Fishing Lures for Bass
When it comes to finding or selecting fishing lures for bass you have thousands of choices, but there really are only two that work. Not two lures for bass, two concepts of lures for bass. You either go “la natural” or you get “crazy”, there is very little room for “naturally crazy” when it comes to fishing lures (or baits) for bass.
Bass are either in a bad mood or they want a quick snack or two; often times they are in both a bad mood and want a snack. This just increases your chance of picking the right lure or bait. People that are very experienced with fishing for bass know this, they probably have not looked at it this way before, but I have an odd gift for seeing things in an odd way.
I have personally witnessed a bass eat a wild duckling about the size of a tennis ball and had either a bass or the most aggressive perch in the western hemisphere bite the fingers on my right hand as I was trailing them in the water off the boat.
Ducks and fingers are not common fishing lures for bass, but they obviously work.
The key to selecting the right fishing lures for bass specifically relies more on your delivery and presentation than the actual lure itself. Your mission is to figure out where the bass are located and then get your bass fishing lure of choice to them because they will rarely travel farther than the range of sight or sound to eat something. Just because they are always ready for a fight does not mean they go looking for one.
You go to them, they don’t come to you.
You often hear the term “Water Column” used when people are talking about fishing for bass or lures for bass. This term is very simple when you understand what it means, and it means exactly what it says. If you take a lake or waterway and look at it by “depth” that is a column. Fish at the surface are at the top of the column and fish at the lake-bed are at the bottom of the column.
Bass, more than other apex predator species will move along this water column during different times of the year. In one part of the year they prefer the upper levels while other parts of the year they may like the depth of 12 or 18 feet. Other times they may like it at 40 feet deep. Depending on the climate, they may like less than 5 feet in the morning and 25 feet at noon. You just need to know your fish.
This is where your choice of fishing lures for bass come into play or to use bass fishing techniques with lure that are not specifically designed for bass. The lures you want to use are the ones that will get to where the fish are, either through their engineering or through the way you rig them.
A plastic worm is one of the classic bass fishing lures because within a few minutes you can modify it from something you are using in 12 inches of water to something that in dancing down bass alley at 30 feet deep.
The correct bass fishing lures or baits are not so much the lures themselves, you just need to understand the “water column”, the character of the fish that time of year in relation to the water column and how to rig the gear that you are using to get to that depth.