Using Big Bait To Catch Big Fish

Learn a couple tricks to catching big bass from using big bait to darkening your line. Hopefully these tips can help you go out and catch some bigger fish.

I want to show you a little trick that I like to use post bond females. On a warming trend after a cold front they really start to feed up on big-bodied brim and so what I'm doing is I'm using this Mic Buca's Bully brim because bull bream this thing is money alright. I generally use a fluorocarbon leader but because there's so many bass  in this area we're going back into this dark water and the backwoods backwater swamps and, because I really don't like to throw these $55 swim baits off, what I like to do is just do a direct tie with braids. So I'm using sixty pound braid here but because that braid shines you know because it's a light color after wears that a little bit. 

What you want to do is take a sharpie and just kind of go up the line and you want to go up six or eight feet. You don't want to have that line flashing be any reason why you don't catch a fish. Now one of the things you got to keep in mind is this is going to create scent okay, and because it creates scent you're gonna need to put some type of cover scent on them. So what I like to do is after I let that dry I like to coat my line and my bait with a little smelly jelly a little bit of you know, bang. For the most part John says juice is probably my favorite these days and so I'll coat it with a little bit of that. So again you just want to darken that line and i'm gonna show you the contrast. Just looking at this line on camera, look at the difference in how that line shows up when you go from black to white to black. In this dark water that black is almost invisible. You don't have to get it perfectly covered because even with breaks in it, it looks camouflage a bit but you really want to darken that leader material and, I'll be honest with you, in this darker water even fluorocarbon has a bit of a sheen to it. It shows up and kind of transmits light where is that direct braid doesn't. If you hang up you can straighten the hooks out for the most part or pull the cover up to the surface and get your bait back. So when I'm fishing these really expensive swim baits and I'm fishing in this dark water, I really like to just kind of doctor the leader material up with a sharpie. I’ll put that Sharpie my PFD so I got it with me the rest of the day.

When these brim start just act like they're about to spawn they start to move up and start making beds right after the basilar respondent and they're gonna be heavily in that spawn phase. Those females that are feeding up after the spawn can get a whole lot of nutrition out of a brim like that, whereas they can swim around eating 50 shad to get the same amount of ROI. So they really like to key on these big baits throwing these near the base of these dark trees in ditches and things like that is a recipe for a fish of a lifetime. So I'm gonna go out there and see if I can make it happen.