(Editor's note: The following is the latest installment in a series of fishing tips presented by The Bass University. Check back each Friday for a new tip.)
While many anglers choose to finesse bass with soft-plastics on heavily pressured waters, Virginia pro John Crews often goes the opposite direction, trying to elicit reaction bites with crankbaits. That doesn’t mean it’s as simple as chunking and winding indiscriminately, though. In order to determine whether and how to catch fish behind other anglers, he spends lots of time observing “what everybody else is doing and not doing.”
That starts with modifying his retrieve until he finds out what the bass desire. He’s frequently surprised to see a herd of anglers using nothing but a steady, moderate retrieve. When that happens, he’ll integrate a stop-and-go cadence or burn his bait.
He’ll also try to throw a different crankbait that everyone else. If he goes to the local tackle store and sees “12 rows of Rapala DT6s,” he’ll surmise that a DT6 has been a historical producer on that body of water, but right off the bait he’s “going to try to throw something with a totally different vibration.” The same principles apply in deeper water, and while many super-deep cranks share a similar profile and vibration, he specifically designed the SPRO Little John DD to be different. Equally important, when you stop your retrieve “it will do a 180 in the water,” like many popular glide baits. In addition to changing his retrieves, he’ll also change his casting angles, attacking cover from a different position than everyone around him.
While the action of his cranks is the most important consideration, he’ll change colors as a secondary refinement. In the spring, he tends to lean heavily on lures with red and orange in them, while in the summer and fall chartreuse is in heavy use, “sometimes the brighter the better.”
Crews is a stickler for using the lightest line he can get away with when cranking in a crowd. With mid-size lures like the Little John 50 or the Little John MD, he finds 10-pound Sunline Sniper to be a good starting point, and with small lures like the Shad Rap and similar handmade crankbaits he’ll often use 6-pound Sniper. It allows the lures to get a bit deeper, wobble harder and deflect off cover more erratically.
In order to ensure that he can get a solid hookset with that light line, he makes sure that all of his hard baits feature Gamakatsu trebles. He believes that the mouth of the fish gets harder in cold weather, so in cooler conditions he likes round-bend versions, which have more bite and less hold than their EWG counterparts. Conversely, when the weather gets warmer, he goes to EWG models that have less bite and more hold. No matter what style of treble he employs, he carefully assesses the weight of different wire sizes to make sure that he doesn’t throw off the lure’s balance.
While he tries to fine tune his cranking setup to fit tough conditions, Crews admits that one element of his system is the occasional need to admit that the crankbait is not the proper tool and put it down. More often than not, however, it’s something he can use to finish off a limit, cull out a squeaker, or add a kicker to his bag, so he’s all too happy to fish around those who don’t share his confidence in this technique.
If you want to learn some of the other keys to Crews' strategies for cranking pressured waters, including how he considers sun and shade when determining how fish are positioned, check out his full video, available only by subscribing to The Bass University TV.
