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Pro anglers commonly use a variety of soft plastics to catch bass in spring, and one of my favorites is a Berkley Power Craw. These lures come in an array of sizes to fit any size jig you might want to use, or any size crawfish you might want to imitate.
The crawfish has kind of fallen out of favor in recent years, but it still catches a lot of bass. Everyone is flipping tubes, which is also a good crawfish imitation. I still use a lot of craws, especially as jig trailers but also Texas-rigged. I Carolina-rig craws a lot of times, too, in the springtime, especially, when the fish are first starting to move shallow. My favorite colors are pumpkin with orange claws, and black with blue craws.
Crawfish live everywhere bass live. There are about 350 species of them in North America. They live
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in weeds, rocks, timber, and in deep and shallow water. They're a very important food source to bass this time of year because they're high in protein. They're also easy for bass to catch.
When bass are spawning, it seems that everybody is trying to catch them in shallow water. But I frequently back off these spawning areas and fish for staging bass -- the ones that aren't actually spawning. At any given time, there are more fish that aren't spawning than are spawning, and a lot of them will be ganged up just off of the beds on the first breakline or a point or a ditch. Those fish are a lot easier to catch in most instances, anyway. And lots of times they're the biggest ones, because the females don't spend a lot of time on the beds compared to the males. So I really prefer not to fish for bedding fish unless the big females are visible. If don't see these fish, I'll back away and fish with a Carolina rig, a Texas rig, a jerkbait or something like that and try to catch the bigger ones. I'll fish whatever first good cover the fish can come to away from the bedding area -- something they can use as a congregation point near the spawning area. This could be a rocky point, a ditch, a fencerow or a grassline.
When fishing for bedding bass, it's important to say as far away as you can from the bed. The less aware the fish is of your presence, the more likely it's going to be interested in your lure. Use your trolling motor as little as possible and run it on slow, steady speed, so it puts off less high-frequency vibrations. A lot of times when I'm working a bed and I've got a big fish that I'm trying to catch, I'll anchor or tie to a stick so I don't have to run my trolling motor at all.
No one lure is perfect for bed fishing. If I had to use just one, it would be a Berkley Power Tube. But I do use a craw a lot, and I use a lizard a lot. A I'll keep five or six rods rigged up with different lures -- different colors and types of lures -- sometimes a tube, sometimes a French fry-type bait, because different fish react differently to different types of lures. Sometimes you have to go through five or six lures to get them to react.
When bed fishing, it important to see the bait -- how it's oriented to the bed and to the fish, and how the fish reacts to it. So it's important to use a lure that contrasts to the bottom. The colors I use most are very dark, such as black, or a very light one like white or chartreuse.
Ken Cook, of Meers, Okla., is a former fisheries biologist and one of the top anglers on the B.A.S.S. tournament trail. He has won the BASS Masters Classic and is well respected for his knowledge of fish and their behavior.
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