Working the dam at Calling Panther Lake near Crystal Springs, I kept the boat parallel to the riprap and launched the long, thin Pro Pointer 100 jerkbait as close to the rocks as I could.
With three quick jerks of the rod tip, I put the lure to work.
And, then, I stopped and let the bait’s suspending characteristics do the work.
Since I was teaching the cold-water tactic to a friend, I started to count out loud: “One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four Mississippi, five Mississippi, six Mississippi… all the way to 15 Mississippi.”
Then I jerked it three more times, reeled up most of the slack, and started counting again: “One Mississippi…”
My partner in the back of the boat wondered, aloud, why I was being so deliberate.
“So, you always let it sit that long?” said Ron Garavelli.
After working that first cast back to the boat, I tossed a second one a few yards further down the bank. I jerked three times, and started counting.
At eight Mississippi… Wham!
“There’s one,” I hollered and was quickly bowed up against what felt like a good fish. The fish was mostly dead weight, not running and jumping or anything like that.
The water temperature was 48 degrees, only a few degrees warmer than the air. It was cold but tolerable, but the fish were slugglish.
I boated the bass a few seconds later and let the 5-pounder pose for a few photos and then released it.
“Got one,” Garavelli said. “Man, for it being so cold, they knock the fire out of it. This is another good one.”
His fish was almost an identical twin to mine. Our first trip down the dam produced 10 fish, all bigger than 3 pounds, none bigger than 6. The second trip produced six more, all in that same range. The third trip produced only three, but I caught one over 7 and we quit to seek warmer conditions and a celebratory lunch.
Garavelli, a fisheries biologist and the chief of fisheries for the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks, started thinking about the pattern from a scientific angle.
“Makes perfectly good sense,” he said. “In the fall and winter when the weather cools, shad migrate shallow. When you get a sudden cold blast, which they don’t tolerate well, they die. Predators make use of that.”
That was exactly the way bass pro Pete Ponds of Madison, who fishes the BASS Elite Series, explained it when teaching me his cold weather tactics. The jerkbait is one of his favorites, but he has others and all are proven successes based on dying and disoriented shad.
“Bass are less active, but they will take advantage of an easy meal,” Ponds said. “You just have to find the ones that will eat. The spastic movement of the jerkbait makes the lure look disoriented, and then the pause adds to the illusion of it struggling. The lure is weighted and balanced and suspends in the spot you stop it, giving a bass a chance to strike without using a lot of energy.”
Ponds’ second pattern of choice is the lipless crankbait, which he prefers during the first few fronts of the season when he’s covering a lot of water.
“Get on a shallow flat, grab a red-colored lipless crankbait and go to work, and it is a little bit of work,” he said. “This is not just casting and cranking. This is pumping it up and down off the bottom, like a dying shad struggling to survive. You pump it up off the bottom and then let it fall back and settle. The strike usually happens on the fall and it can be powerful.
“I use 10- or 12-pound Vicious fluorocarbon line and work it all the way back. You don’t get a lot of strikes but the fish that will take it are big ones. This is a pattern that targets the bigger fish.”
The third pattern Ponds uses is one he calls “dead-sticking.”
“This one is a no-brainer but it works like nobody’s business, and it takes a lot of patience,” he said. “Dead-sticking means throwing a soft plastic lure like a Senko-type worm or a shad-shaped lure like a Bruiser Rad Shad and letting it just sit there with very little if any movement on your part. You have to be patient, just like with the jerkbait, and let it sit still and do its work. Then you pump it up off the bottom, let it fall again and then let it sit again. You’ll be surprised how many big fish will pick it up and take it.
“I always use fluorocarbon line on these patterns because a fish may sit there and look at it for a while before hitting it. The less visible the line, the better.”
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