Bassology
By Mike Yurk
For the love of crankbaits
When I was kid growing up in the 1960s, we called them plugs, and when I talk to older fishermen, they still call them plugs. Today we call them crankbaits. Regardless if you call them plugs or crankbaits, they remain some of the most effective baits for bass.
I guess I have always had a love affair for plugs, or crankbaits. Back when I was a kid, there were spoons and spinners and plugs for artificial fishing baits, but that was about it. I remember going into hardware stores or small sport shops we had in those days to look at the fishing equipment. We didn’t have the big super sports stores then. Many times fishing gear was sold near the grass seed and fertilizer.
I marveled at the displays of plugs, which seemed kind of dark and dusty with the plugs hanging from metal hooks or laid out in the small cardboard boxes they came in. There was always the River Runt, Lazy Ike, and Flatfish. A plug was only a couple of dollars then, but that was a lot of money to a young kid in the early 60s. I always said that someday I would have all the money I wanted to buy plugs.
Now I do have the money, and I must admit that in addition to some of the River Runts and Lazy Ikes I admired when I was young, I also have several tackle boxes full of the new modern plugs we now call crankbaits. I have used crankbaits all over the United States and Canada to catch bass as well as northern pike and walleyes.
My enthusiasm for crankbaits has not subsided from that time when I was a young kid looking at those plugs on the hardware store wall. Today there is a lot of variety in bass fishing equipment. Sometime in the 1960s plastics exploded on the bass fishing scene, and a lot of other new innovations have come along. It has been easy for some people to forget the crankbait, but not me. I still love them and catch a lot of bass with them.
Crankbaits replicate bait fish and that is always prime forage for game fish. However, some of them are also painted in crawdad colors and bass look at them as crawfish, which is one of their favorite food sources.
Crankbaits are especially effective in the fall. The author's wife, Becky, shows off a bass taken with a crankbait one fall morning from a lake in northwestern Wisconsin
On this year’s Opening Day of the Wisconsin fishing season, I tried two new crankbaits I found at a sportsman show. That first day I caught five bass and four of them were with those new crankbaits.
Although many people look at crankbaits as only deep diving baits, there is a wide variety of crankbaits that can be used in shallow water. Hands down, two of the best crankbaits are the Shad Rap or Jointed Shad Rap by Rapala. I saw my first Shad Rap sometime around 1983. I fell in love with it immediately and have since caught thousands of bass with it as well as walleyes and northern pike. Almost 20 years later Rapala introduced the Jointed Shad Rap. It was love at first sight again. I knew they were going to catch fish, and I wasn’t disappointed.
The Shad Rap has a number of variations from the original models. I am partial to the classic Shad Rap, but there is also a Shallow Shad Rap, which is great bait for shallow water. There is a Glass Shad Rap and an RS model that is made out of plastic. The classic and shallow-running Shad Rap are both made from balsa wood, which has made Rapala brand so special.
I use the number 5 and 7 baits. The larger sizes have a bigger bill and run deeper. I tend to use the more natural colors such as gray and silver or minnow colors and perch.
The Jointed Shad Rap was originally a deep diving bait, but just this year Rapala introduced a shallow running version. That was one of the two new baits I tried on Opening Day and I was impressed with it.
The two sizes I use are numbers 4 and 5. Again, I generally go for natural colors such as minnow or perch colors. The Jointed Shad Rap also comes in three varieties of crawdad colors. My favorite Jointed Shad Rap is what Rapala calls a blue shad that has a blue back, silver side, and orange belly. Something about the color blue seems to generate strikes. The Jointed Shad Rap also comes in what Rapala calls their bleeding color patterns. My favorite is the bleeding original shad color.
The Salmo Hornet has also become a favorite of mine. I like the 4 and 5 sizes, especially in the silver blue color. This bait has a larger bill, so it dives deeper.
The Mann Baby Minus One is truly a shallow running crankbait and will go no deeper than a foot below the surface. I use it to run over the top of weed beds since it doesn’t dive deep enough to hang up in the weeds. I generally use a silver or minnow-like color.
Although crankbaits work all year long from spring through the heat of summer and into the fall, they can be especially effective in fall. As the temperatures begin to drop and the colors on the trees change, bass are starting to fatten up. Oftentimes minnows are their forage of choice as the weather is getting colder, so crank baits are a better match with food they are eating.
Crankbaits have been around for a long time because they work. So start a love affair with crankbaits. You can’t go wrong with that.