(Editor's note: The following is the latest installment in a series of fishing tips presented by The Bass University. Check back each Friday for a new tip.)
Veteran FLW Tour winner JT Kenney was raised in Maryland and now calls Florida home, and in both venues he’s dealt with the combination of tannic water and lush grass beds. It’s a combo he’s seen in places like South Carolina, Texas and Louisiana, too, and whether he’s dealing with only one of those factors or both of them, he has some secrets that enable him to catch more and bigger fish, and break down the water in a hurry.
One of his first secrets is in the color of his lures. While he rarely strays from shades of green-pumpkin or black and blue in other circumstances, he says that “for some reason, purple is really, really effective in tannic water.” That doesn’t just apply to soft plastics, but to spinnerbaits, buzzbaits and chatterbaits, too. Rip off those old white or chartreuse skirts and try something darker.
Those bladed baits are traditional bass lures, but over the years Kenney has also incorporated swimbaits into his search repertoire. If you’re trying to break down a grass bed, you can certainly use a Senko or a worm, but with both hard and soft swimbaits he can cover much more water.
In areas of sparser cover, he’ll use the big, jointed glide baits, but he admits that “this bait pisses me off.” It tends to attract followers with its “lazy-S” motion, which makes it good for practice day, but not so good on tournament day. “For some reason it’ll bring big’uns out of nowhere,” he said. The good news, though, is that you can come back an hour later with another bait and often get them to bite.
If you’re just dipping a toe in the swimbait world, Kenney recommends that you start with a few bags of solid-bodied soft plastics, like those from the Gambler “EZ” series, with the size tailored to the fish and baitfish in your local waters. In grass, you can hold your rod tip up, retrieve steadily and it “gurgles like a subtle buzzbait.” Unlike a buzzbait, you can reel it through cover of any thickness. Also, you can kill it and it has a deadly action on the fall. Sometimes he’ll put a skirt in front of it for a little bit of extra action.
“Most of the bites come on a slow, steady retrieve,” he explained.
It’s a great tool for breaking down grass beds, even when there aren’t any obvious starting points. If he pulls into a grassy area and nothing really catches his eye, Kenney will just start fishing, and every time he experiences something indicative of a fish – whether that be a subtle bump, a landed fish or even just a boil a short distance away – he’ll punch in a waypoint. By the end of a reasonable period of time, his GPS screen should show some sort of a pattern or at least a few key locales. At the end of the day, he’ll narrow it down to several key areas, leave just a single waypoint at each of them, and then focus on those areas rather than just drifting around aimlessly.
If you want to learn more about Kenney’s system for dissecting grass with swimbaits, including some key characteristics of his jigheads and swimbait hooks, check out his full video, available only by subscribing to The Bass University TV.
