Winter Cranking Tips: Pro Tricks to Catch More Bass

Hey, everyone, Mike McClelland here with BassResource and we're going to talk winter cranking today. You know, a lot of people when you think about winter cranking, granted there's going to be certain areas of the country where you may not be able to crank in the wintertime, but if you live, you know, where I live the Midwest, the South, the Southeast, wintertime cranking is probably one of the best times to be cranking. And, you know, it's one of those situations where you're going to have to change your tactics up a little bit. You're going to have to do things a little bit different depending on the body of water that you're actually fishing. But there's generally always a wintertime crankbait going on in most parts of the South, Midwest, Southeast if Mother Nature is doing the right things.

And when I say that, to me, the biggest thing about wintertime cranking is paying attention to what Mother Nature has been dishing out and what the conditions truly are. I've had so many people, in fact I grew up in a household where my uncle used to tell me there's no use going bass fishing until the water temperature hits 50 degrees. Well, we all know that that is not true. 

The biggest thing to me that makes the difference and when I get excited about going wintertime cranking is when you get a little warming spell. Anytime in the winter, any place you are in my opinion, and it actually works just the reverse the farther south you go, but in the winter when you get a warming trend in the Midwest, the Southeast where those water temperatures tend to get, you know, down into that upper 30, lower 40-degree mark, but you get a few days of warming weather, that is when to me the wintertime crankbait bite is going to come on.

And when I start talking about fishing lakes that have any type of rock, any type of sand, any kind of clay, hard bottom type lakes, to me, there's going to be two or three crankbaits that I really, really rely on in the winter. The number one crankbait for me, and I mean everybody that follows me knows it, I designed the bait for Spro, but the number one wintertime crankbait for me is going to be a Spro Rk55. That is going to be my first go-to wintertime crankbait and it's generally going to be in a red hue. There's something about wintertime and red-colored baits that go hand in hand.

There's a couple of things you want to keep in mind when you start talking about wintertime cranking. The biggest factor, in my opinion, is the speed at which you go about cranking. If I'm going cranking in a wintertime and the water temperatures are below 55 degrees, when I'm throwing a bait like a RKCrawler, I'm going to be throwing a five-to-one gear ratio reel. I throw a Bass Pro Shot Pro Qualifier five-to-one gear ratio reel and I'm going to be throwing it on a Falcon Cranker 417 action. It's a medium action rod, it's got a good tip, it's seven foot long, allows you to make really long casts, and line becomes really important too. 

In the winter is going to be the time that I want to get this bait generally the deepest I want to get it all year. So I'm generally going to be throwing 8- or 10-pound Sunline Crank FC because those lines are going to allow me to get this bait absolutely the deepest I can possibly get it. And when I start talking about throwing that RK55 on a long cast on 8-pound Sunline Crank, I can generally get that bait 15 to 16 foot pretty easily. I know you look at that bait and you're like, "There is no way you're going to get that bait there," but it will get there on the right cast and the right line.

So I'm trying to get that bait down to those fish that are staging, I shouldn't even say staging, those fish that have kind of fallen into their wintertime haunts, you know they're on channel bends, they're on transition areas, those are going to be the keys to catching these fish in the wintertime. 

When I talk about channel bends, I'm going to be using my Garmin Electronics to look at the mapping and I'm looking for any place that the channel, the actual creek channel, swings up close to the bank. I'm not necessarily looking for sheer bluff type stuff but just steeper, you know, bluff to 45-degree channel type banks that have a mixture of rock you know whether it be ledgy rock a lot of times in lakes in the Southeast you've got a lot of clay but generally where you have clay and you have a steep drop you're going to have the hardest bottom you're going to have rock in those areas because anywhere that channel used to run is where that bank is carved out and that's where the rock's going to be exposed. So those are the places to me that I really want to look for that wintertime RKCrawler bait.

Now when you start talking about the southeast and even further down south, what I said earlier about Mother Nature trending in a warming direction sometimes the further south you go, it's actually Mother Nature trending the other way. I mean, a lot of those Florida lakes, the lakes deep south in Texas, they don't get cold enough for a crankbait to really, really come into play until you get a few cold fronts. So lakes, you know, in Florida, Kissimmee, the Okeechobee, the Harris Chain, lakes like that, you really want them to cool off. A lot of times those lakes in the winter will be in the mid-60s and you get a cold snap, a cold front, and those lakes will drop in temperature really, really quick. 

Generally it takes a few days of warming to get those lakes to fire again but when that happens, that is when a rattling style bait really, really comes into play for me, a bait like a Spro Wameku Shad, a Spro Aruku Shad, baits that have rattles built into them, baits that are, you know, really rip style baits. I mean, this is a bait that is going to sink. It's not a diving bait. You throw it out, you let it fall to the bottom, and a lot of times, you're throwing this bait in a pumping retrieve. You throw it out, let it go to the bottom, you kind of wind it, rip it up off the bottom, let it fall again because those fish in those southern lakes have really not had water that cold so they're really lethargic, but a rattling vibrating bait is a bait that'll really get it done.

When you start talking about colors, I know I've got a chrome one tied on here, if you're fishing lakes that have a big shad population and you know the fish are focused on feeding on forage of shad, that's when I'm going to go to my chrome style baits. If I'm fishing, you know, those lakes that have some color in them and on cloudy days, I really like a bait that's got some gold in it, especially lakes in Florida due to the shiner population down there, you know, something like a gold shiner style bait. But any of those southern lakes that you fish that have vegetation and grass, I mean, you've always got to keep red baits like you know a Wameku shad, something of that nature in mind for throwing in those wintertime situations. We're about to get it undone here.

Red craw colors, I mean, those are the colors that I predominantly are going to throw on lakes that have a lot of vegetation, hydrilla, milfoil, things like that where you know there's crawfish. Those crawfish during those cold front periods will really get pushed to bury up in those grass clumps and things like that and that is when a rattling bait like, again, I said the Spro Wameku Shad the Spro Aruku Shad are really good baits to throw. 

As far as your line and rod setup with a rattling bait, for me, I'm going to throw a little bit higher speed reel. I'm going to throw a six-to-one gear ratio reel generally. I'm also going to throw a little longer rod. I'm throwing a 7'3" Falcon Deep Runner rod, throwing a Bass Pro Shop reel and generally line size-wise is going to be dependent on the size of bait I'm throwing. If I'm throwing a, you know, a 5/8ths to a 3/4-ounce rattling bait, I'm probably going to be throwing 14, 16, maybe even 18 or 20-pound Sunline of some fashion. If I'm going up above 16, I'm going to have to throw Sunline Sniper. If I'm throwing, you know, 14 and 16, it's going to be Sunline FC crank. If I go to a 1/2-ounce bait, then I'm going to size my line down because the action that you get in those baits really isn't as good as it would be with heavier lines so 14, 16, occasionally 12-pound Sunline FC crank when I'm throwing the smaller 3/8ths and 1/2-ounce style rattling baits.

Another key factor I've talked about, the fact that you want to throw a slow gear ratio reel when you're cranking in the winter, talked about the line size. One of the factors that you also want to consider when I'm cranking in the winter, that I want to consider when I'm cranking in the winter, is the actual hooks that I use on my RKCrawlers. 

Generally, not generally, RKCrawlers always come standard with number five Gamakatsu round bend trebles. One thing that I'm going to do in the winter time just due to the fact that the fish are more lethargic and they aren't as aggressive, is I'm going to upsize my hooks to a number four round bend Gamakatsu and generally I'm going to go with a 2x strong Gamakatsu. And what that is going to do, this bait is a relatively buoyant bait so when I wind this bait down and it stops, generally that bait's going to kind of back up a little bit and it's going to float up at a pretty good rate of speed. But when I add those 2x strong hooks to it, it's going to slow the rate of float down a little bit. So when I wind that bait down and stop it, it's almost going to suspend and I can pull the bait along a little bit so that is another real key factor, especially when you're cranking extremely cold water. You know, if that water temperature is down there below 47, 48 degrees, you know, 40, lower-40s to mid-40s, that's when I want to add bigger hooks, slow that speed of floating down on that bait, make it suspend a little bit more, pull it along in those rocks, and you're going to catch a lot more fish doing that that time of the year. But those are really the mainstays for me when you start talking about wintertime cranking.

The Florida lakes, the southern lakes, some of the ones down south that do have drains and creeks, that's where your focus is going to be but when you get into those southern impoundments like you have in Florida that are more flatter style lakes, you're going to be wanting to focus on, you know, points, areas that you have shell beds with some vegetation growing close, things like that is really what you're going to focus on. But the two things that always come in common is deeper water channel swings, hard bottom, anytime you're throwing a crankbait in the wintertime. So that's my crankbait theory for wintertime cranking. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.