SEPTEMBER TACTICAL SESSION

 

 

 

CRANKBAITS IN BAD PLACES

By Tim Tucker

 

          It was the kind of place that even Houdini wouldn't have attempted to fish.

          Cradled by 4 feet of slightly stained water, the massive old tree had fallen victim to shoreline erosion many years ago. Since the day that it crashed into the shallow shoreline exposing its extensive rooted pad, the tree (a “laydown” in angler jargon) had collected much of the debris that had floated through this narrow bend in the creek. Clumps of brush had accumulated around its perimeter, sweetening this spot for bass, but practically eliminating it for most bass fishermen.

          But then, David Fritts is not most fishermen.

          The North Carolina pro and former BASS Masters Classic® champion motored over to the weathered old tree, positioned his boat carefully, selected the closest thing to an open lane and pitched the crankbait into its interior. With the calculated touch of a surgeon, Fritts coaxed the big-lipped diving plug through, over and around a jumble of limbs and brush.

          Impressively, it arrived back at his Ranger boat completely unscathed. It returned without fulfilling its intent — hooking a well-hidden largemouth. But watching him steer a fat-bodied crankbait sporting a pair of treble hooks through such troublesome territory was remarkable in its own right.

          Unfazed by such challenges, Fritts immediately scanned the wooden junkpile to find another small opening for his chartreuse-colored lure. He simply shrugged his shoulders when complimented on his heavy-cover crankbaiting prowess.

          “I'm not scared to throw my crankbait anywhere,” says the man recognized as America's best crankbait fisherman. “This is probably what sets a good crankbait fisherman apart from others. I love cranking this kind of stuff. This is the kind of spot where fish never see a crankbait.”

          “Most people simply aren't comfortable throwing a $5 or $6 crankbait into those kinds of places,” adds Rick Clunn, the four-time Classic winner from Texas. “The problem is that this kind of cranking requires a lot more knowledge and effort than they're used to.”

          Clunn knows well of what he speaks. Heavy-cover cranking is one of his specialties. In fact, he demonstrated that particular ability to the fishing world in 1990 by cranking shallow cypress trees in Virginia's James River to win a record-fourth Classic championship. It is not uncommon to find him making underhanded casts, pitches and even flipping with a diving bait into the kind of bass domiciles usually reserved for jigs and Texas-rigged plastic worms.

          Others have apparently learned from Clunn's unorthodox, but highly successful technique.

          “I always look for the rough, tough stuff,” admits Oklahoma's O.T. Fears, a past BASSMASTER SuperStars champion. “I throw a crankbait into the thickest cover where normally people throw a jig or spinnerbait because that's where the big fish live. It takes an accurate cast to do it, but you get a big, wide-bodied crankbait in the right spot and you will catch a fish because those bass have never seen that kind of a bait in that situation.”

          And that often leads to the ultimate in reactionary strikes.

          Cranking such bad places as laydowns, standing timber, brush and grass is not only possible, but it can be extremely prosperous for the serious bass enthusiast who learns the proper approach.

THE MENTAL ATTITUDE

          “It all begins with having the right frame of mind before you try cranking cover,” Clunn explains. “You have to accept the fact that it's going to be frustrating (and) that you're going to get hung up every 10 casts or so. That's just part of it. But the fish you can catch with this method is worth the aggravation.”

          The amount of time spent cursing versus celebrating can be determined, largely, before the cast is even made, according to the experts. Fritts emphasizes the importance of visualizing the layout of the cover to select the most likely locations for fish, the proper casting angle, the retrieval path of least resistance, and, hopefully, a lane to get the bass back to the boat.

          For Clunn, part of this process involves understanding the limits of the crankbait (with its sharp, swinging hooks) and identifying which portions of the cover are just not fishable. First, he makes the easy casts to the outer sections of the natural bass shelter in hopes of enticing fish out from the interior. Then he targets the interior portion — but only when there is an “escape lane” for pulling a bass out of danger.

          “If you just throw into a mess of overhanging limbs and branches, you will have a hard time getting the bait back,” warns Mississippi's Paul Elias, another former Classic champion and cranking authority. “But if you'll pinpoint your casts and try to do things like cast vertically alongside of logs and things like that, you can work a crankbait through a lot stuff that will surprise you.”

SELECTING THE RIGHT CRANKBAIT

          Obviously, all crankbaits are not created equal when it comes to probing dense cover. The best lures for navigating the wilds of reservoirs, lakes and rivers all share similar characteristics.

          Almost all are fairly deep-divers that have relatively large plastic lips. The lip deflects off of obstacles to protect the hooks hanging from the lure, which runs with its nose down and tail riding slightly higher. As a result, it is the rear hook that usually snags the cover (but not as often as you might think).

          Flat-sided crankbaits that sport a four-cornered lip (like a Poe's RC3 and Norman's Tennessee Kil'er) are especially adept at careening off of branches and other roadblocks, according to both Clunn and Fritts.

          Buoyancy is also an important consideration for cover crankers. Ample flotation will enable the lure to instantly rise once the crankbait hits an object and the retrieve is interrupted. “The big-bodied crankbaits with a wide wobble like a (Norman) Big N are fairly weedless,” Fears says. “They have a wide wobble and are buoyant enough to come through a real thick brushpile or logjam or weedbed without getting tangled up.”

          Some crankbaits feature design enhancements that enable them to better bounce through cover without becoming fouled. Bomber's Fat Free Shad, one of Mark Davis' winning lures in the 1995 Classic, has small “kick-out” points on each side of its sizable lip to help it carom off of anything that impedes its path. And Luhr-Jensen's ultra-buoyant Brush Baby contains similar “brush cams” on the side of the lip, as well as on each flank of the plastic lure.

THE PROPER APPROACH

          To watch a master like any of these pros deftly maneuver a treble-laden plug through such dense underwater bass lairs is to enjoy the precise performance of a tight-rope walker. Each have an uncanny knack of tweaking a crankbait through each problem spot it encounters with the perfection of a diamond-cutter — using nothing more than their sense of touch.

          “The main thing with cranking heavy cover is learning to feel the bait so that you understand what it's doing at all times,” Fritts advises. “When I'm reeling, I can tell you when I'm coming up a brushpile because most of the time my line comes up a little bit before my bait hits the brush. Or I feel my bait hitting a few little sprigs.

          “The way I like to fish brush and stuff like that is to make a long cast past the cover and get the bait down to the brush. Then I will just raise my rod real slowly and ease my bait over it. I raise my rod and slow my reel up. The bait will be barely moving so it can sort of hop up over the limbs. The key is once you feel the bill of that bait hitting a limb, stop reeling and let the bait float loose a little bit, and then pull it. It takes a lot of practice to develop that kind of feel, but once you do, you'll be able to finesse a crankbait through all kinds of stuff.”

          O.T. Fears won the 1995 Georgia BASSMASTER Eastern Invitational by employing a Norman Deep Little N to seine a cove harboring some of the most impenetrable wooden cover in Lake Lanier. It was a perfect demonstration of the kind of finely tuned technique that only comes with experience.

          “For me to get a strike, the bait had to come into contact with some kind of wood, whether it was a boat dock, a brushpile or a laydown,” recalls Fears, a two-time B.A.S.S. winner and formally trained biologist. “That meant I had to finesse it, even crawl it through some bad stuff. I had to slow down, take my time and make sure the bait worked around each piece of cover or came over each limb and then immediately went back down to where the fish were. If I had just bumped it around in the cover and through the heavy limbs, I would have been hung up on every single cast.”

          In the hands of such adventuresome anglers, almost no type of cover seems immune to the allure of a diving bait.

          Brush. En route to his historic Classic victory (becoming the first man to win the Classic and B.A.S.S. Angler of the Year in the same season), Arkansas' Mark Davis spent considerable time guiding a 3/4-ounce Fat Free Shad (on 20-pound test monofilament) through a series of manmade brushpiles in North Carolina's High Rock Lake.

          The brushpiles were huge (6 to 8 feet in height) and located at a depth of about 15 feet. But Davis was not intimidated. “With a good, clean brushpile, you can usually finesse a crankbait through without getting hung up all of the time,” he says. “But these brushpiles were used by crappie fishermen and every one was full of old fishing line. That made it really hard to fish a crankbait in there.”

          Having seen the bass that were in and around the brush on the screen of his Lowrance X70 liquid-crystal depthfinder, Davis persevered — showing incredible patience as he methodically worked the Fat Free Shad through each individual danger point.

          Standing trees. With flooded timber, Paul Elias emphasizes the importance of selecting the most-suitable areas for cranking. He peppers any open lanes with short casts, while concentrating on hugging each tree with his retrieve. When possible, Elias utilizes a Mann's Loudmouth II to parallel any trees that have become more horizontal than vertical over the years.

          Laydowns. With its trunk positioned in one direction and numerous branches extended in all directions, a fallen tree can be challenging to fish with any lure — especially a bait with exposed hooks dangling from its undercarriage. This is a situation where David Fritts assumes an aggressive posture and throws caution to the wind.

          “I want to throw that bait where nobody else has thrown a bait,” he says. “Everybody who has fished that laydown before you has thrown along both sides. If you're going to catch a fish — particularly a big fish — you cannot be afraid to throw into that tree. Unless he is real active, that fish is not going to run away from the trunk and hit your bait.

          “So if the tree is coming straight off of the bank, I'll get in a position to work the trunk over as much as possible. I do that by making a lot of casts into each major fork along the trunk and then paralleling the limbs back to the boat, which is the angle that will reduce the number of times you'll get hung up. Wherever I think I can throw my bait and have a chance of getting it back, that's where I make a cast.”

          Aquatic vegetation. Water weeds present the most difficult of cranking situations, Fritts believes. He usually opts to crank the outside edge of a grassbed or just barely touch the tops of the submerged vegetation.

          Oklahoma pro and B.A.S.S. winner Jim Morton relies on a broad-bodied Storm Magnum Wiggle Wart to catch grass bass in a variety of situations. He targets areas of a hydrilla patch where the cover is less dense and more immature — places where the Wiggle Wart's big lip, fat body and wide wobbling action can part the weeds as it moves through the water.

          But getting a crankbait snagged in vegetation isn't all bad, Morton counsels.

          “If you get hung up or your hooks get fouled and you feel the mushy feeling that comes from hydrilla getting on your bait, most fishermen give it a real quick jerk to shake the grass off,” he says. “That will cause the bait to kind of explode with a burst of speed, and very often that erratic action will trigger a strike.”

          With the proper approach, a well-placed crankbait can dredge up some of the biggest and best-hidden bass in a lake. But it is a challenge not for the faint of heart.

 

 

 

 

 

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