Master Summertime Soft Swimbait Fishing!

What's up guys? Russell Lane here with Bass Resource out here on Lake Hartwell talking swimbaits today. And the topic of this video is soft swimbaits and how I use them, tips and tricks for the summertime. And to me, there's basically two, fundamentally two things that I like to do in the heat dead of the summertime with swim baits.

Well, one, so you think about what fish do and how they relate to structure and cover offshore, because that's generally where they're going to be in the summertime. Well, on lakes where they have current, like say on the Coosa River Lakes where I grew up and a lot of these river systems. And two, even some of these bigger reservoirs, they generate water for power in the summertime. Usually in the afternoons it gets hot, everybody wants to run their air conditioners and they need that power. Well, when they generate that water to create that power, it creates current. So, those fish will go to these specific places on these ledges or long points that have drop-offs on them and they will use that current to set up and feed, and they'll do it in a school. They like to school up in the summertime on those current places.

My favorite thing to do, bar none, in a current offshore situation is to slow roll like a finesse type swimbait. I like this 4-inch Big Bite Pro Swimmer. This is a sexy shad color. It's basically the only color you really need. It works in pretty much all conditions. Maybe if the water is like a little bit murkier than murky I guess, not muddy but just like a dark color, maybe get you a chartreuse marker and put your little chartreuse line on it. I do that sometimes just to brighten it up. But that sexy shad color is basically what you need.

I rig it up on a 1/2-ounce head. This is a head that I pour from a Do It mold. Glue eyes on there to make it realistic and it just works good for me. I rig it up on 12-pound Sunline Sniper and I use that lighter line so that I can get that bait deep quick and keep it on the bottom.

One of the keys though is in that current, if you have enough current, is letting that current help guide that bait through the zone where the fish are set up. You want to be able to present that bait naturally to them. Usually it's not throwing straight up current and reeling it down with the current. Usually it's at an angle. Maybe a quarter of a turn angle across the current. If the current is going this way, parallel to my boat, I would cast a quarter turn away from you guys and I would let that current and my reel sweep that bait until it hits the strike zone right there. I've just seen over the years that, that is way more effective in getting those fish to bite on those current places with a soft swimbait than throwing straight into the current and reeling it back.

This is what I think. You throw it straight up current and just say the current is coming straight here. Well, the current is hitting this tail as I'm reeling it. It kind of makes the bait dead looking, not lively. If I'm sweeping it this way, the bait is naturally coming towards me at an angle with the current pushing it to the fish. And in my experience, that's the deal. That's how you want to fish it. So generally those places, depending on water clarity and the parts of the country that you're in, it could be anywhere from 10 foot deep to 25, maybe even 30 foot deep. If you get much deeper than that, it's hard to present a bait like this to them. So this is, you know, 10 to 15 to 20 is like, the key zones that you're going to want to look for, for that technique.

The other thing that I like to do when there's no current, people say, well, I didn't catch them today because they didn't pull current. You know, you hear that all the time on these river systems and especially the Coosa Lakes. Well, they didn't make the adjustment. So those fish will pull off. They'll pull off those ledges where they go to feed in the current when there is no water generating and they'll lock on to a piece of cover like near that structure that they were on.

So let's say we just worked this school over in the current on this bare river ledge. Well, they're not pulling water anymore and the fish swam off. Well, I'm going to get on my trolling motor or my big engine, use my Garmin graphs or LiveScope and I'm going to look around for a piece of cover, a stump, a brush pile. I mean, guys, you know how many brush piles get put out on these lakes these days. They're everywhere. I guarantee you there's three or four in this cove that we could find in minutes with that Garmin LiveScope. But find that piece of cover, that's what they'll be set up on.

And if you want to catch the biggest fish in that brush pile, take you...it's called the Spro Megalojohn and there's other swimbaits that work too. But the reason that this one works so good is it's heavier and you can get it to sink a little bit faster. So, say that brush pile that's adjacent to that ledge that they were on when they were pulling current is 7 or 8 foot deep. Well, let's say it's 10 foot deep. All right. And the top of it is say, it's 6 foot tall. Well, I can bomb this thing over there across, you know, that brush pile and still reel it at a pretty good clip. But it'll stay down close enough to him that that fish that's being lazy and not necessarily in a feeding mode, can see it. But I can reel it fast enough because it's heavy enough that it'll trigger him to come up and take a look at it. And you know, at that point, it's up to him to decide to eat it or not. But the more realistic that it looks, which in this case with this bait, is very realistic, the higher your chances are that he goes ahead and gets it. So that's a sneaky deal for when they're not pulling current is looking for that isolated cover.

Usually, it's one fish on one stump, one big rock, one brush pile, but slow rolling this Spro Megalojohn over it. I like to rig it up for doing this. Like in the springtime, I'll use bigger line because I want to have it a little bit higher in the water column. But in summertime, I want to be able to get it down. So I'll rig it up on like, 16 or maybe even 14-pound Sunline Sniper. And you know, that line is surprisingly strong. It handles this bait well. And it also frees that bait up to having that lighter line that it has more action and it'll run a little bit deeper. Rig it up on a Phoenix Feather 7'3" extra heavy, 7'1" reel and make long casts as always.

Like, I firmly believe in making super long casts these days with all the pressure that our lakes receive. Usually the longer the cast, the bigger the fish you catch. Those are two things that I like to key in on with soft swimbaits in the summertime. Try them out and hopefully, they'll work for you.