This video is about the top five baits to fish in January, starting with jerkbaits. Jerkbaits work... They're very effective in January, primarily because, well, they imitate baitfish very, very well. And you can fish them at different depths, and they suspend, which is what you're going to need because you're fishing these relatively slow. All you do is you crank it down to the depth it's going to be and let it sit motionless.
And sometimes it's a 10-second pause, sometimes it's a 30-second, sometimes it's more than a minute. But you just let it sit and then give it a little bit of a twitch and give it just a little bit of a lifelike action and then let it sit again. All you're doing is you're getting this bait down to the bass and just sticking it in their face until they bite. So a suspending jerkbait is key in order for that to happen.
And so what you do is, of course, you buy a suspending jerkbait. Cool, you get it out in the water, you stick it in the water, and guess what? It sinks a little bit or it floats a little bit. And you're like, "Well, that's not suspending." Correct.
Water temperature kind of dictates the buoyancy of these baits, even though they're suspending. So you may have to tweak it a little bit. What I do is I swap out hook sizes, starting with the front treble hook. For example, if it's floating up a little bit too much, I go the next size up on a treble hook and I'll do that in the front and work my way to the back until it finally suspends correctly. And I'll do it the reverse if it's sinking. That's usually all you need to do to tweak it enough to get it to suspend, but sometimes you'd still need a little bit more weight and that's when you can use a suspend strip, lead strip, it's adhesive, you just stick it on the belly of the jerkbait until you get it to suspend properly.
Because that's key. Those pauses are going to be long and you don't want it to move out of the strike zone. You can get different bait sizes, but this is the key thing here, guys, and you're going to need them. Because a lot of times during the wintertime, the bass, they've got time to examine that lure while it's sitting there and you need that bait to be the exact same size of what they're feeding on.
Typically, that's smaller this time of year. Those 3.5 to 4.5-inch size baits, 3-inch, those are the things that the bass are keying on. So you'll need a couple of different sizes.
The other thing about this is this is not the time of year to fall in love with your favorite jerkbait and throw that all day long. Bass are going to want something different and you need to figure out what it is. So for that reason, you need a good arsenal of jerkbaits. And I would get them from a variety of different brands. So you have different sizes, they have different actions to them because the build is a little bit different, the body is a little bit different. Some have rattles, some don't, some sound of the vibration they put out is a little bit different, a variety of different diving depths as well.
Because you need to experiment to figure out what exactly it is, what depth and cadence they want, and what type of bait they want for that day. But jerkbaits work really well during the wintertime.
Another bait, jigs, jigs, jigs, jigs. Jigs work year-round, of course. They always got to be tied on ready to go no matter what time of year. But in the wintertime, there's a different way to fish them. Because the water is so ding-dang cold, the crawdads, which is what a jig imitates, are moving about real slow. And so you need to imitate that, match the hatch, you need to imitate their movements this time of year. So a real slow presentation. And typically, they're going to be deeper.
So the jig head design, first of all, comes into play if you're fishing around hard bottom, rocks, outside weed lines, you're fishing in riprap, stuff like that. A Football Head Jig works really well for that. A Football Jig would be my number one choice because it also wobbles on the bottom and makes it look like it's walking. Nice amount of action.
Weight. What weight you use is going to be dictated by a couple of things. Number one, again, if the bottom is soft and mucky, you don't want a heavy jig head, because that's just going to sink into it. And if you got a lot of wind, a lot of waves, current, things like that, you're going to need a little bit heavier jig head to maintain contact with it and to keep control of it.
Conversely, if you're fishing on hard bottom and there's not a lot of wind or current to deal with, you can lighten up. You can go as light as a 1/8-ounce or 1/4-ounce jig. A good starting point is a 3/8-ounce jig and then adjust from there. If you're getting hung up a lot, yeah, maybe you're too heavy. But if you're casting it out there and it goes downstream or if the wind carries it or it doesn't feel like you got a bait at the end of your line, then you need to heavy up a little bit because you need to be able to detect those strikes. So that's really about it.
The crawdad colors, the deeper you go, the less important the colors become because the colors get washed out and just become shades of gray by the time you get below 25 feet or so. So color, to me, I just want contrasting colors like black and blue. The trailer, I think, is more important than anything else.
See, in the summertime, we throw trailers that a lot of times have got the ridges on the ends of the claws and it makes them just move and wiggle a lot and give them a lot of action. You don't want that this time of year. You want a little movement. Again, the crawdads are moving slow and lethargic, so you don't want to have a lot of action it looks out of place.
So this is when you use a Zoom trunk or a V&M craw, something like that that doesn't have a lot of action in it that just kind of trails behind the jig without moving a whole lot. That is more realistic this time of year. So those are the key things to consider in how to fish those jigs.
The next bait is the Damiki rig, or it's been known as the hover rig, hover strolling. There's a lot of different names it goes off of, but basically what that is is a ball head jig that has a 3.5 or 3-inch-sized minnow threaded onto it. And that's critical. The size of the minnow is critical this time of year. You don't want those 5-inch jerkbait shad-style baits right now. It's too big. So go with a smaller 3, 3.5 that you'll get more bites that way in the wintertime.
And the presentation is super simple here. What you're looking for, look on your graph with your boat. Doesn't matter if you got forward-facing sonar or not because you're going to be fishing directly below the boat. You're looking for balls of bait fish. It could be perch, it could be shad, whatever. And what you want to do is you basically want that bait to be outside of the ball of bait fish.
The first way to do it is to get it up above the bait fish and just hold it there. Don't do a whole lot of movement. Again, it's wintertime. It's cold. The bait fish aren't moving around very quickly, so you don't want to make it look too lively. Just hang it down over the boat, right above the ball of bait fish. And the natural movement of the boat rocking on the water or your hands moving or maybe the wind getting the waves a little bit lapping on it, just hold it. Hold it steady. And that will give it enough action to make it look alive. And just wait for the bite.
Now another way to do it is to do the same presentation but have the bait below the ball of bait fish. Again, you want it to look like it's dying or injured and it's kind of straight from the pack. That looks like an easy meal, easy pickings for the bass. That's what they're looking for. They're not going to dive straight into the ball of bait fish. They're picking off the ones on the edges. So that's why you want to have it above or below the ball of bait fish.
In my experience, the bigger fish tend to be beneath the ball of bait fish. Like, they're lazy. They're just going to wait for the meal to fall through and come to me rather than swimming up top and chasing a minnow. They'll just lie and wait. So you just drop that down through the ball of bait fish and when it gets down on the bottom underneath the ball of the bait fish, you get bit. So great way of fishing this time of the winter.
The next rig to fish is the drop shot rig, okay? Drop shot, it's... The key thing about fishing a drop shot, guys, is that it's not designed to cover a lot of water. It's designed to pinpoint and pull apart target areas. So you have to locate the fish first, right? So are they going to be at a tapering point that drops off into the main river, or are they going to be on a ledge or a hump? Something... You usually find a bank that's a steep bank and they might be along there, especially if you can find some remnants of weeds. That's a honey hole. If you can find some maybe scattered boulders or maybe some logs along that steep drop, even better. Bass are going to hang out there. That's where you want to use a drop shot to pick apart that area, just, I mean, meticulously take it apart.
You see, these fish don't necessarily show up on your depth finder because they are going to hug real tight right next to it. So much so that they actually appear to be part of that cover. They don't actually... They're not distinctive between the two. So you're not going to really see them show up on your depth finder, especially if they're deeper than say 30 feet deep. So just fish it knowing that they're there, but take it apart meticulously. And once you get that bait right near them, man, they're going to nail it.
The type of bait I would use is, like, a 3-inch, 3.5-inch-sized minnow type bait. A 3-inch Senko-style bait works really well. A tube. I've used a tube in this situation and that works well. Or, like, a 4-inch finesse worm. All those are excellent choices for this time of year, mainly because they don't impart a lot of action. They move very slowly, and just a little twitch of the rod, just a movement, and they've got some action to it.
This is not the time of the year to be bouncing your rod, by the way, with the drop shot. Not like you do that in the summertime in the warmer months, but this time of year it's the same thing like you're fishing the Damiki rig. You just straight out hold that rod and let your arm movement and the rocking of the boat and whatnot, that imparts the action. If there's any current under the water, that's going to give it action too. You don't have to do anything. There's movement going on there without you making any movement. You're going to make it look unnatural if you try to impart any more action than that. And that's a great way of getting bits, particularly in deeper water, 40, 50 feet deep.
Then lastly, speaking about that deep, sometimes those bass, they are right there on the bottom, hugging the bottom. And they're not going to venture very far to hit a bait, but you still want to mimic that dying bait fish. That's where what I call heavy metal comes into play. Blade baits, jigging spoons, tail spinners. These are very compact lead or titanium, titanium, yeah, lead or tungsten baits that fall right through the water column like a rock because they're small, compact, slender, don't have much water resistance to them. They'll fall right down to the bottom.
And what you do is, again, you're over the top of the structure you're fishing and you use your rod. You might cast out a little bit, but not too far. But basically what you want to do is jig it up off the bottom and let it flutter back down. Now don't do it quickly for two reasons. One, these baits flop and flutter when they fall. They don't fall straight down. And they got treble hooks on them and they can foul up on your line if you just give it slack line. So you want to control the fall.
But also it's the speed. Again, you want things to be slow. So you slowly lift it up and you slowly let it drop. For the most part, you're not lifting it up very far and you're not dropping it very far. And you need to let it pause. The duration of the pause, experiment with that. Sometimes bass want a short pause. Sometimes they want something longer than a minute, even more than that. You have to experiment to figure it out. Pay attention to what you're doing because when you get bit, you have to remember exactly what you're doing so you can replicate that.
But that's primarily how you fish them. If you got a tail spinner on them, you can give it a little bit more of a lift. You can get that spin to action. For some reason, tail spinners, a lot of times they hit them on the fall. These other baits, they'll hit them on the fall too, but sometimes they get them when you first lift them up off the bottom. They'll strike it. But tail spinners, more often than not, they hit it on the fall. So you lift it up a little bit higher so it has a little bit more distance to fall and gives a little more opportunity for the bass to strike them.
But with those baits I just told you about, those are the prime bread and butter what works in the coldest months of the year to catch bass. Hope that helps. For more tips and tricks like this, visit bassresource.com.
