Until your local lakes freeze over, there’s no reason to put away the bass fishing gear for the winter. With the right lures and presentations, anglers can find dependable bass bites all winter long. Get familiar with these ten winter bass fishing lures to keep catching 12 months a year.
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Ned Rig
When selecting your top lures for winter bass fishing, small, finesse presentations are paramount, especially in the dead of winter. The subtle action and versatility of a Ned-rigged soft plastic like the Z-Man Finesse TRD on a Z-Man Finesse ShroomZ jighead tempt big bass all year long.
Generally, ned plastics measure around 3-inches and feature a slim profile that resembles an easy meal. Ned rigs can be vertically jigged, cast and retrieved through the water column, or slowly crawled and hopped along the bottom, triggering lethargic bass to bite.
Given the slow retrieves used with this presentation, the Ned Rig isn’t the best technique for covering water, so it helps to know where the bass have balled up for the winter before breaking it out.
Blade Bait
Among the deadliest cold water bass lures, blade baits like the Damiki Vault, Reef Runner Cicada, 6th Sense Slice and Rapala Rippin’ Blade are all safe options for shore and boat anglers in the winter. While both largemouth and smallmouth bass eat blade baits, they are most often associated with deep-jigging smallies.
These metal lures sink quickly, getting down to the bass over deepwater humps where they winter-over, and staying there. Subtle flicks or long sweeps with the rod generate heavy vibrations that draw reaction strikes from low-lying bass, but be careful not to “overwork” the lure. Often, lifting the rod just enough to feel the blade begin to vibrate is enough to trigger strikes. Repeat a gentle lift-and-drop retrieve while reeling ever so slowly and wait for a bass to pounce on it.
Lipless Crankbait
These loud-rattling, tight-kicking lures are either irresistible to cold water bass or highly irritating. In either case, they put out heavy vibrations, and their narrow profiles and forward orientation allow them to swim through wispy winter vegetation at various levels of the water column.
Much like blade baits, lures like the Rapala Rippin’ Rap, the Strike King Red Eyed Shad and the original Rat-L-Trap can be cast and retrieved or vertically jigged over changing bottom contours where smallmouth and largemouth bass school during the winter months. Locate some structure, be it deep vegetation or a patch of sunken Christmas trees, and let the lure sink before beginning a steady retrieve with the occasional twitch of the rod to keep the bait running just high enough to avoid snags.
To really get the most out of lipless crankbaits in winter, experiment with suspending lipless crankbaits, which will hover long enough to give lethargic fish a chance to strike.
Suspending and Slow-Sinking Jerkbaits
Fished along drop-offs and weed lines, suspending and slow-sinking jerkbaits are killer lures for winter bass fishing. From November through March, suspending jerkbaits dupe some true bucketmouths. With their neutral buoyancy, internal rattles and a mid- to deep-diving range, these hard-plastic stickbaits produce a frantic slashing action that is contrasted by the appearance of a stunned-baitfish on the pause.
While there’s a wide range of effective jerkbaits available to bass anglers, the pricier suspending models, like the Shimano World Minnow 115 and Megabass Vision Oneten, tend to “hang” better in cold water, when painfully long pauses up to 60 seconds can be the key to getting bit. In deeper areas around steep contours and underwater humps, where vegetation is scant, the slow-sink of a Berkley Stunna will draw a strike as it shimmies down toward the strike zone like a mortally-wounded baitfish.
Scaling down to a smaller suspending jerkbait, like the Lucky Craft Pointer 65 or 78 can also help tempt sluggish winter largemouths when a larger jerkbait fails to get bites.
Float and Fly
In the winter, bass are less likely to chase down a meal, but offerings that hover in their faces with subtle lifelike actions, like the Float and Fly rig, can be deadly.
The key components of this rig are a sensitive float, like the Thill Pro Series Slip Float, and a 1/32- to 1/8-ounce hair jig, like the Beast Coast Tungsten Compound Superfly, Kalin’s Hand-Tied Marabou Jigs or VMC Dominator Marabou Jigs. Soft plastics like the Berkley Atomic Teaser can also be very effective.
The float and fly is fishing when it’s paused and the jig below is subtly moving as the float bobs on the surface, with the hair “breathing.” While this technique is deadly effective on lazy, slow-moving bass, it’s a poor choice for covering water. It’s best employed when schooled-up bass have been located with other techniques like lipless crankbaits or jerkbaits.
Drop Shot
To suspend a bait several inches off the bottom in deep, cold water, the drop shot employs a pencil-style or teardrop sinker such as VMC Tungsten Tear Drop Weights and slender plastics like the Berkley PowerBait Pro Twitchtail Minnow, Z-Man Trick ShotZ, or Rapala Crush City Mooch Minnow.
The sinkers are designed to slip in and out of narrow cover with ease to keep anglers free of snags and keep lures in the strike zone. A small, soft-plastic of choice is rigged 12 to 18 inches above the sinker with a specialized drop-shot hook through the nose, so it appears to wiggle enticingly in the water column, without much forward movement, keeping it in front of lethargic bass long enough for them to strike. It is the subtle, tantalizing wriggle of the plastic that make dropshot-style soft plastics one of the must-have lures for winter bass fishing.
Casting and Jigging Spoons
Designed to sink quickly and swim like an injured or fleeing baitfish, metal spoons like the Nichols Lures DUH Jigging Spoon, Acme Kastmaster, and Bink’s Pro Series Spoon feature the kicking action and shimmer of a real baitfish. Their narrow, compact profiles maintain the target depth and maximize fishing time with fast drops and frequent takes when fished in clear water around schools of bait.
With variable sizes, colors and weights, spoons make it easier to match the hatch and attain the desired depth, earning their spot as a staple winter bass fishing lure.
Chatterbaits
Although bass grow lethargic in cold water and may be less willing to chase down baits, they have a hard time ignoring the pulsing vibrations of a chatterbait. Throughout the winter and into early spring, fast-sinking, low-profile bladed jigs like Z-Man’s Chatterbait Mini Max and Chatterbait Micro Max still get bites.
The Chatterbait Mini Max is an upgraded version of Z-Man’s Chatterbait Mini and features fine-tuned adjustments to the lure’s anatomy that make it more likely to stick a winter trophy. It includes a downsized hex blade to generate subtle vibrations, a 2/0 black nickel hook with dual molded keeper barbs for smaller soft-plastic trailers, and a shortened silicone skirt for a more compact appearance which, depending on the trailer, imitates small crawfish or panfish like perch and bluegills. The heaviest model weighs 1/2 ounce, which is ideal for targeting largemouth and smallmouth over deep offshore structure.
To take finesse fishing with chatterbaits a step further, consider downsizing to the Chatterbait Micro Max, which excels with Bait Finesse System (BFS) setups.
Armed with a size 1 black nickel hook, the Chatterbait Micro Max is just a lighter, bite-sized version of the Mini Max. It shines in cold, clear water or high-pressure tournament scenarios, especially if bass are keyed in on small, schooling baitfish like juvenile alewives. Reel it just fast enough for the blade to articulate and push water, which should translate through your line or rod tip, and work in the occasional pause to trigger strikes from followers.
Micro Plastics
Whether it be a creature bait fitted to an ultralight Ned head, a simple paddletail and jighead combo, or a tiny underspin jig, soft plastics under 3 inches are hyper-realistic baits. When water temperatures are skirting the freezing mark and bass are glued to bottom, grubbing on tiny craws and baitfish, few other presentations will get their attention.
In stained or tannic water, a small underspin like the 6th Sense Pecos Swimbait, fished slowly, elicits strikes from low-lying bass. The Pecos Underspin sports a small Colorado-style blade—attached by a barrel swivel—that emits flash and a barely-noticeable vibration which is amplified by the paddletail’s natural kicking action. When conditions call for a quieter, cleaner presentation, pair a 2-inch Keitech Easy Shiner with your favorite ultralight jighead and swim it slowly over deep rock piles and vegetation, or along steep contours and points with sharp dropoffs.
When moving baits draw short strikes or go completely untouched, micro plastics from brands like Z-Man and Northland Tackle are incredibly effective. Rig a Z-Man LarvaZ, Tiny TicklerZ, StingerZ, or Micro Goat on a Micro Finesse ShroomZ head, and drag or hop it over offshore humps and on the edges of rock piles to entice stationary smallmouths.
Depending on the body of water, the winter diets of bass may shift away from baitfish to easier grabs like aquatic insects and small crawfish, which is when these tiny creature-style baits shine.
Jigs
A standard skirted jig, like the Beast Coast Lil’ Magnum, is a useful tool for winter bass fishermen that has year-round appeal. During the coldest months of the bass fishing season, a jig’s retrieve should be slowed to a crawl with painfully-long pauses whether you’re dragging it over gravel bottom for offshore smallmouth, or through dying vegetation for shallow bog pond largemouth.
Downsizing to a compact, ultralight finesse jig, like the Keitech Tungsten Mono Spin Jig, is a great alternative if bass are unresponsive to heavier jigs or those with bulkier skirts.
Choose your trailer wisely; while a deep-bodied soft plastic will slow a jig’s sink rate and may lead to bites on the drop, it will do little to no good if the bass are keyed in on smaller presentations. Instead, opt for slim-bodied soft plastics that generate plenty of action even on ultra-slow retrieves to maintain a low-profile presentation.
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Very good content!!
You literally cannot squeeze that bass any harder and thanks for sales ad
Live bait , crayfish (crabs) and not a restriction on quantity would sure be nice too !!!
Spinnerbait, chtterbait, tx rig worm, soft plastic swimbait should be included