Inside Edge

Deep Jigging For Winter Bass

When the weather outside is frightful, but a fire inside is so delightful, some anglers still brave the cold because they know the bass are biting.

One veteran Missouri guide who ventures out in the cold to catch bass all winter long is Pete Wenners. The former Bassmaster Top 150 competitor gets in on non-stop action when he locates schools of bass in their deep cold weather  haunts. Although he applies his wintertime tactics mostly in the Ozarks, Wenners believes the same technique should work on any of the country’s deep, clear lakes that don’t freeze.

On his home waters, Wenners has two options for catching bass from the deep. He targets main lake flats and points for spotted bass and standing timber in deep creek arms for largemouth.

In the creeks, Wenners keys on channel swings or even the back end of a creek as long as it has a depth of 60 to 80 feet.  On the main lake structure, Wenners starts searching for fish in the 35- to 60-foot range. The fish will either be suspended at a mid-depth range or holding near the bottom.

“You might catch the fish from one day to the next in the exact same spot, but one day you might catch them as high as 30 feet,” Wenners explained. “And then the next day you might have to drop down to 60 feet to catch the exact same school of fish.”

Weather influences where the largemouth hold in the standing timber. Wenners believes the fishing is better on sunny days because the fish hold tighter to the trees and are easier to pinpoint. On cloudy days, the fish tend to roam around the trees and scatter more.

Fine tuning his electronics helps Wenners find wintertime bass in deep water. He uses a Lowrance X-28 depth finder and sets the sensitivity high enough to see clutter on the screen. He then backs the sensitivity down until the screen clears up (about 65 percent on his unit). When he finds suspended fish, Wenners also turns off his unit’s auto depth feature and sets the upper depth range to zero and the lower limit to 80.

“Then if you zoom in one time on the screen, it will only show you from 20 to 60 feet. That allows you to get more power for the depth range that you are trying to key on.”

While keeping a vigil on his electronics, Wenners looks for any sort of fish activity, whether it’s bass or baitfish.  He rarely fishes a spot unless he sees shad or bass on his electronics. If he fails to find any fish activity on a couple of main lake gravel flats, Wenners switches to the deep timber in the creeks and searches two or three spots.

If he can’t mark any fish in the timber, Wenners locates tree tops in 35 to 45 feet of water and drops a lure into the cover.

“A lot of times what will happen is once your bait gets down there then you will see the fish start moving.”

Wenners will try the same tactic on an open gravel bottom if he caught fish at the spot the previous day. 

“I’ll take a grub, and as I am vertically jigging I want it to hit the bottom (a technique the locals call scratching the bottom. These fish are often so tight to the bottom they won’t show on the screen.”

When he locates a big pod of baitfish on his graph, Wenners usually mills around the area until he finds the edge of the school. He believes it’s easier to catch bass by presenting his lures on the edge of the baitfish school rather than making his presentations in the thick of the pod.

When he locates bass in deep water, Wenners can catch the aggressive fish on a jigging spoon. However, as the water gets colder and the fish become more sluggish, he switches to a single-tail plastic grub for his vertical jigging presentation.

“It seems like the colder the water, the less action you want on the bait.”

The guide prefers a 3 1/2- or four-inch plastic grub attached to a 1/4- or 3/8-ounce darter jig head. Wenners opts for this type of jig head because he believes it falls faster than a ball-type jig head. His favorite grub colors are smoke with black flake, salt-and-pepper and pearl with black flake.

Spinning gear works best for Wenners’ grub tricks. He favors a 6 1/2-foot medium action rod with a spinning reel filled with six-pound fluorocarbon. For the coldest days, Wenners uses monofilament line, which coils less than fluorocarbon in frigid temperatures.

The mood of the fish dictates how Wenners presents his grub.

“A lot of times the fish like it sitting dead still and other times they want you jigging it like a crappie jig.”

If he sees fish on his screen rising up to look at the bait but the fish drops back down, Wenners raises his lure a couple of feet to coax the fish into another look. If this fails to produce, he reels in the lure and can usually trigger a strike on the next drop by slowly reeling up the grub if he sees a bass coming close to his lure.

It would behoove an angler to pull themselves away from the cozy fire, grab some grubs and go deep to experience winter action on a clear-water lake.