunter]

You know what I'm useing the LC pointers. I bought a new one It's a LC Stacey King edition I haven't had a chance to use it much yet though! It has a weird motion to it I'm not real crazy about but it might be better in warmer weather! How do those X-Raps work? I been thinking about getting some! and what colors you useing. I've learned right now not to realy jerk them but the real-pause technique works a little beter in this cold water!


Those X-raps are a "slash" bait. They are suspending, so you give the bait 2-3 quick jerks, then let it set for several seconds. I really like the pearl color, it seems to be the most attractive to the fish.

[wackemandstackem]

Rattlin' Rogue

[Xi Bowhunter]

Rattlin' Rogue

THAT was the other one I was trying to think of earlier. I use that type too.

[shot'm&hook'm]

where you get those? what do they look like and what depth do they run?

[str8 shot]

i like rapalas and smithwicks...clown colors are working best for me right now in the 10ft range suspending

[mcdenney]

Rattlin' Rogue

Ah sukie, sukie!

[buzzbaiter83]

A suspending smithwick rogue, orange bottom. silver body with black stripes.

[HalfBass]

For Bass, I like to use a 1/4-3/8 oz. black & blue jig with a small pork trailer. Fished reeeeeaaal slowly near deep cover. It gets those lethargic fish to bite.

[drakeshooter]

Here is a great article from the Paducah Sun Outdoor section on jerkbaits, along with an accompanying picture of a Kentucky Lake smallmouth caught on one:


Saturday, March 08, 2008

All things don't necessarily come to he who waits, but sometimes bites from good bass do.

This time of year, water temperatures remain numbingly cold and bass are still sluggish but interested in moving to where some of the first signs of approaching spring can be felt. As bass gravitate to shallower water to seek comfort where the chill is moderating, the jerkbait-and-wait approach can work wonders.

The jerkbait is a skinny, elongated minnow plug of the sort that most hard lure manufacturers include in their product lines. It’s a staple because the shape of the bait and the action it produces make it a proven fish catcher.

As applied to cold water tactics typical of now, the routine jerkbait might be a 3/8-ouncer with either a short (most) or long (some) diving bill. Many of them now come in factory-weighted versions to produce neutral buoyancy, meaning that when a bait is being retrieved and stopped, it will tend to hang at its present depth, neither floating upward nor sinking.

The late winter and early spring jerkbait pattern calls for targeting water off steeper main lake shores where bass may move to soak up warmth where the water might be a few degrees warmer than the darker depths as yet unaffected by any periods of milder weather or sun exposure. The standard approach is to cast the jerkbait off one of these shores, crank the diving lure down, then stop it — working it back with a series of line-swishing wrist twitches while reeling between poignant pauses.

The crux of the method is that it keeps the lure in the area of the fish longer, it replicates the struggles of shad succumbing to the cold, and the pauses are particularly effective in tempting cold, lethargic bass to chase faster-moving prey.

Last weekend, Kentucky Lake local anglers Ron Lappin of Calvert City and David Harris of Mayfield topped a jerkbait-heavy field of anglers to win a season-opening River City Bass Club tournament with a five-fish limit weighing 20.55 pounds. All the winners’ fish came on jerkbaits.

“We caught 13 keepers, every bite on jerkbaits,” said Lappin, himself a tournament director for FLW Outdoors. “We might have had one of those catches of a lifetime, because I lost two other fish, one at the boat that was between 5 and 6 pounds, and another that I couldn’t even move toward the boat.”

The lures used were a long-lipped Berkley Frenzy jerkbait — custom painted by Paducahan John Parks — and short-billed Frenzy and LuckyCraft jerkbaits. They produced in water between 46 and 49 degrees.

Some of the better fish were taken as deep as 8 or 9 feet on the spoonbilled jerkbait fished with strong, yet small-diameter 8-pound fluorocarbon line.

Lappin credits an agreeable cadence — the pattern of twitches and pauses — for catching the winning bass. He spoke of a single, double and triple twitch pattern combined with pauses of six to eight seconds as working in that tournament.

“Other times, you may have to wait as long as 30 seconds between twitches,” he said. “When I’ve guided people doing this, I’ll say, ‘Twitch, now stop and talk to me a while — now twitch again.’ You’ve got to make yourself wait long enough sometimes.

“When you think you’re fishing slow enough, slow down some more,” he said.

Lappin said a key to productive jerkbaiting is to fish different cadences, but only one pattern on any give cast until the fish responds to a particular combination of cadence and pause length.

“Once you get a bite, you can figure out what they want on any given day,” he said. “Then you can do that over and over.”

Lappin said prime water for jerkbaiting are locations where a warming trend, particularly direct sunlight, has been raising the water temperature off a sharply sloping rocky shoreline near deep sanctuary water. The rock along the shore will absorb sunlight and radiate a bit of warmth into the surrounding waters. The fish sought typically will suspend back away from the bank and a few feet down from the surface.

“If you can cast all the way to the bank, you’re too close,” Lappin said. “I really look for the fish to be about 1 1/2 boat lengths back off the bank. But there’s no set pattern to location. You just have to fish until you catch one and figure out where they are from that.”

Lappin said the fish that won the River City Bass tournament came from the sides of pointed gravel bars that extended from shore on the eastern side of Kentucky Lake.

“The spots that usually produce first are the little pockets on the main lake because they are able to warm up first,” he said. “The best thing is usually to start on the little pockets, and start on the most dominant feature there, which is usually the point at the start of a pocket.”

Steve Vantreese can be contacted at 575-8684.

http://i30.photobucket.com/albums/c334/drakeshooter/smallmouth.jpg