Having trouble getting bites on blades? Put these tips to work, and that’ll change in a hurry.
Outside the occasional marsh bass that falls for my redfish spinnerbait, I can’t tell you the last time I had a really good spinnerbait bite in a lake or river. Several years ago, it was nothing to fish down a brushy shoreline at D’Arbonne Lake, and get several bites in one pass.
When I left North Louisiana in 2005, I couldn’t buy a bite on a spinnerbait at D’Arbonne — or anywhere else for that matter.
Am I the only one? I’ve got to think that I’m not, so I started asking around to see what some other bass anglers were thinking. Turns out, I’m not the only one. More than half of the anglers I unscientifically polled reported spinnerbait problems. The minority just looked at me and shook their heads and laughed.
So, what gives? Do largemouth bass still bite spinnerbaits? Is the bite gone? Has the undisputed most-versatile lure in bass fishing gone the way of the Jitterbug, Hula Popper and Hawaiian Wiggler?
Or like those oldie-but-goodies, do they still produce bass after bass for those who know when, where and how to fish them? Have bass just quit biting spinnerbaits for some of us, or is the spinnerbait bite just harder to find?
“The bite is as strong now down here as it’s ever been,” said Nitro Pro Team member Dennis Tietje from Roanoke. “What’s changed, I think, is that the fish have repositioned because the structure and cover have changed. The bite hasn’t stopped; we just have to adapt to these subtle changes that have changed the spinnerbait bite.”
Another spinnerbait veteran who has been a force throughout the local North Louisiana bass tournament circuits is Kenny Covington from West Monroe. Covington, like Tietje, was one of those who had to subdue a snicker when asked if the spinnerbait bite was gone for good.
“I think there’s the misconception that the bite is gone because few anglers up here fish them anymore,” Covington theorized. “It’s not the ‘in’ thing to do right now. Spinnerbait fishing is becoming a lost art because everybody wants to stroke their egos by saying they caught them on a square-bill crankbait or a Sweet Beaver or a, well, take your pick, but it ain’t a spinnerbait.”
There’s no doubt that bass are a lot smarter today than they were just a few years ago. It takes more to trick them into hitting an artificial lure, and slinging the same chartreuse/white tandem Colorado/willowleaf spinnerbait where you slung it with great success last year won’t even earn you a sniff this year.
If you’re not a struggling spinnerbait angler, you can take the next few minutes to feed the dog, take out the trash or do something really important like organize your tackle. However, if you are a struggling spinnerbait angler, then these tips should help you get your spinnerbait swerve back.
1. Try a single willowleaf
Let’s face it; the vast majority of spinnerbaits thrown today have a small Colorado blade in front of a larger willowleaf blade. Think the bass aren’t wise to what this sounds like coming through the water? Think again.
“Something as seemingly little as removing that front Colorado blade can make a huge difference,” Covington said. “Bass get used to sensing the same old lures coming through the water, and if it’s something that’s burned them before, they’ll tend to avoid it in the future.”
One of Covington’s spinnerbait secrets is to throw either a 1/8- of 3/16-ounce Stanley or 1/4-ounce Mr. Hooty spinnerbait with a white skirt and a No. 3 sliver willowleaf blade on it. He has used this small-package bait everywhere from catching small school bass to catching giant females that move up to feed during late-winter warming trends.
Covington believes the allure of his white single-willow spinnerbait is that it looks very much like the baitfish that inhabit most of the lakes he fishes in North Louisiana, which tend to be small more often than not.
“I have done best with it around grass, though,” Covington said. “But you can fish it so many different ways — burn it, slow roll it and use it as a drop bait and flutter it. It’s very versatile and something different.”
2. Change your skirt
Look at the spinnerbaits displayed in the most prominent places at your local tackle shop, and tell me what kind of skirts you see — nothing but silicone. There’s more silicone in a bait shop than on the red carpet at the Oscars.
Silicone skirts definitely have their advantages over other skirt materials, but the fact that most everybody is throwing a spinnerbait with a silicone skirt means that bass have gotten used to their fancy façades.
That’s why Covington prefers to use flat living-rubber skirts rather than silicone. These are the skirts you see on spinnerbaits like the Mr. Hooty and Humdinger. Rather than a bunch of material held together with a rubber band, these skirts are often tied by wrapping the material into a collar with the strands streaming back from that.
“Few people use this kind of skirt,” said Covington. “It has a completely different look as it moves through the water. I characterize it as more of a rippling motion rather than the pulsating action of a silicone skirt. We get so conditioned to what a spinnerbait should look like that we forget the job it’s supposed to do, which is catch fish.”
When asked if one skirt would really get more bites than another, Covington reminded me of a day I spent fishing with him recently. He had been throwing a regular silicon skirt, and he wasn’t getting bit. Wanting to make a change, he cut the full-length skirt down to just behind the hook bend. The difference was immediate and obvious. He started catching fish.
3. Vary your retrieve
Watch the struggling spinnerbaiters around you next time you’re on the water, and you’ll see a bunch of chunkin’ and windin’. Good spinnerbait anglers rarely cast a spinnerbait and reel it straight back. Rather, they are constantly making subtle changes in their retrieves to make their lures do different things.
According to Covington, one of the simplest yet most effective changes you can make is to stop reeling just for a second before resuming the retrieve. This may not seem like much to you, but it makes your spinnerbait do some wild things.
“Just stop for a second. Count ‘one,’ boom start reeling again,” he explained. “Think about what happens when you’re walking in line and somebody in front stops. Everybody behind them runs into them. The same thing happens to your spinnerbait. When you stop, the skirt pulsates toward the head, and the blades keep trying to move forward, and they clang together.”
Some other options include using your rod to steer your spinnerbait into cover rather than away from it. Good crankbait anglers know the deflection of their lures off cover is what often triggers bites, and the same can be said for spinnerbaits.
4. Hit your target
One of the main things that has affected the spinnerbait bite in recent years is that some great spinnerbait lakes have experienced a reduction in grass coverage. Tietje believes this is one of the main reasons people are putting down the spinnerbaits and picking up other lures.
“The lack of grass means bass are less likely to roam,” he said. “Anglers who know this are putting down their blades and picking up other lures. The key is, though, that the spinnerbait bite is still there even though the grass is gone, but you’re going to fish a little differently.”
Tietje explained that the lack of grass pushes bass wood cover like stumps and logs. This is creating a situation in which blind fan-casting isn’t as productive because fish on wood cover are less likely to move away from that cover to bite a lure. That means you’re going to have to get your spinnerbait in just the right spot.
“My mental strategy in this situation is to think like a jig fisherman,” Tietje said. “Rather than being able to fan-cast to fish that will come a long way in the grass to bite your lure, you have to be more precise with pinpoint accuracy because your bite is going to come from one specific area.”
5. Smaller means more bites
Tietje says it’s easy to understand why he hears some of his fishing buddies complaining about not being able to catch bass on a spinnerbait.
“All you’ve got to do is look in their boats,” he said. “What they’re throwing is the reason they’re not getting a lot of bites.”
It’s common knowledge that big baits catch big bass, but this comes at the expense of bites. Struggling anglers who are stuck in a rut need to get some bites to get their spinnerbait confidence back up. The best way to do that is to fish a smaller spinnerbait.
“A lot of people throw a 3/8-ounce when they should be throwing a 1/4-ounce,” Tietje said. “Now, on a lake like Toledo Bend, you can throw a 3/8-ounce and catch a lot of fish, but when you get in a river system like the Mermentau, it pays to throw the smaller bait. I throw a 1/4-ounce Humdinger if I’m in the river and a 3/8-ounce Stanley at Toledo Bend.
“But if I’m struggling with the Stanley at the lake, then I will drop down to the Humdinger. You’ll always get more bites dropping down in size than going up, but, and this is a big but, you get those bigger bass by going up.”
All these spinnerbait secrets are offered to help you improve your spinnerbait fishing, but they won’t work for you if you don’t use them. It’s easy to fall back into the same old rut the next time you’re on the water, and that’s going to keep you scratching your head about what happened to the spinnerbait bite.
Or you could put these tips to good use and be like Tietje’s friends who called him from Toledo Bend recently.
“We’re slamming them on spinnerbaits,” they told him.
Now that’s the kind of secret we would all like to share.
Visit the author’s blog at www.chrisginn.com.
