Crankbait tips.

[ROBZILLA]

Crankbait Tips

The crankbait is a very versatile fishing lure, and the fisherman needs to be versatile and adaptable when using one. A crankbait is very useful in covering a wide amount of water in a short period of time, which is very helpful when you are fishing a new body of water about which you have little information, or when you need to cover a lot of water while finding where the fish are.

A lot of emphasis seems to be placed on what depth a crankbait is designed to run at. Although that can be a helpful measure, your exact performance will differ depending on a number of factors. In general, the heavier the line you are using, the shallower a crankbait will run. In general, the faster you retrieve a crankbait, the deeper it will run. Holding your rod tip up will make it run shallower, placing your rod tip down will make it run deeper. That is why you'll notice on Thefishingnut, that we don't get carried away with claims of how deep our crankbaits run, rather, we get carried away with facts as to the lip shape of our crankbaits.

In general, the shallow zone for a crankbait could be defined as shallower than 6 feet. A crankbait running at this depth needs to have a smaller, more vertical lip. Crankbaits running at medium and deeper depths will have larger and more horizontal lips. The deepest running crankbaits may have a lip as long as the body of the bait, and it will be almost horizontal to the body. It's unlikely that you will be able to have an unweighted crankbait run below 20 feet.

Although a faster retrieve will make a crankbait go deeper, you also need to find the speed at which the fish will respond to the bait, which generally means you need to find a crankbait designed to run at the depth you need, at the speed the fish wants. It’s probably this consideration that makes the lures laboratory running depth least meaningful. If you need to slow your presentation to trigger a strike, you need to use a crankbait designed to run deeper to keep it at the strike depth. If the fish are striking at a faster bait, you run a crankbait designed to run more shallow - the faster retrieve takes it lower.

You want in most cases the crankbait to be bouncing off things, because this will generate a strike. Bouncing off things causes a change in direction, it's this change in direction that triggers a fish into striking the crankbait. No change in direction, encourages a fish to follow the crankbait. If you were a minnow and a big fish was following you, you'd be trying to get away, not going for a leisurely swim in one direction. If you're in open water, try to promote a strike by changing speeds, and directions of the bait.

Because you will (or you should) be hitting underwater obstacles with your crankbait, you should have some sort of crankbait retriever with you. You don't want to lose crankbaits, but if you're not hitting things with them, you're not catching as many fish as you could be.

You want crankbaits to be long casting, and need to find a balance between your rod, reel, line, and crankbait to optimize that. In particular for deep diving crankbaits, since the first part of the retrieve is spent trying to get the bait down, and the end part of the retrieve is bringing the crankbait out of the productive bottom zone, you want to extend that middle period where the crankbait is running at the depth you want.

For clear water, generally fish are relying on sight for finding food. A fast moving bait in natural color is called for. For less clear water, fish rely more on motion (vibration) to find their food. Tend to use fatter crankbaits with rattles to create the motion.

You can tune a crankbait to run straight, and there are times you want to tune it to run to the side. If you are fishing along a dock for example, it may be to your advantage to try and push the crankbait further under the dock than a straight-running crankbait will go. To change the direction, slowly bend the line tie wire one way or another. Make small adjustments rather than large ones, and test run the crankbait in open water so you understand what change you've made to it.